Dear Baron,
I need to add my two cents’ worth to your post on workers’ exploitation in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. As you know, I lived in Kuwait in 1990 and again from 1997 to 2000. You cannot imagine the things I saw and heard.In 1990 I got stuck in Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion. This is not the place for the entire story of my journey back to Austria. But let me tell you one of the most harrowing images I have stored in my memory: As our convoy — made up of Austrian citizens — approached the border between Iraq and Turkey near a town called Zakho, we found that the border had been closed for the night. We managed to bribe the guards into opening the border control area. The mountainous area was dimly lit at 3 a.m., but I was able to see the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of not so affluent Asian migrant workers lying asleep on the rugged and rocky ground, waiting for the gates to Turkey — and to freedom — to open in the morning.
I had seen these same workers driving in open trucks, children being baked in the hot desert sun, squashed between the family’s belongings in the open area in the back of the truck. We were lucky in that we were welcomed upon our return to Austria. The Asians were not welcomed at all because they brought with them problems: the countries they had left could not provide jobs for them; their families were dependent on the workers’ incomes and were now destitute.
When I returned to Kuwait in 1997, nothing had changed for the hundreds of thousands of maids and drivers. They were still in bondage. It starts with their sponsors — the Kuwaiti employer —confiscating their passports, making it impossible for the workers to run away, that is, to flee the country. Without their passports and — even more important — without the so-called iqama, the stamp in the passport with the work permit, they are stuck. Not even the embassies can help these poor souls.
Considering what we all know about Arab supremacy, what do you think the Minister of Labor is going to do to help when the Indian ambassador is at his doorstep? Nothing. You guessed right. So all these representatives can do is provide safe houses for these maids to hide in until things are sorted out with their sponsors.
- - - - - - - - -
When summer approached and with it the unbearable heat, the number of visa requests rose steadily. The larger the family, the more maids and drivers were required to travel with these families. It sickened me having to stamp visas for the maids, knowing perfectly well that they would not have a wonderful and relaxing time in Austria, that they would have to work just as hard as in Kuwait, running after misbehaving and abusive children, often having to double as sex slaves. We at the embassy also knew perfectly well that the maids went along to work, which is actually illegal according to the visa regulations. But what could, what should we have done? It was an impossible situation.
It is well-known that maids were often forced to sleep in the kitchen, under the table, on a foam mattress. There is no law that regulates working hours, vacation time, or sickness compensation. Migrant workers, according to the law, fall into a special category. There are no lawyers they can contact because there is nothing these lawyers can do. If the workers do get vacation time, and that’s a big if, they usually travel home to the Philippines or India or Sri Lanka, or wherever they are from.
And they always return, which should tell us a thing or two about their lives back home. How bad must life be in these countries, that an abused maid leaves her family to return to Kuwait? To 40 Kuwaiti Dinars in salary, about $120.
Maids and drivers, which means boys and girls, are strictly segregated. Imagine the boredom. Imagine what happens if they do get together. Imagine the consequences. An illegitimate pregnancy. And that’s when the s**t hits the fan.
I usually enjoy reading the newspaper. Yet one of the saddest aspects of reading Kuwaiti newspapers was reading about abused maids. The English-language newspapers were filled with news about maids who had committed suicide by jumping out of windows.
Imagine how bad things must be to commit suicide, without saying good-bye to your family. Imagine the loneliness. Just imagine.
I couldn’t back then. I can’t now.
— ESW
8 comments:
It's sad indeed.
MAybe I am really a bad person but I still don't want those people in Europe.
Sad, says it all...
I grew up in India, where many of those maids and drivers came from. In actuality the situation is not that bad...people are not starving en masse in the streets, and although it is a backward culture constrained by its own belief systems, it's certainly not "driving" people out by virtue of horrendous conditions.
People leave because big bucks beckon elsewhere. $125 a month may not sound like much to the north american or european mind, but it's quite a bit relative to a country in which the same skill level garners a fraction of that mounthly amount. But that's quite different from the proposition that they are forced to leave because of abject starvation.
People make a trade-off between living at home and making more money. There is no economic imperitive for anyone to choose to work in the Gulf States, and emoting over the consequences of those choices is making victims of people whose victimhood is intentional and self-inflicted. Yeah, it's crappy, but it's a choice.
Having said that, the conditions this underclass lives in is in stark contrast to how they live in the west when they are allowed to come here. That's what makes me so mad at the ongoing immigrant attempts to change our successful society into the same kind of morass they themselves allegedly came to escape. Unfortunately, remolding society into what one is familiar with is quite natural, even if one gave up everything to escape it...that's why the root problem is not a lack of "inclusiveness" or multiculturalism or even Islam...the problem is floodgate immigration.
