Introduction

Domestic workers constitute a large percentage of the labour force in most of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states. We can say that domestic work is one of, if not the, most common vocations in the GCC states. According to the most recent data, domestic workers number over 700,000 in Kuwait, accounting for a quarter of the total number of migrant labourers and approximately a fifth of the total workforce in the country (Kuwait Central Statistics Bureau 2019). In the UAE, they number over 750,000 (Migrant Rights 2018). In Saudi Arabia, migrant domestic workers number almost four million (Middle East Monitor 2020), over 8 per cent of the country’s population. Domestic work itself is not an exception or a marginal dimension of social life and the labour market but a central and overwhelmingly predominant sphere of work and life. To refocus on migrant domestic labour, not as an outlier or an exception but as the general and most popular form that work takes in the states of the Arabian Peninsula, would shift the perspective on what work itself means in the contemporary realities of these states, and what the future of work might entail. More concretely, it would foreground the fact that reforms to domestic migrant work in the GCC would significantly impact class relations in society at large. To make this argument, my chapter draws on comparative data from across the GCC states, and focuses on the particular experience of Kuwait, as it exemplifies many of the contradictions I attempt to unpack.In the first section of the chapter, I attempt to situate and understand how kafala is lived as a social relation between (citizen) employers and (migrant) employees. I argue that kafala as a migration governance regime governs all populations, including citizens, and produces particular ideological effects, logics of governance, and labour relations. I then offer a history of domestic labour and position it as an important lens through which to view the migrant–citizen divide. I argue that the place of domestic labour in the Gulf both reinforces and diverges from this work, a divergence rooted in kafala’s main practical effect: the outsourcing of migrant governance to citizen populations. Although domestic labour is often seen as an exceptional site for exploitation and atomization of these migrant workers, I argue that domestic labour should instead be seen as an exemplary site for understanding migrant–citizen labour relations. I conclude by revisiting the category of domestic labour, tying it to social reproduction, which I argue does not entail simply the reproduction of labour but the reproduction of society at large and the global division of labour.

Labour governance in the GCC and how it is lived

Al-Khater expresses dismay and shock over this ‘satanic idea’, stating that ‘betrayal’ isn’t something any culture should endorse. Al-Khater’s purpose for recounting this anecdote becomes clear as the opinion piece continues; she sees the new labour reforms as akin to the ‘betrayal’ she almost faced at her servant’s hands, as well as an instantiation of the titular ‘law of the jungle’ that works to take away citizens’ rights under the pretext of international labour norms.

The French philosopher Louis Althusser famously described ideology as the imaginary representation of individuals to their real conditions of existence, a representation that wasn’t simply a false consciousness. Instead, ideology’s representations are based in the real relationships of their life and are aimed at the reproduction of those relationships (Althusser 1971). Althusser rooted the functioning of ideology in ‘apparatuses’, such as schools, religion, the arts etc, but it is quite easy to see kafala itself as one such apparatus. We can see what ideological effects kafala produces by close-reading al-Khater’s piece, which clearly and tangibly expresses the ideological effects of the kafala system and its attendant stratification of labour relations on the citizen-employer and the migrant-worker. These effects are absolutely fundamental to understanding how kafala works on the populations it governs. I say populations in the plural here because, as al-Khater’s piece demonstrates, kafala is not just a system for governing migrant populations, but one for governing citizens too; indeed, all migration governance regimes are, and as such are constitutive of the ideological representations based on the real conditions of the labour relation.

The first ideological effect of the kafala system is that it places the rights of the citizen-employer in fundamental opposition to the rights of the migrant-worker. It produces a zero-sum game whereby if one camp gains rights, the other inevitably loses them. Secondly, it expresses a contradiction between national sovereignty and international labour norms as, similarly, a relation of conflict, with the sovereign state positioned as the defender of the ‘citizen’ class against encroachments on their rights by the international, and links the state’s legitimacy to the legitimacy of its citizens, who are now tasked with ‘defending the state’s honour’.² Finally, it reframes the labour relationship as an interpersonal one, with all the affective force that interpersonal relationships carry. In this sense, the idea that moving to a higher-paying job might entail a personal ‘betrayal’ can thus be used to paint the worker looking for a better life and better working conditions as ‘ungrateful’. This latter effect is built on an insistence that the host society is kind, generous, and humane, and that exploitation and abuse are minor exceptions to an otherwise thriving and mutually beneficial relationship.

