Shining a light on the runaway maids issue

A rather long comment answering Stinni's comment on my previous posting is worth sharing for all (Stinni's original remarks in italics).

I’ve taken some time to reply to some comments you have received as I think that whilst it is representative of the opinions and experiences of many people, it only tells half the story. Here’s the other half.

One of our maids ran away one day shy of her three-month trial period.

That’s a change from the oft -told story of the maid being returned one day short of her trial period – and not receiving a bean for the work she’d done. Then she gets another trial period elsewhere, same thing. Each time she was told that her wages were withheld against the cost of getting her.

That first phase when she has just arrived is a very difficult one for both housemaid and employer. There is a language barrier and a cultural barrier as well. Many housemaids are young and uneducated and find themselves overwhelmed when they arrive.

Now seems to me that sometimes a maid is truly incompetent and is returned, to her agency. This incompetence may be evident after a couple of employers, but, as is often the case, the expectations may be unrealistic. How many people should have to work 7 days a week in their job? How many people should have to work long hours, then fall into bed exhausted for a few hours sleep before being back to work?

I know that it is a risk to pay an agency for a housemaid and then find she doesn’t fit with the running of the household. Some people want independent housemaids who show initiative (at the risk of making a few mistakes) and some want toe-the–line housemaids who are not allowed to get one thing even a little bit wrong. It’s like any relationship in life, some work better than others. That trial period is essential, but it needs to be well managed, for both side’s sake.

It was a scam that she had going on with the owner/manager of the agency we dealt with.

If you know it was a scam then you should report it and get it dealt with. If you have reason to suspect that it is part of an ongoing racket then many more people are going to be subject to the same thing and that is not fair on anybody. Please bring some accountability before the agencies! Someone should be tracking how often this happens. Those agencies worry me. At the end of the day it’s all about the money, not the person.

They made KD400.

Who did? The agency and the maid. So that’s 400 KD split between them. Why is it worth the maid’s loss of income and her sponsorship for a cut in 400KD?

If she's ever caught though, we get to pay her ticket home. Makes NO SENSE.

You’re right it doesn’t make sense. However, if she has not worked the full two years for you then you do not have to pay her full fare home. This is exactly why so many maids stick it out in a bad job. They know that if they run away they will not get their airfare paid so they stay with their misery instead.

But hey, that’s the same in many jobs here. Even throughout the business world. A broken contract means paying your own way home, so the only reason people stick with an unsatisfying job is so that they can get their airfare and a letter of release.

Another maid working in my husband's family home ran away because she figured out she could make more money hooking down in Fintas.

Now, on a going wage for maids of 40-50KD month, from which clothing and toiletries are deducted, it’s not hard to see why the grass looks greener on the other side and women do run away looking for other opportunities. They think they will have the freedom to come and go as an independent human being instead of living life under lock-up.

The trouble is that having got to the “billiard halls” the grass is not always greener and many maids are trapped against their will. Some have to pay in advance in anticipation of their change of sponsorship to an “outside” i.e. shop worker, or similar, visa. The visa is bought on borrowed money which the maid has to work to pay off. She has therefore ended up with herself in slavery.

So who is paying her when she becomes a hooker? There would not be prostitutes if there were not randy men with problems! People need to look to the cause of these problems and do not punish those who are just one part of the problem. Men have a lot to answer for in this (and any!) society when they see women as sex objects only and don’t keep sex within marriage.

Here’s a curious observation about relationships:
When there are problems between the husband and wife they are often linked to finance. If the wife hasn’t got her needed/wanted money who does she borrow from? The housemaid. Silly maid, some would say, for lending it. But what is she to do? Not pay it? Get kicked out? Make her daily life miserable for not complying with her employer’s wishes? When the money is not paid back she can be added to the long list of those who have not been paid their wages.

When she got caught, my sister-in-law had to pay her ticket home. Again, not fair at all.

