On a recent Friday night, migrant workers from Africa and Asia joked with one another in English as they filed into a sparse, freshly painted room decorated only by a flat-screen TV playing a muted Bollywood film. They were arriving at one of the first meetings for Beirut’s new Migrant House, a Lebanese-funded, migrant-worker-run gathering spot in the city’s suburbs.
“We wanted a safe, migrant-friendly place where migrants can simply meet and use the space as their office and headquarters to organize themselves with the help of Lebanese activists,” said Ali Fakhry, a spokesman for the Anti-Racism Movement, the Lebanese group of social activists responsible for funding the Migrant House.
The ambition is to create an independent center where migrant workers can meet and organize in a country where foreigners are barred from unions and syndicates. The Migrant House will not only be open to migrant domestic workers — an almost exclusively female group — but also to migrant workers who are men, many of whom come to Lebanon to work as laborers.
The ambition is to create an independent center where migrant workers can meet and organize in a country where foreigners are barred from unions and syndicates. The Migrant House will not only be open to migrant domestic workers — an almost exclusively female group — but also to migrant workers who are men, many of whom come to Lebanon to work as laborers.
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