“We Escape to the Roof to Breathe”: Inhabiting Jordan’s Dormitory Migrant Labor Regime

Use the zoom to see the full details of the visualizations

Secluded in Jordan’s industrial zones, migrant workers from Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, Myanmar, China and Madagascar sew sports and outdoor clothing for large US brands. Two thirds[i] of the 78,000 workers[ii] employed in Jordan’s export-oriented garment industry today are foreign. Most workers on the production lines are currently young women from Bangladesh, who are recruited on three-year contracts and arrive in Jordan in their late teens or early twenties with little prior work experience. The migrant workers’ contracts with the garment factories include food and accommodation in Jordan, for which 100JD (141 USD) are automatically subtracted from their 230JD (324USD) monthly basic salary.[iii] The foreign workers thus live in dormitories that are either directly built on factory premises or are located in the immediate surrounds of the industrial zones, rented out by private Jordanian landlords to the clothing producers.

This article provides intimate insights into workers’ everyday experiences of inhabiting Jordan’s dormitory migrant labor regime. It uses illustrations derived from participatory mapping and drawing workshops with garment workers of diverse nationalities who live and labor in Jordan’s two largest clothing production zones. The mundane and embodied experiences of the dormitory—captured in the maps, drawings, and workers’ accounts that detail the spatial and material conditions of dormitory life—open up an immersive understanding of how life actually unfolds in a workers’ dormitory.  In doing so, these materials expose some of the ways in which the labor control regime in Jordan’s garment industry expands from the factory shopfloors to the workers’ private living environment. From surveillance mechanisms and systems of social control and denunciation; to insufficient reproductive infrastructures that exacerbate the “time poverty”[iv] of factory workers: employers exert direct influence over the most intimate aspects of migrant workers’ lives. Yet simultaneously, the workers’ drawings and accounts also testify to their capacities of navigating, and at times partially circumventing, this extended control regime. More broadly, examining labor conditions and labor exploitation from the dormitory, and thus from the sphere of social reproduction, can also productively challenge how we conventionally delimit understandings of the workplace and the home.

The dormitories have long been a central pillar of Jordan’s garment labor regime. This is so because the spatial confinement of workers between factories and dormitories plays a decisive role in achieving high productivity and profitability in Jordan’s clothing factories. The workers’ constant availability and disposition to work extreme overtime hours[v]—due the alienation from socially reproductive roles and basic salaries below the Jordanian minimum wage [vi]—allow suppliers to fulfill the extreme time and cost pressures of large US clothing brands. As production rhythms in the clothing industry are notoriously volatile, the workers’ constant presence in utmost proximity of the factories is central to guaranteeing timely delivery of merchandise to US clothing brands by enforcing late-evening or night shifts just before the shipments. In addition, the dormitory labor system complements the legal dependency that the kafala (or sponsorship) system establishes by tying foreign workers to their employers for temporary work and residency permits in Jordan. This migrant labor regime—which also exists in the Arab Gulf states and in Lebanon[vii]—makes it impossible to change employer, let alone sector or activity, for foreign workers and thus effectively locks them into their work contracts for three years. The obligatory accommodation in dormitories additionally binds foreign workers in Jordan’s garment factories to the living arrangements offered by their employers, similar to migrant domestic workers whose live-in arrangements in employers’ homes favor exploitation and abuse[viii].

This explains why the recruitment of foreign workers was one of the key conditions of transnational clothing producers relocating to Jordan. Most of the Asian investors came to Jordan during the mid-2000s, to benefit from the Jordan-United States Free Trade Agreement—signed in 2001 and fully entered into force in 2010—that grants quota- and duty-free access for Made in Jordan garments to the American market. As import duties are particularly high for synthetic clothing, producers of sports- and outdoor-wear for American brands like Under Armor, Nike or the North Face set up factories in Jordan. Most of the producers moved to three Special Economic Zones (SEZs), namely Al-Hassan (Irbid), Ad-Dhulayl (Zarqa) and Tajammouat (Sahab). These extra-territorialities had originally been created as so-called Qualified Industrial Zones (QIZs) in the wake of the 1994 peace accords between Jordan and Israel (see fig.1). Underpinned by a wider American policy of promoting peace through free trade, the QIZ scheme had expanded the preferential trade agreement between the US and Israel to neighboring Jordan to foster economic cooperation between the two countries. As Asian producers gradually replaced most Israeli-Jordanian joint ventures in the garment industry, they demanded an exemption from restrictions on the employment of foreign workers to lower labor costs and heighten productivity in the factories. The Jordanian government gave in, authorizing the substitution of local workers with migrant workers recruited initially from China, and then predominantly from South Asia. As the original QIZs had been built as isolated factory clusters, dormitory and canteen infrastructures were constructed ex-post to establish the contemporary dormitory migrant labor regime.