To have broken her contract meant that the maid was to pay for her own ticket home, or return to the sponsor to work out the rest of the two year contract. If the system is so transparent that the employer is paying for the ticket home then why are there so many maids waiting for their ticket home. “So many” = about 1,000 at my rough calculation (based on embassy and prison numbers. Someone please correct me if they can add more information.) A few questions for anyone who can help me:

What should a maid do when, at the end of her two year contract, her employer refuses to repatriate her? If, as this person is stating here, the sponsor is responsible for her airfare, who will enforce this and how can she make it happen?

She doesn’t have her passport.
Should she:
A) stay in the house and hope that some how, some day, her employer is “done” for having an overstayer
B) believe it when she’s told “ next week/month…”
C) run away

When her sponsor renews her visa, against her wishes, what should she do?

When her employer (who may or may not be her sponsor) kicks her out on to the street and says “You want to go home, right, here’s your bags off you go,” what should she do?

Every single worker coming here is fingerprinted and put in the system somewhere. Why can’t the sponsor who brought the maid here be contacted after 2 years and asked “ Where is worker -----. “ and have the file checked off as returned home or renewed. (after providing some evidence.)

A maid should be working for the person who sponsored her and not sold on to someone else – especially against her wishes.

Part of the problem here is the inconsistency with the 200KD cost for a foreigner to sponsor a housemaid while it costs a Kuwaiti only 20KD. This encourages a racket in slave trading whereby a maid is brought in by a Kuwaiti to work in the home of someone of another nationality, at some comfortable profit to himself.

I’m also concerned about how this system is used to place maids in the homes of repeated offenders who should be blacklisted as maid abusers but are managing to employ maids through other people’s sponsorship. When the maids run away from this situation, without their paperwork, their employer /sponsor is untraceable and not going to cough up for their airfare.

If you have a couple of stories to relate here of your bad experiences with housemaids then how many employed housemaids does this represent? Over a period of years and throughout the extended family there must have been a number of maids employed and I’m pleased that you do not have stories of theft or other problems to relate. You must be very appreciative of the work that your maids have put in.

Maids run away all the time

WHY???? I’ve never had a maid run away from me. Perhaps that’s because I don’t beat mine and I do pay them.

I've never come across one that ran because she was abused or not paid.

Where did you meet these runaways? The run away or want–to-run-away maids I’ve met at hospitals, people’s houses, embassies, the park, talked to outside their homes, etc., consistently say they have not been paid or they have been beaten.

I’ve seen many maids whose bruises were in no way self-inflicted (I don’t quite see how someone could run a hot iron over her own arm or completely bruise the back of her legs, buttocks and up her back.)

On a much more minor scale, I’d like to know what the local guidelines are for what constitutes abuse. A very common sight I see up and down the streets of our neighbourhood is the Clorox hands. Women whose skin is chafed and raw from doing the washing. When I ask about it I’m told that she’s not allowed to wear rubber gloves, she hasn’t been given any cream for dermatitis and if she wants any regular hand cream she has to pay for it herself. This is “talking at the rubbish bin” conversations which I’ve had with several women. They are rarely allowed out of the house and I haven’t been able to talk for long. The maid next door got slapped on the face for talking to my maid when she was outside. Many women have no life outside the boundaries of the house; many are not even allowed to take the rubbish out to the kerb but have to call the driver to collect it from the door.

I am a social person and the solitary confinement that some of the women describe would start to drive me crazy. Among all the raped, abused, unpaid housemaids I have met there is only the one who made me cry. She told me she was not allowed to talk to the housemaids of the other families when they came to visit. I know that many maids quickly make friends among the maids of the employer’s extended family. To hear about her having to spend the two years in solitary confinement, not allowed to talk to her children at home, nor to the people around her here, just broke my heart.

I've met plenty that claim they were abused, raped or not paid but end up telling me they lied to score a better salary.

And did it work? Did they manage to get a salary increase from 40 KD to 60 KD or something like that?

