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A study of workers' rights in a non-unionized field in Lebanon This study examines the process of unionizing domestic workers in Lebanon, highlighting the potentialities as well as the obstacles confronting it, and looks at the multiple power relations involved through axes of class, gender, race, and nationality. The author situates this struggle within the larger scene of the labor union 'movement' in the country, and discusses the contribution of women's rights organizations in rendering visible cases of abuse against migrant domestic workers. She argues that the 'death' of class politics has made women's rights organizations address migrant domestic worker issues as a separate labor category, further contributing to their production as an 'exception' under neoliberalism.
List of contents
Arabic Abstract
Acknowledgments
1. Beyond the Weapons of the Weak: Domestic Workers' Union in Lebanon
2. Workers without Trade Unions, Trade Unions without Workers
3. The Missing Worker in "Domestic Worker": Class Politics and Women's-Rights Organizations
4. Women Domestic Workers and Trade-Union Organizing: Challenges and Possibilities
5. The Prospects for Organizing Migrants in a National Framework
Bibliography
About the Author
About the author
Farah Kobaissy is senior research assistant at the Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship at the American University of Beirut (AUB).
Summary
A study of workers' rights in a non-unionized field in Lebanon
This study examines the process of unionizing domestic workers in Lebanon, highlighting the potentialities as well as the obstacles confronting it, and looks at the multiple power relations involved through axes of class, gender, race, and nationality. The author situates this struggle within the larger scene of the labor union ‘movement’ in the country, and discusses the contribution of women's rights organizations in rendering visible cases of abuse against migrant domestic workers. She argues that the 'death' of class politics has made women's rights organizations address migrant domestic worker issues as a separate labor category, further contributing to their production as an 'exception' under neoliberalism.
Foreword
A study of workers' rights in a non-unionized field in Lebanon