These ideological effects are a result of a governance structure, and have a basis in social relations and legal frameworks. This is important in understanding how kafala operates in the everyday workplaces that it organizes. They also contribute to the pushback against reform by citizen-employers, a pushback that al-Khater’s piece is a particularly exemplary representative of (Migrant Rights 2021). More broadly, the link between legislation and ideology can be seen in the incentivization of absconding charges for workers across the GCC. In Dubai, residents who report an absconding worker are eligible to receive 10,000 AED (2,700 USD), while in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the reporting of an absconding worker is performed with the utmost ease through apps that are advertised as ‘easy’ and ‘time-saving’ (Migrant Rights 2020b). In Bahrain, which has particularly weak legal protections for domestic workers that exclude them from key workplace regulations, including limits on working hours, mandatory rest days, and a minimum wage, lawmakers have recently voted unanimously to pass a proposal instituting stringent action against so-called absconders (Migrant Rights 2021). These actions include requiring the worker to reimburse their kafeel (sponsor) and pay their own repatriation cost, and go even further by punishing those sheltering the workers with jail terms and fines.

On the opposite end, it is extremely difficult for migrant-workers to report abuses or non-payment. The legal dead-ends often facing migrant workers naturalize ethno-nationalist and class-based discrimination against migrant workers, as seen over the past few years in Kuwait both from popular social media influencers and parliamentarians (Arab News 2020a). To reiterate my point, then, kafala, broadly conceived, can be thought of as a complex of policies and laws that materially influence social relations in the GCC states, stratifying populations according to their position in regards to the migration governance nexus. The materiality of these relations expresses itself in the ideological effects I note above, and which I will detail at more length in the section that follows.

The most pernicious instantiation of these ideological effects, one that combines them all into a concrete political question, is the discourse of the so-called ‘demographic imbalance’, – the political discussions around the fact that migrant labourers vastly outnumber citizens in most of the GCC states. This reality has led, for example, lawmakers in Kuwait to attempt to introduce a ‘quota’ system on the diverse nationalities that make up the Kuwaiti labour force – quotas that are to be measured as a percentage against the citizen population (Al-Rai Media 2020).³ The question of the so-called ‘demographic imbalance’ has been expressed as a fear over the loss of cultural identity and resources and state provisions, but also, most significantly, in anti-migrant xenophobia and discrimination. That kafala provides the material impetus for this discrimination should be clear; when a vast majority of the labour force is unable to integrate into the structure of society, indeed, is seen as alien to that very structure and easily deportable, a rift in the connective tissue of society is created. This effectively leads to a situation where, despite living within the confines of the same state, migrants and citizens function as distinct populations who, on the whole, do not engage in any form of social relation not mediated through the diverse labour processes in which migrant workers find themselves.

To return to the place of domestic workers in this situation, we can also see the ideology of kafala at work in the relations between those committed to providing safety and better conditions for migrant domestic workers and the institutions that are meant to be protecting their rights. I want to briefly turn to the organization Sandigan, a domestic worker support organization based in Kuwait. Founded by former domestic worker Ann Abunda, Sandigan emerged when Abunda, a year into her migration to Kuwait, began to experience verbal and physical abuse from her employer. She ‘absconded’ and, after a series of misfortunes from which she was lucky enough to emerge with a new job and a new visa, she founded Sandigan, a community-based domestic worker support group (Migrant Rights 2018). Until recently, Sandigan was based at the Kuwait Union of Trade Federations (KUTF), working at a grassroots level to inform migrants of their rights, with training and information workshops, maintain a database of domestic worker abuse cases, help with repatriation, and provide a social safety net for domestic workers who, for the most part, spend their days living and working in other people’s houses. They also consult with international organizations, an experience which has demonstrated that governance is not just the drafting of laws and memorandums, but also includes implementation and administration (or lack thereof). Nevertheless, Sandigan’s work literally saves lives, and their organization is one that is constantly growing, providing a community service that is not provided sufficiently by the state or by civil society. Despite this, the workers who volunteer at Sandigan are still perceived with the overriding ideological effects engendered by kafala. Sandigan’s working relationship with the KUTF seems to have broken down recently following a change in the union’s administration. At a recent implementation meeting for the UN Compact on Migration based in Kuwait, the author witnessed a particularly vicious moment of abuse by a representative of the KUTF towards Sandigan, a vitriolic attempt to delegitimize both the work and lived experience of the Sandigan spokesperson. Undeterred, they shifted their base of operations and are currently working under the auspices of the Kuwait Human Rights Association, a shift that demonstrates the marginalization of domestic workers from labour law and the incorporation of migrant rights issues under the purview of human rights, despite the reality that they are questions of labour.

