Migrant Masculinities of Kafala Workers

The aim of the Essex Accounting Centre (EAC) research seminar series is to support our world-class research activities in five key areas: accounting and global development; capital Markets, audit, regulation & reporting; publicness and resilience, precarity, exclusion & social justice; and environment, climate change & vulnerability. The seminar series is also expected to promote inter-disciplinary research that links the work of members of the centre with others both within the university and with external institutions.

Pakistani men constitute the largest group of migrant blue-collar workers in the Gulf, which includes countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain. Their work is regulated by a unique sponsorship system called the Kafala. In the present study we consider the conditions of work under the Kafala in the context of precarious south-south migration.

We situate our work in the nascent scholarship on migrant masculinities and explore how worker subjectivities are shaped by the exploitative and racialized conditions of work in the host country, on the one hand, and by strong familial ties to the home country, on the other. Our analysis attempts to restore the worker’s humanity by presenting him in the fullest sense possible. We contend that migrant masculinities are complex and fluid as workers submit to and at the same time resist hostile institutions and extortionist middlemen.