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From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Thu Sep 02 2010 - 14:13:23 EDT
http://www.economist.com/node/16953469?story_id=16953469&fsrc=rss
Maids in the Middle East
Little better than slavery
Domestic workers in the Middle East have a horrible time
Sep 2nd 2010
A fistful of nails.AS a maid working in Saudi Arabia, Lahanda Purage
Ariyawathie suffered at the hands of her Saudi employer and his wife,
who skewered her body with at least 24 nails and needles (pictured).
Her case was unusually brutal, but the abuse of domestic workers in
the Middle East is all too common.
Huge numbers of migrant domestic workers, mostly from Asia and Africa,
are employed throughout the region. Some 1.5m work in Saudi Arabia,
660,000 in Kuwait and 200,000 in Lebanon. Many work very long hours
and receive little food, no time off and pay that is a fraction of any
minimum wage, if it materialises at all. Human Rights Watch (HRW), a
New York-based group, says at least one domestic worker died every
week in Lebanon between January 2007 and August 2008. Almost half were
suicides and many were as a result of falling from high buildings,
often while trying to escape their employers. Mistreatment is so
widespread that the Philippines, Ethiopia and Nepal no longer let
their citizens go to Lebanon to work as maids, though such bans have
had little effect.
Most maids get their jobs through sponsorship systems, so their
immigration status is tied to their employer. Employers can repatriate
them at will, prevent them from changing jobs and, in Saudi Arabia and
Kuwait, stop them from leaving the country.
In much of the Middle East domestic workers are also excluded from
legal employment protection. There has been talk of reform, but little
has come of it. In a lonely example Jordan extended its labour laws in
2008 to cover domestic workers.
In June the Lebanese ministry of labour set up a hotline for workers’
complaints. HRW has been monitoring the hotline which, it notes, has
not been advertised to migrant domestic workers, is open only between
8am and 1pm, and has no translators. In the first month it did not
receive a single call from a domestic worker. NGOs and religious
organisations have done better. They have set up text-message numbers
so that maids trapped at home can report abuses and get free legal
advice.
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