The experience of Sandigan is an exemplary case in the kinds of marginalization that domestic workers face in the social relations engendered by kafala. These relations position the domestic worker outside the labour relation, and as a ‘grifter’ who must constantly be overseen and who does not have a political subjectivity – the common example of employers confiscating domestic workers’ passports is a clear example of this ideological relation, at once authoritarian and paternalistic. This relation takes the form of an invisibilization of the labour of migrant workers in the data on migrant labour, especially feminized labour (see Wadhawan’s chapter of this volume), but is also embodied at the level of law, which often separates the mechanisms that govern domestic labour from non-domestic migrant labour. As is well documented, a key facet of kafala as a historical regime of governance is the fact that, until recently, migrant workers across the GCC, including domestic workers, were completely overseen by the respective states’ ministries of interior (see Ennis and Blarel, Chapter 7 of this volume), and in all the GCC states the ministry of interior maintains a strong position in the migration governance framework, especially when it comes to workers’ rights.⁴ This is also seen in the above-mentioned parliamentary proposal in Kuwait, which glaringly does not include domestic labour in its quota scheme.

If we look to Saudi Arabia’s recent celebrated labour reforms, for example, we see that very little has been done to address the situation of domestic labour, which still falls outside the purview of the state’s labour law (Migrant Rights 2020a). Qatar has gone the furthest with recent reforms to kafala, including the ostensible abolition of the No Objection Certificate (NOC) and the introduction of a minimum wage. These reforms were formulated to apply to domestic as well as non-domestic migrant labour. Qatar’s relatively substantial reforms to the kafala system could explain why al-Khater’s piece, for all its clear anti-worker discourse, surprisingly uses the domestic worker–employer relation as a way to critique wider labour reforms. Yet, as al-Khater’s anecdote demonstrates, these reforms are attracting extreme backlash from citizen-employers and, as with much of the labour reforms in Qatar, the question of the extent to which these reforms are to be implemented remains to be seen (Amnesty 2020). Each of these reforms is often celebrated in the media as an abolition of kafala, often with much fanfare, yet the system continues to dominate labour relations in the states of the GCC and produce the subjectivities of migrants and citizens (Saraswathi 2020).

In the next section, I provide a theoretical basis for my discussion of domestic labour and the role of migration in the constitution of labour markets in the GCC states. To orient my discussion, I want to flag again Althusser’s insight that the role of ideology is to maintain the smooth reproduction of society. As I will demonstrate, this reproduction is complexly imbricated with domestic labour, which is necessary for the reproduction of one of the basic units of this society; the worker.

Domestic labour: what is it exactly?

Theorizations of domestic labour emerged out of Marxist-feminist and activist projects of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Federici 1984). Such theorizations aimed to reformulate Marx’s theory of value production in capitalism by looking at how unpaid domestic labour – the cooking, cleaning, and upkeep necessary to ensure the worker can go to work daily – is central to the reproduction of labour-power, and thus to the wider processes of production on which capitalist society relies. In other words, they look to re-centre and foreground a dimension of capitalist production that is ostensibly ignored by Marx: ‘what are the implications of labour-power being produced outside the circuit of commodity production, yet being essential to it?’ (Bhattacharya and Vogel 2017: 73). If labour-power is produced outside the circuits of commodity production, who does this production? How might labouring classes turn the site of this extra commodity production towards struggle, especially when it isn’t covered by traditional working-class avenues of struggle such as unions and worker’s parties?

A key campaign in this intellectual and activist trajectory is the ‘Wages for Housework’ campaign, launched by a number of Marxist-feminist activists across Europe, including Selma James, Mariarosa Della Costa, and Silvia Federici. The crux behind the movement is an attempt to introduce a wage for housework, considering how vital this work is more generally for the functioning of society and, more importantly, how this work is apportioned to working-class women and expected from them through a sexual division of labour. In other words, women are expected to do their work as a ‘labour of love’. The campaign aimed to redress this through collective action and activism, culminating in a series of international women’s strikes (Mies 2014).