Fig. 1 Location of our two main research sites:  Al-Hassan and Ad-Dhulayl industrial zone

Remapping Jordan’s Industrial Zones as Sites of Labor and Life 

This article is based on migrant workers’ hand-drawn maps and illustrations depicting entire dormitories, individual rooms or particular aspects of dormitory life; as well as on the accounts and annotations that accompanied these drawings. Taken together, the selected materials presented in this piece tell multi-layered stories about overcrowding, surveillance and social control; and about the desperate longing for both privacy and conviviality in the midst of a harsh living environment.

The insights here offered were gained through a collaborative mapping project with migrant workers, implemented in partnership between the University of Nottingham[ix] and the Cairo-based urban research and participatory planning practice 10Tooba. The first step consisted of a careful remapping of Jordan’s two largest garment production zones during the autumn of 2023, shifting attention from formally planned industrial infrastructures to the SEZs as sprawling and cosmopolitan sites of labor and life that concentrate diverse forms of circulation, trade, production and living arrangements. The second step was to extend an open invitation to different worker constituencies in Al-Hassan and Ad-Dhulayl to join participatory cartography workshops in spring 2024.[x] Participants first revised and complemented the maps we had produced, adding their everyday mobilities and strategies of navigation and livelihood-making. Subsequently, they produced cognitive maps of commutes, workplaces, living spaces or other places of importance. The workers’ dormitories featured centrally in the floor plans and annotated sketches of our participants.

Based on multiple participants’ drawings and recorded accounts, Heba then produced the illustrations presented throughout the piece. The goal in creating these highly detailed, visual accounts of different dormitory spaces is two-fold. First, combining the individual, often highly intimate, drawings of our participants into a single visual representation guarantees confidentiality in an environment where any leaked information can result in the forced termination of contracts and deportation. Second, the illustrations render some of the workers’ everyday living experiences legible across barriers of language and literacy, giving participants an opportunity to critique and revise our drafts. To the reader, these illustrations convey some of the socio-spatial characteristics of dormitory life. The decision to populate the drawings of the dormitories with their residents allows to render visible the multiple, parallel practices and movements that actually co-constitute the distinct density of the dormitory environment. By abstaining from explicit analysis and by letting the illustrations largely speak for themselves, we hope to actively encourage the reader to engage with the multiple storylines the drawings open, while leaving space for the affective registers, as well as sound- and scent-scapes, these visuals elicit. We have chosen excerpts of the recorded accounts of particular workers to speak to each of the illustrations.

Fig. 2 Selected mapping materials produced by one of our Bangladeshi female participants

Longing for a Space to Breathe

Overcrowding is usually determined by a simple square meter per person calculus that allows inspectors of the Ministry of Labour and Health to assess employers’ compliance. In the workers’ drawings and maps, meanwhile, experiences of overcrowding emerge from the innumerable, parallel activities, bodies, scents and sounds that fill a single dormitory room. The great importance our participants gave to windows and fans in their cognitive maps of the dorms reflects a chronic lack of oxygen and concern of suffocation. These sensations not only highlight how overcrowding translates into embodied experiences; they are also inextricably linked to the mental state of being confined in a crammed dormitory space in which any quest for privacy remains elusive. Any open space surrounding the dormitory—most notably its stairs and roof—thus become sites of escape, breath, and scarce moments of privacy. Yet these open spaces also enable rare moments of conviviality within the tightly timed routines of factory workers. As migrant workers are not allowed to bring their families or children to Jordan, and as dormitories —or at least dormitory floors—are strictly gender segregated, interstitial spaces like the staircases become crucial for bonding with friends or building romantic relationships, and thus overcoming the acute loneliness and homesickness many workers describe.

