Brokered Domestic Work: The Sri Lanka-Saudi Market
Since the early 1980s, Sri Lankan women have been migrating in great numbers as domestic workers to the oil-rich Arabian Gulf. This labor outflow was an outcome of Sri Lanka’s economic liberalization reforms in 1977 and the Arabian oil boom in 1973, which opened up a profuse market for paid domestic labor in a context of globalization. Today, migrant domestic work has become one of Sri Lanka’s key exports in terms of the contribution to foreign...