For Federici then, the ‘Wages for Housework’ (which she later formulated, importantly, as wages against housework) is not the aim of the campaign and does not amount to a form of redistributive justice. The wage might initially open up the possibility for struggle and bargaining by acknowledging the social nature of housework, despite the fact that it occurs in the ‘privacy’ of the household. However, the tremendousness involved in the task of properly valuing housework would cause the edifice of the wage itself to crumble. This perspective is important for understanding how domestic work was understood historically but comes up against an impasse when discussing the GCC states. For while migrant domestic labourers labouring under the kafala system do ostensibly have a wage, regardless of how paltry it is, migrant domestic labourers distinctly do not have the power to ‘bargain and struggle against the terms and the quantity of the wage’.

This is due, in the first and most immediate instance, to the nature of housework, which works by separating workers from each other almost definitionally; if workers are working in other peoples’ homes, with no recourse to collectivization, then their ability to bargain and struggle is sabotaged at the outset. In the case of kafala, this atomization is compounded by the migrant/citizen divide, which provides the ideology of sovereignty that citizen-employers often make recourse to when discussing the rights of migrant-workers. More to the point, the waging of the housework reforms the domestic labour relation into one of contract, giving the employer power over the workers’ very mobility. In this sense, kafala works to ensure an impossibility of the kinds of collective action that might effectively pressure for significant worker reforms, reforms that are rooted in worker agency and not the human-rights based ‘reform from above’ that has so far characterized migrant labour reforms in the GCC states.

To better understand how this divide between citizen and migrant populations is articulated in relation to migrant domestic work, it is useful to situate it historically in the development of a global division of labour. This division of labour has its roots in the processes of historical decolonization outlined by scholar Nandita Sharma (2020). Sharma’s account goes far in elucidating how the migrant/citizen divide is rooted in the decolonizing world’s imbrication within an imperial order that demarcated the world-system into rich, labour-importing countries and poor, labour-exporting ones. This demarcation was predicated on a pair of twin practices that historically produced a global proletariat by facilitating large-scale movements of people and restricting people’s mobility in order to create a reserve of disciplined, exploitable workers, often racialized and easily deportable according to the novel logics of national sovereignty.

National sovereignty, thus, is always essentially imbricated with an exclusion of migrant labour from the potential to ‘struggle and bargain’. This is not to say that nationalism cannot have different stripes or have progressive or liberatory aims; instead, it is to say the combination of nationalism and sovereignty as ordering political principles organized through a capitalist division of labour cannot but have a logic of political exclusion at its heart. Sharma convincingly describes this logic of exclusion as one rooted in the labour-capital relations of a developing capitalist world system. This can explain why, as I demonstrated earlier, there is a distinct ideological animosity from the citizen-employers towards migrant-labourers as a class in the Gulf. For the citizen-employer, the migrant-labourers are somewhere they should not be, and constitute a potential drain on resources and provisions that should be going to the citizen-employer. This is what Sharma defines as a ‘politics of national jealousy’ – a jealousy over ‘land, jobs, education, and state services, all of which are imagined as belonging exclusively to those who belong to the nation’ (Sharma 2020: 160). This vision of sovereignty transforms the migrant-worker not just into an unwelcome figure in figurations of the polity, but figures the worker as an active drain on the polity’s resources.

In the GCC states, this complex has come to be known as the kafala system – the historical form that this global division of labour took. The roots of this historical practice can be found in the British empire’s attempts at juridically regulating labour in the early decades of the 1920s, specifically to regulate the work of pearling divers who were not indigenous to the Arabian Peninsula (AlShehabi 2019). In the 1930s, the system was updated to ensure that jobless migrants would not come into the peninsula in order to look for work on travel visas without prior regulation by the authorities. Thus, the British authorities stipulated that every person seeking work, in whatever capacity, had to first obtain a No Objection Certificate from the political agent, and the sponsor or employer had to pay a repatriation surety deposit to obtain the No Objection Certificate in the first place (AlShehabi 2019; Lori 2020). This system contained the basic dimensions of what today is known as the kafala system; it both restricted the movement of migrant labourers based on nationality in order to facilitate their movement as potential labour-power for the needs of capitalist accumulation. As this system developed over the course of the twentieth century, it more strictly articulated a broad societal division between migrant and native rights, crystallized though the issue of migrant and citizen labour relations.

Figured this way, kafala can be read as a complex of policies that outsource governance of migrant labour to citizen populations. These citizen populations become the agents who recruit the migrant labourer, bear the financial cost of their entry into the country, shoulder the responsibility for their reproduction through the employment relation, and police the legality of the migrant labourer’s status in the country. Because kafala itself is more of a complex that incorporates the citizen-employer into the governance framework than a single law, responsibilities, obligations, and rights become a blurred territory. It is a governance complex that has been in place for decades and has thus shaped the social roles that people perform within the social division of labour.