Fig. 3+4 Top view and section of two rooms in a female workers’ dormitory

"Struggling to let the air circulate"

“When you enter our dorm room,” Rachel from Madagascar remarks, “you can’t actually see a room, just a narrow hallway and colorful cloth on either side.”  Sheets or curtains are used to cover the bunk beds from the outside, usually 4 or 5 beds depending on the size of the room. While the curtains make the room seem even smaller than it is, they create subdivisions that provide for some privacy in rooms shared by 8 to 10 workers. As Rachel explains, her bed is the only place where she goes to undress and change and where she applies make-up and performs other beauty rituals for which she requires some privacy. “Sometimes I need this space to pray, sometimes to cry, or simply to be alone for a minute”, she says. Rachel also uses parts of her narrow bed as a storage space, as her only cupboard provides insufficient space for her personal belongings and as she is worried about theft. Besides her bed, Rachel has decorated the walls with some photos of her family and a golden cross that she has brought from Madagascar. She has also fixed an electric fan to the bedpost, her very first purchase after coming to Jordan. “I can’t survive without this fan,” Rachel admits, “I let it blow directly into my face when I lie down, it is the only way to not suffocate at night.” While a central ventilator hangs from the dorm ceiling, it is often out-of-order. “It’s a constant struggle to make the air in the room circulate, but the situation gets worse in the summer with the dust storms and heat,” Rachel laments. Steam and fumes from the rice cookers and sometimes gas stoves that the women secretly use to prepare food in the rooms; mixes with the smell of toiletry products, sweaty bodies and worn-out shoes after long working days. The regular use of pesticides in the dorms, which are sprayed while the workers are in the factory to get rid of bed bugs, rats and cockroaches, make matters worse. “After they spray our rooms,” Rachel confides, “the heavy smell stays on my bedding and I can feel my throat, chest and eyes stinging.”

Fig. 5 The external staircase and roof terrace of a workers’ dormitory

"The dormitory stairs are our plaza"

“We all minimize the time we spend in the dormitory rooms; we only go there so sleep,” Farhan, a Pakistani worker in his late twenties, remarks. “The dormitory stairs come alive at night, they are our plaza, the only place to sit and meet others and enjoy your time”, Farhan explains. Fire safety regulations stipulate that all dormitories need to be equipped with external staircases. Rather than mere evacuation routes, Farhan recounts how the stairs become the site of laughter, flirtation, and phone calls back home after factory shifts end and on the only weekly holiday on Fridays. Especially after the dormitory curfew, when the main gate is shut by the private security agent at ten in the evening, the staircase becomes the only open common space that can be used by the workers. At times, those who own phones with large screens bring them to the stairs to watch football matches together. Others carry speakers into the stairs to practice dance choreographies on the platforms, with curious spectators gathering on the steps above. Again others, as Farhan explains, “use the stairs as an extension of the kitchen or bathroom because there isn’t enough space to cut vegetables or to do our washing by hand and then hang clothes for drying.” The roof of the dormitory is openly accessible and thus functions as an extension of the stairways, forming a large, shared space that is empty apart from some washing lines. “It is my favorite place here,” Farhan smiles, “we all escape to the roof to breathe, it’s the only way to survive here in Jordan.” As the industrial zone in which Farhan works is isolated from surrounding settlements, the roof offers distant views over open fields during the day and star-filled skies at night. “Some moments like that, on the roof alone, give me the strength to keep going,” Farhan asserts. He then adds that at times, he gets up before dawn to come to the roof and call his wife back home, where day has already broken, “to show her the sunrise and to have a moment just the two of us.”