In the mid 70s I worked for 2 years in Qatar. It was shortly after the oil crisis and the place was flowing with money. I had been hired with a group of other Brits to run an automatic concrete block plant. They had fenced off a large area of the Desert to the west of Doha for a trading estate we were virtually the first firm to start there. The plant was American and came from a firm in Green Bay up on the great lakes, they were exciting times, everything was quick quick the whole place was built in about 4 months and there was a constant stream of American technicians helping us out. It was a god send to me because I was not familiar with the way Americans did there electrical drawings. When they left we were on our own. Then the fun started, I wont go into the details as you wouldn't believe me if I told you. Because there was no fence around the plant we hired a night watchman. He was originally from Pakistan but had managed to obtain Qatarian citizenship. He slept in a hut during the day and wandered around at night. I used to come in early in the morning to check that everything was OK start the generators and get the plant working so that when the crew arrived they could start straight away. It was a bit like booting up a computer what with all the limit switches and rotary timers. One day from behind the curing kilns I heard somebody screaming. Coming round the corner of the kilns I saw our good friend beating up a poor Bangladeshi. Here was our water supply, we had built two large concrete basin in fact they looked like two large swimming pools, which were replenished by a fleet of tankers. He had caught the Bangladeshi bathing in one of the basins. I don't know what would have happened if John the other member of the maintenance team hadn't arrived on the scene. To say I was livid was to put it mildly. The Bangladeshis and his mates for there were a dozen more with him were laborers working on a factory about a mile away. They lived in tents in a squalid camp at the back of the factory and worked 6 days a week 12 hours a day for a dollar a day. There were not water or sanitation facilities. I told them that they could bath in the basin as long as they didn't use any soap. They bought us a homemade chicken curry a few days later as thanks, with plenty of nan bread. If you haven't been out in the Gulf you cannot comprehend the heat. I once measured a temperature of 48 degrees in the shade and a humidity of 95%, you didn't sweat you melted, and as John used to say it might not be the a**ehole of the world but you can see it from the top of the factory.
In relation to foreign workers and their conditions in Saudia and Kuwait we have to be very carefull to be CONSISTENT in the way we see things.
As I have tried to explain in a previous post, most of these workers are CONTRACT WORKERS and not immigrants ,which is exactly the situatiion we should try to reach in Europe if and when we are confronted with cries for " more imigrants are needed to support an ageing population" .
While OFCOURSE it is right to attack the inhuman conditions and lack of legal protektion that some of these workers suffer in the hands of their arab masters , we have to be carefull not to undermine the institution of international contractwork, which is the most EFFICIENT way to prevent further muslim imigration to Europe.
It is not allways a smart idea to attack your enemies whereever and whenever possible.
Not in war and not in politics.
Another examble of this was the way EVERYBODY in the west attacked Russia over it's supposedly unnesescary brutality in the war in Chechenya.
This media-war against vital russian interrests ALIENATED the russian leadership against the west over an issue where we should have been in complete agreement whith them : to crush a fanatic moslem insurgency/government
Whithout this mistake and the similar mistake in kosovo , Putin might have had a very different attitude .
Anyhow , our interrest is to expand the legal foundations of international contractwork into a moraly defensible position ,and to be sure that ALL contractworkers, including the ones in Kuwait ,GO HOME when their contract ends.
"And they always return, which should tell us a thing or two about their lives back home. How bad must life be in these countries, that an abused maid leaves her family to return to Kuwait? To 40 Kuwaiti Dinars in salary, about $120.'
A $120 a month is nothing in the West but it is a lot of money for a poor person in Africa! An average maid in Africa works from 6:00 am to midnight for $20.00 a month if she is lucky enough to work for a middle class family.
Would be migrant workers are willing to pay brokers a substantial amount of money to get them a job in the Middle East because a job there means working shorter hours, one day off a week, (not so in their homelands), and an income five times higher than what they would have earned in their home country.
There is abuse of household help in the ME, but it also happens in Africa and Asia.
The remittence pay that comes from the ME is helping to raise the standard of living of hundreds of thousands of people in poor countries. So in short-the issue of migrant workers in the ME is not so simple.
The main aim should be to make sure the worst types of exploitation and abuse are prevented by legal measures.
Re: Zenobia said...
It seems your arguments gravitate to a measure of how close one can come to the moral equivalent of absolute bottom, and by virtue of missing the mark claim that you have done someone a service by abusing them slightly less than someone else.
You are a very special breed of apologist.
Actually, I am quiet young and I agree with ScotSA.
My grandfather was an immigrant for three years in France during the 1970s, but it was a bit hard back then to be an immigrant in France (at least a European one).
By contrast, he was contracted by a German corporation to work (as a low skilled worker) in constructing power plants in, surprise, Lybia.
It was a paradise compared to France, in one year he got enough money to buy a house here, he got more than he did in France for three years. It was the 80s and he plays around saying he build Kadafi's nuclear plants...
The thing is, I envy the gulf states by their standard of living and specially by their migrational system.
Ole,
the Russians had already gave up the Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan). The problems in Chechnya started when the muslim insurgency started planning uniting with Azerbaijan with the support of the two brothers Turkey and Iran, endangering both Armenia and Georgia and getting the all region under musilm control.
Not to speak about the ethnic cleansing of Slavs who were some 40% of Chechnya in the 60s and are now less than 10%.
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