Maids Treated As Near-Slaves In the Middle East

Contemporary slavery, or very close to it.

That is the conclusion of the Economist in its recent piece on the horrific abuse of foreign maids working in the Middle East. Those familiar with my writings know that I have been following the plight of foreign maids in the region for a long while.

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Sushar Rosky--lest she dies namelessly--is a Sri Lankan maid who killed herslf by hanging early morning yesterday in Sidon in Lebanon.

The abuse is simply stunning in its cruelty. These are maids which are lured to the region - mostly the oil rich Gulf and Lebanon - on the premise of securing a decent job, only to suffer unceasing abuse. Their passports are often confiscated so they cannot leave the country, payments are often delayed as another deterrent to them leaving - even their employers know how awful they treat them and this is why they worry that they will naturally leave - their housing arrangement is often worse than that given to family pets. One maid in Lebanon once complained that the house dog was allowed to sleep inside while she was forced to sleep on the balcony.

If that was it, the maids would be lucky almost. But abuse extends to actually physical harm in the form of beatings and other bodily damage, and even rape by the local son or husband. Some are even killed.

Conditions are so awful that many maids simply take their lives as an escape. Or they accidentally fall from the balcony in a desperate effort to escape from their horrific employers:

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.

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.

But, fortunately, at least something is being done:

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.