I know some of them are treated badly

Too right they are. What does that mean? The beatings they receive, the slap on the face, or just the complete lack of dignity with which they are treated? How about not even being allowed to have a walkman to listen to at night? How about not being allowed to send and receive letters from home? Or have a telephone by which they can SMS family at home. (I know that there are standard answers to most of these: We don’t want our housemaid to get a boyfriend and/or run away.)

Housemaids are people as well. It is up to the woman herself to take responsibility for her actions. Why can’t she have a day off a week and have a social life? Not all women will be only looking for a boyfriend! I once gave a woman a gift bag of soap, shampoo etc and then her employer had a, accusing her of having a boyfriend! The housemaid was a young, married Moslem woman who enjoyed some kindness from me in her life. What has her employer got against that?! This is the woman who is not even allowed to visit her own sister. These so-called “protections” do not help a person but drive them to defiance. Ask any parent of a teenager, they’ll tell you it’s the same thing with teenagers. Employing a housemaid means finding that balance between responsibility and independence.

What is treated badly? Sleeping on the kitchen floor with no personal space for privacy (surely in itself that is Haram?)? Having a Bible taken away by an agency and being told that it’s not allowed here?

but you would be surprised to find out how many of them are deceitful.

Not surprised. I know it. I’ve been stolen from and lied to. But that doesn’t give me a reason to state that house maids are trouble and take the attitude of “get them before they get me” which I’ve found among many employers. Just as in the current blogging re: Bangladeshis, it is racist to state that Bangladeshis are responsible for the crime here, so too is it not possible to state that all housemaids are thieves and should be kept in their place.

Many workers come here with the idea that they are to “serve their time” and go home with the money. I know of several cases where sisters or cousins have been here working in the same city for their 2 years, and never seen each other and rarely even been allowed to talk to each other on the phone. They’ve never even seen the Kuwait Towers. Compare that to the freedom of life that those who can read this now are currently experiencing. Housemaids bear the demeaning attitude of their employers and live a life of subservience because they know that at the end of it they will have money to support the family at home. Imagine then the insult when the money is not forthcoming.

Not that the lying is at all justified, but one has to ask what motivated it. Could it be that they were also lied to? I met a woman who was a qualified dentist at home and signed up with an agency in her home country thinking she was coming here to work in dentistry. It wasn’t until just before she left that she got the contract and read that she was coming to be a housemaid. Given that she had already paid money to her agency and that she was wanting independence from a marriage that had gone wrong she decided to go ahead with the job anyway. Not a good start to her time here, and it only got worse when she arrived to a job with just one day off a month and a complete disrespect for the fact that she was a mature woman who could think for herself and did not want to be treated as a slave.

People have come here at all levels of the work force thinking that the wages promised would be sufficient to live on and save some money. Over and over again, the lies have been perpetrated that an employee has to pay for their own visas, medicals, etc. and have had it deducted from their wages, leaving them well short of what they had anticipated.

In this area at least some progress has been made and thanks to FALCON (Fostering Awareness of Labour Conditions) there are now pamphlets in circulation informing workers of their rights.

The fact that we are having this “conversation” in English and using the cyber world to do so means that we are in a different world entirely from the experiences of many housemaids. It’s my turn to make a sweeping generalization – to which I hasten to add “NOT ALL” when I say that there are many Bedoon, who are lesser educated, who treat their housemaids like animals. They are fed little, work long hours, sleep little, get a slap for anything that is done wrong, and are generally very run down before they do run away. This is where some attention should be focused.

The newspapers here are publishing regularly the cases of abuse that have taken place. My goals are 1) to see a public recognition of this as a national problem and 2) see the perpetrators of these crimes brought to justice. Publicly, so that others may learn that it is not acceptable to treat a maid as a slave.

To those who feel the need to defend the employers, I again state, not all housemaids are angels, and there are thieves in any level of society but this does not, in itself justify the lock-up conditions under which many have to live. There are some caring benevolent employers here and they have an important role in society as role models to others for their kindness and humanity. These are the people to whom housemaids return after their two year visa expires in the knowledge that they are appreciated and valued.