If the market and the family are to be conceived as natural and self-regulating social forms, then it follows that the principle of non-intervention by the state into the sphere of the market and that of the family is the most desired form of governance. In other words, the household, much like the free market, works best when left to govern itself, and so should be left to do so. In the case of the family, ‘the notion of non-interference in the family depends upon some shared conception of proper family roles’ (Olsen 1983: 1506), encouraging the family to govern itself, so to speak. If the family, and the household it inhabits, is imagined as a private domain, autonomous from the vagaries of state and market, then waged domestic workers, especially those who live with their employers, are often subsumed within the realm of the family and the household.

For an illustration of this principle of non-interference we can simply look to the aforementioned proposals for regulating the so-called ‘demographic imbalance’ in Kuwait. Following the initial proposal by the parliamentarians, the Speaker of the Parliament introduced a further proposal that excludes migrant domestic workers, spouses of Kuwaitis, and migrant workers working for foreign firms from the quota system (Arab News 2020b). The family and the global market thus come together as spheres where interference is to be limited. Indeed, the common terms of reference used by domestic workers for their employers in the Gulf are often ‘baba’ and ‘mama’ (‘father’ and ‘mother’), reiterating the logic of the familial and domestic social roles that govern migrant labour in the GCC states. If, as some scholars have demonstrated, the increase in migrant domestic work can be seen as a response to a wide variety of emergent social and demographic factors, such as shifts towards more nuclear arrangements in family structure and composition, decreased birth and fertility rates, and longer life expectancies (Rajan and Joseph 2020), then, on the inverse, we can also say that kafala, and the abundance of migrant domestic labour it allows for, has itself shaped the very form of the family in the GCC states.

Under kafala, the family stops becoming a model for government and becomes an apparatus of governmentality, with the sedimentation of the citizen–migrant dichotomy through the kafala system. As suggested by Michel Foucault, the family transforms ‘from being a model to being an instrument; it will become a privileged instrument for the government of the population rather than a chimerical model for good government’ (Foucault 2009: 105). This transformation, according to Foucault, accompanies a general transformation in the art of governance, from that of sovereignty to that of governmentality. Indeed, the governance structures that kafala introduces are built with a logic of population as their driving principle; how else do we separate out two kinds of people and accord both highly stratified social rights unless they are differentiated as populations? To think of the family this way – as an instrument for regulating and governing the migrant–citizen relation – reframes the role of domestic labour in the constitution and production of society. In the next section, I will look at what this means practically for the social reproduction of society.

Social reproduction

According to the theoretical perspectives I have surveyed, domestic work in general ensures the social reproduction of labour-power, building on the insight that, unlike other commodities, the commodity of labour-power is not produced with exchange in mind. As Bhattacharya puts it succinctly: ‘labour-power itself is the sole commodity – the “unique commodity,” as Marx calls it – that is produced outside of the circuit of commodity production’ (2017: 73). This uniqueness lends, in the discourse of social reproduction theory, a specificity to the site of reproduction – the family and the home, in the most familiar notions. For even if capitalism’s ability to structure daily life extends to this sphere – think of the fact that households must buy its goods from a market – theorists of social reproduction argue that capitalism must also ‘relinquish absolute control over the time of reproduction’ (Bhattacharya and Vogel 2017: 10). This has practical political repercussions; if capitalism must relinquish absolute control over the time of reproduction, then there are spaces in this time that can thus be used to counter or resist capitalism’s propensity towards commodification.

Since labour markets in the Gulf are comprised primarily of migrant workers, functionally, the processes of social reproduction of the working class are split between two geographical sites. At one, the worker must ensure they are replenished and ready to go to work every morning in the location of their employment (the GCC state where they are a migrant). At the other, the process of intergenerational social reproduction, which ensures the continual availability of a workforce for capital, occurs, at the site of the worker’s origin, through the process of remittances that ensure the worker’s family are clothed, fed, housed, and schooled. For AlShehabi, this trait means that GCC states are not responsible for ensuring the social reproduction of their labour markets, as the intergenerational reproduction of the labour force occurs beyond the boundaries of the GCC states, in the labour-exporting countries. Similarly, GCC states do not to have to account for the socially reproductive activities that might take place in a worker’s retirement, such as elderly care, pensions, etc, because these are also the provenance of the labour-exporting countries. In sum, while GCC states require the labour that migrant labourers provide, kafala, as a system of labour governance, means that GCC states have fully outsourced the social reproduction of labour-power to other entities, namely labour-exporting countries and their own citizenry. On the flip-side of this point, the structures of kafala also allow the GCC states to outsource socialized care – the care of children and the elderly – to the domestic sphere. The availability of cheap domestic labour in the form of nannies, cleaners, nurses, and drivers has thus not only structured the form of the GCC family but also the form of the GCC welfare state itself.