Bodies under Constant Pressure

In the drawings and accounts of our participants, the dormitories are rarely portrayed as sites of rest and recovery. Rather, the floor plans and illustrations spatialize the extreme pressure on time and space that characterize dormitory routines, particularly around basic reproductive infrastructures like kitchens and bathrooms. The substantial waiting times, and constant stress or tensions that dormitory residents need to put up with in order to cook, shower, wash or simply use the bathroom, add to the bodily and mental exhaustion of workers’ bodies after long factory shifts. Insufficient infrastructures increase the burden of reproductive tasks. This in turn exacerbates the “time poverty”[xi] of migrant workers, as their scarce free time is consumed by daily chores, and as they are often chronically sleep-deprived. While this denial of complete reproduction[xii] can in part be explained by employers’ cost-saving rationales, interviews with clothing producers in Jordan also point to a disciplining rationale. Simply put, workers who are busy fending for food and washrooms have no temporal, physical or mental capacity to venture beyond the confines of dormitories and factories, to socialize, or to organize. The employers’ capacity to dictate the time and effort workers exert for basic reproductive tasks can thus be understood as an additional tool of labor control.

Fig. 6 Shared kitchen and bathrooms in a female workers’ dormitory

"Factory food and water can make you sick"

After the end of factory shifts—depending on overtime hours either at six, eight, or ten pm—the dormitory kitchen is overcrowded and the smell of gas and spice are so intense that it becomes difficult to breathe despite the kitchen windows standing permanently open. Taslima, a young Bangladeshi worker, hurries into the kitchen with her portable gas stove in one hand and balancing a pot filled with vegetables and cooking utensils in the other. She squeezes past other Bangladeshi women squatting in front of their gas stoves and sizzling pans and pots who got to the kitchen first, settling in a small empty spot in the back corner. “I always hurry back to the kitchen immediately from the factory to set up my stove here, because in the middle you can get your things knocked over or get burns from the pans next to you because there is no space,” Taslima explains. As she begins frying the onions in the spices she has brought in a small plastic bag in her pocket, Taslima sets out the difficult logistics of preparing her own food in the limited time and space available to her. Yet despite these challenges, she insists that, “eating the factory canteen food is no option, it can make you sick and has no nutrients.” While the 95JD that are subtracted from her monthly salary theoretically include full board and lodging, Taslima thus only takes rice from the canteen and prepares her own vegetable and lentil stews. Taslima even avoids drinking the water provided to the workers in dispensers that are filled from water tanks. “It is not just the bad taste,” she explains, “but I have heard so many stories of women getting kidney problems here and having to travel (meaning their contracts are terminated).” As buying bottled water it too expensive, Taslima boils the water before consumption. She also buys fresh Asian vegetables like the korola (bitter gourd) from street vendors on her way home from the factory, insisting that eating “food like back home” gives her the necessary physical and mental strength to put up with the extreme work pressure in the factory.

Fig. 7 Shared kitchen and bathrooms in a male workers’ dormitory

"An empty stomach or a cold shower"

In some male dormitories, kitchens are equipped with electrical sockets, so that workers have to buy single plate cookers that they can bring to the kitchen. When asking Arjun, an Indian male worker in his early thirties, why he has drawn an exclamation mark next to his sketch of the kitchen consisting only of tables and electricity plugs, he counts the plugs he has drawn out loud, and smiles triumphantly when he has counted to 18. “We have 18 plugs, so 18 places to cook for almost 80 male workers, can you imagine? The floor beneath us has no kitchen, so two floors share this kitchen and it is forbidden to cook in the rooms or anywhere else.” Arjun details his strategies to hurry back from the factory to make sure he gets to the kitchen first, but also highlights the difficult trade-off he has to make: “we never have enough hot water in the dorm, so you need to decide between an empty stomach or a cold shower. It’s a difficult decision, especially in winter when you’ve been cold all day in the factory and the thought of cold water just becomes unbearable.” The only way to get by, Arjun underlines, is to coordinate with one or two of his roommates to divide tasks between queuing, gathering the kitchen equipment, and buying groceries. But even then, Arjun recounts, the competition is so fierce that he has to confront long queues for both cooking and showering. Sometimes, he admits, after waiting hungry for his turn to cook and then preparing food and eating, he is simply too exhausted to go to the washrooms. When he works long overtime hours until ten or even eleven pm during peak season, Arjun explains that he often needs to wait an additional two hours to get his turn in the kitchen, so that he only has dinner well after midnight. “The worst thing is that we also have frequent electricity outages in the dormitories,” he recounts, “especially when everyone is cooking and charging phones in the evenings and the circuit can’t cope. Then with one bang everything goes dark and it takes time for the guard to come and restore electricity.”

