Rights group reports on lack of protection for domestic workers

THE ongoing evacuation of Filipinos from Lebanon has, coincidentally, put the spotlight on the hardships being faced by migrant domestic helpers.

Television news is replete with images of tearful women, most of whom had worked as maids in the strife-torn country, thanking the heavens for having escaped not only the fierce battles between Israel and Hezbollah forces, but their abusive employers as well. One of those maids was reported to have risked certain injury and jumped from a second-floor apartment after her employer barred her from leaving the house to join the other workers who were going to be repatriated.

But according to a new report from an international rights group, such incidents of abuse are far from isolated. There is enough pattern, says the report from the New York-based Human Rights Watch, to show that migrant domestic workers — from the Philippines and many other countries — are routinely deprived of their basic rights and exposed to various forms of discrimination and abuse.

“Millions of women and girls turn to domestic work as one of the few economic opportunities available to them,” said Nisha Varia, senior researcher for the Human Rights Watch during the launch of the report, Swept Under the Rug: Abuses Against Domestic Workers Around the World. (View the report.)

“Abuses often take place in private homes and are totally hidden from the public eye,” Varia said.

Swept Under the Rug puts together research since 2001 on abuses against women and child domestic workers coming from or working in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, El Salvador, Guatemala, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Togo, and the United States.

The report admits that it is difficult to estimate the prevalence of abuse, given the private nature of domestic work and a general lack of reporting mechanisms. Still, indications are rife, says the report, that abuses are indeed widespread. It refers to Saudi Arabia, for example, where the Philippines, Indonesian, and Sri Lankan embassies handle “thousands of complaints” every year.

The abuses range from non-payment of wages, inadequate living conditions, termination of employment, to assault and rape.

Feminization of labor migration

Even with the very significant threat of potential abuses in their destination countries, migrant workers continue to dare face the risk and their numbers continue to rise. Among them, the women migrants have grown in far bigger numbers over the last three decades, Human Rights Watch notes. Today, women comprise half of the estimated 200 million migrants worldwide.

This so-called feminization of labor migration, says the report, is “particularly pronounced” in the Philippines, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. In these countries, national-level numbers show that women comprise 60-75 percent of legal migrants, a huge majority of whom are employed as maids in the Middle East, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong.

And why do the populations of women migrant workers continue to swell? Swept Under the Rug theorizes with what it calls “push and pull factors.” As employment opportunities shrink in the labor-sending countries, the economies of those receiving them increasingly rely on labor migration to fill low-paying jobs with poor working conditions. Maids help free women among the growing middle-classes of those countries, who are then able to work outside the home.

And for labor-sending countries such as the Philippines, their economies rely on the remittances that flow in from the labor of those overseas. In 2005, according to World Bank figures quoted by Human Rights Watch, migrant workers from developing countries sent home some US$167 billion in remittances.

Need for protective mechanisms

As women continue to search for work outside their own countries, the report calls, governments of receiving countries must “regulate working conditions, detect violations and impose meaningful civil and criminal sanctions.”

For their part, labor-sending countries must install an adequate framework to regulate and monitor recruitment, training, and employment conditions at the host countries.

The report takes a positive note of the protections that the Philippine government, through the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, has started to provide for those employed as maids abroad. Those protections include a standard contract that ensures a weekly day of rest, and regulations that require employers to pay most of the costs associated with recruitment and placement.

But clearly, such mechanisms have not been enough to stem the abuses. The report calls “on governments, the international community, civil society, and donors to prioritize the defense of migrant domestic workers’ rights and freedoms.”

An international treaty, the Migrant Workers Convention, was finalized in 1990 and came into force in 2003. The Convention guarantees migrant workers a range of civil, political, social, economic and cultural rights.

Human Rights Watch laments that while several labor-sending countries have ratified the Convention, such as the Philippines and Sri Lanka, most labor-receiving countries have not agreed to be bound by the Convention.