Seen this way, the migration governance complex involves a negotiation over who does the societal reproduction; for the Philippine state, it must reproduce its capacity as a global labour provider, and it does this by incorporating migration into a nexus of financial and social programmes (Guevarra 2010: 2). On another level, the Philippine state must also work to commodify its population at many different levels of social practice in order to produce the Filipina domestic worker as an exceptional commodity, or a ‘super-maid’ (Guevarra 2014). The GCC states can thus abdicate responsibility for the reproduction of this labour force as it is economically insured to be covered by the labour-exporting country, whose own reproduction depends on its ability to continue to send labour to diverse geographical sites.

Sending state policies, however, are only one part of the picture; the robustness of the economies of the labour-importing states, and how much capital is available to be consumed in the purchase of reproductive labour, also play an important role. This can be demonstrated, for example, in the case of Sri Lankan labour migration to the Gulf. Since 2014, when the states of the GCC were facing economic pressure due to the escalating crisis in the price of oil, studies demonstrate that the absolute number of female migrants to the GCC states – 80 per cent of whom migrate to work in the domestic labour market – has been declining (Weeraratne 2020). Similarly, recent fallout from the COVID crisis has meant a drastic decline in the importing of domestic labour into the region. Regulations against travel have led to a situation where domestic labour is in short supply. In Kuwait, for example, the President of the Kuwait Union for Domestic Labour Offices described the effects of COVID on his sector as a ‘catastrophe’, with many offices having to close down (Al-Anba 2020).

The GCC states can thus construct a semblance of sovereignty through the process of outsourcing and abdication of responsibility for social reproduction, even as daily life, right down to the level of the household, completely relies on the work performed by migrants. We can see this in Kuwait’s rollout of a migrant-focused health insurance company, titled ‘Dhaman’. A flagship of the Kuwait 2035 Vision of economic diversification and privatization, the Dhaman company is a public-private enterprise with a pledged capital of KD 230 million (760 million USD), held by Kuwait Investment Authority and Public Institution for Social Security at 24 per cent, the contracting and trading group Arabi Holding at 26 per cent, and with the remaining 50 per cent of shares allocated to Kuwaiti citizens. The company owns and oversees three new migrant-focused hospitals, attendance at which will be funded by the new health insurance scheme that will become mandatory for migrant workers in the state. It functionally segregates the population, ensuring that the reproduction of citizens remains tied to the state’s welfare privileges, while outsourcing the health of migrants to the private sector, further abdicating the state from any responsibilities towards its migrant population. What’s more, it will also commodify the reproduction of migrant labour in a novel way, instituting a new market for healthcare in which the citizen-employer is also a shareholder.

Conclusion: governance and organization

What is clear, then, is that states in the GCC, in outsourcing governance of migration through kafala to citizen-employers, have resigned from their role in the social reproduction of migrant populations. This logic has seeped into social relations in the GCC states, producing an ideology influenced by kafala – an ideology that conditions social relations in these states at large. Social reproduction, however, does not simply mean the ‘daily’ maintenance of the worker, or, indeed, simply the reproduction of labour-power. Instead, social reproduction also entails societal reproduction, or the ensuring that global capitalist society itself, with its structures of domination and exploitation, is reproduced. As Kirstin Munro argues, ‘there is no social reproduction without “societal reproduction,” as all production and reproduction in capitalist society are indelibly shaped by accumulation’ (2019: 455). We cannot isolate the activities that reproduce labour-power from the wider circuits of accumulation, whether they happen through the commodity circuit or not, especially if we are attempting to see how domestic work fits in with the totality of society. For this insight to shape how we think, we must be attuned to the way that the societal reproduction, meaning the reproduction of contemporary capitalism and its global division of labour, rests on the way that processes of social reproduction link diverse geographical sites and seemingly autonomous and sovereign political entities. As the varied entries in this volume demonstrate, the role of governance cannot thus be located in state – or, as I argue, even public – institutions and protocols only, but seeps into the lived reality and daily experience both of migrants and citizens, workers and their employers.