Does Anyone Care? —The Prevalence of Forced Labor Among Kenyan Migrant Workers and the Glaring Need for Better Labor Conditions in GCC Countries

ABSTRACT

Much media coverage in recent years has identified the abuses of migrant workers in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries (e.g. Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, United Arab Emirates [UAE], and Saudi Arabia), an increasingly popular migrant destination for Kenyan workers. Due to their unique geo-political and economic profiles, these countries with widespread human rights violations have remained non-responsive primarily to pressure from the international community. Importantly, these factors mask another critical gap in human trafficking research: the lack of reliable data and how best to collect it threatens the effectiveness of existing and proposed interventions in the GCC. To address this gap, this team sought to measure the prevalence of forced labor among recently returned Kenyan migrant workers from GCC countries currently residing in the Nairobi Metro area. Using rigorous estimation strategies in our data collection and analysis, we found that forced labor was pervasive among this population. Practically every Kenyan migrant worker who worked in GCC countries during the studied period could be considered a victim of forced labor. Most striking was the consistency in the high rates of violations across all measures, regardless of which set of indicators we applied in our analysis. Although abuses among migrant workers are not uncommon in wealthy nations, such high rates of forced labor violations in GCC countries are truly rare, if not unprecedented in current prevalence estimation research, and call for massive systemic efforts to address the situation.

KEYWORDS:

• Forced labor
• human trafficking
• Gulf Cooperation Council
• prevalence estimation
• migrant labor

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Disclaimer

This study was funded by the United States Department of State through the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery (GFEMS). The opinions, findings and conclusions stated herein are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Department of State.

Ethical approval

This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at NORC and an equivalent body in Kenya. All U.S.-based research staff-maintained update-to-date ethics training certification from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI). Our field staff were extensively trained in research ethics, including confidentiality, informed consent procedures, and the IRB-approved field procedures.

Notes

¹ Bahrain and Qatar introduced new labor regulations in 2009 and 2016, respectively.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by a grant from the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery (GFEM) to NORC at University of Chicago.