Amnesty International on 7 August 2026 published first-person accounts from Filipina domestic workers describing the abuse they experienced while employed in Saudi Arabia, as part of a campaign on the conditions of migrant women who work inside private homes.
One account comes from a woman the organisation identifies only as Gloria, who worked as a domestic worker in Saudi Arabia for two years. For five months, she says, she worked 14 hours a day without a break, until she felt her body was about to give out.
Why she left
Gloria says she decided to take a job in Saudi Arabia at the age of 44. Her son was at university, and her husband’s salary was not enough to cover the household’s costs. She had worked abroad once before, in Kuwait.
Withholding a worker’s full identity is standard practice in this kind of documentation: being identified can cost a domestic worker her job or expose her to reprisals, which is why accounts are often published under a first name alone.
Work that happens out of sight
Domestic labour across the Gulf is performed largely by migrant women recruited from countries in Asia and Africa, with the Philippines among the largest sending countries. Because the workplace is a family home rather than a business, no one outside that household can readily observe how many hours a worker actually works, whether she gets a day off, or which contract terms are applied to her in practice. That is why accounts given by the workers themselves are a primary source of evidence about the job.
The material is published in the workers’ own voices rather than as a report on a single incident. What the accounts describe is cumulative rather than dramatic: hours that run past any normal working day, stretched over months, with rest treated as optional. In Gloria’s case, that meant five continuous months out of the two years she spent in the country.
This report was produced by the HuMedia newsroom.