The Dormitories as Sites of Labour Control 

Security and surveillance infrastructures feature prominently on dormitory maps and drawings. In participants’ accounts, privacy in the dormitory thus not only remains elusive due to residential density, but more importantly because of the visible and invisible control mechanisms put in place by their employers. In fact, many of our participants portray the dormitory as an extension of their factory, with blurry bounds between their space of production and reproduction. They underline that “the factory” closely monitors all aspects of their private lives and that anything that happens in the dormitory will directly impact their employment relation. The resulting, all-encompassing control regime operationalizes the legal kafala system by complementing legal precarity and dependence on the employer with de-facto spatial and temporal containment.

Fig. 8 The entry gate of the dormitory and its diverse security infrastructures

"Multiple pairs of eyes on us"

“There are multiple pairs of eyes on us at all times,” Prisha affirms as she marks the security cameras on her drawing of the dormitory in bright red. “There are those eyes that you can see”, she points to the cameras and the security kiosk, “and those eyes that you can’t see.” As Prisha, who is not yet twenty and arrived from Bangladesh a year ago, goes on to explain, the apparent security infrastructures of the dormitory are only one aspect of the control imposed on workers’ private lives. More invisible, yet according to Prisha more effective, are the systems of social control that allow employers to monitor all aspects of workers’ routines in the dormitories. Dorm and room leaders are thus appointed by the employers, officially to help workers with any problems and signal complaints back to the employer. As Prisha insists, however, the so-called “camp leaders” are rewarded for denouncing their peers. “They see everything, and will report anything that happens back to the employer,” she underlines, “and if you misbehave with them or they don’t like you they can simply make up a rumor or false information about you”. She recounts how women from her dormitory have been “sent home” for having violated the dormitory curfew, for having been caught in a mixed-gender romantic relation, or for having been accused of theft. “Anything you do in your private life can get your contract terminated,” Prisha sighs. She then goes on to describe how the dorm leaders and guards of the private security firms abuse the power they hold over the workers. “They know how scared we are of being reported, so they can humiliate us or make us do work for them for free, and they know we will obey.”

Navigating an Environment of Control, Inhabiting Liminalities

During one of our mapping workshops, Heba and Shankar, a factory worker from India who has lived in Al-Hassan for two years, struggle to find orientation on our A1 printout map of the industrial zone. The directions Shankar uses to navigate his living and work spaces seem to contradict the information on our map. Suddenly, Shankar lifts up the large sheet of paper and flips it around, laughing out loud. As Heba looks confused, he explains: “I enter the zone from behind, my entrance is on the opposite side of the big gate (the official entry gate), so for me your map is completely upside down.”

Remapping Jordan’s industrial zones through migrant workers’ perceptions of space and practices of everyday navigation radically alters our way of seeing extra-territorial production spaces. Rather than inert and bounded spatial containers for profit accumulation, migrant workers’ maps, drawings and accounts bring the industrial zones to life as sites where people from diverse nationalities and religious and cultural backgrounds struggle to get by and build livelihoods in an extremely harsh environment. Dormitory spaces feature centrally in such spatialized accounts of inhabitation, and underline their importance to comprehending working lives and labor conditions in Jordan’s garment industry. Close-up insights into dormitory life show how employers extend their control to workers’ mundane reproductive routines and private lives, expanding the bounds of the workplace both spatially and temporally. At the same time, workers’ intimate accounts of dormitory life reveal how they navigate and negotiate this tightly controlled environment, harnessing liminal spaces and temporal gaps from which provisional collectivities and temporary forms of home-making emerge.