Immigrant maids tortured in Kuwait
With nowhere else to go, dozens of Nepalese maids who fled from their employers now sleep on the floor in the lobby of their embassy in Kuwait, next to the visitors’ chairs.
In the Philippines embassy, more than 200 women are packed in a sweltering room, where they sleep on their luggage and pass the time singing along to Filipino crooners on television. So many runaways are sheltering in the Indonesian embassy that some have left a packed basement and taken over a prayer room.
With the starting of Ramzan, the number of maids seeking protection is growing, straining the capacity of the improvised shelters, embassy officials say. With Kuwaiti families staying up into the early hours of the morning, some maids say they cook more, work longer hours and sleep less.
Rosflor Armada, who is staying in the Philippines embassy, said that last year during Ramzan, she cooked all day for the evening meal and was allowed to sleep only about two hours a night.
“They said, ‘You will work. You will work’.” She said that she left after her employers demanded that she wash the windows at 3 am.
Laws protect employers
The existence of the shelters reflects a hard reality here: With few legal protections against employers who choose not to pay servants, who push them too hard, or who abuse them, sometimes there is nothing left to do but run. The laws that do exist tend to err on the side of protecting employers, who often pay more than $2,000 upfront to hire the maids from the agencies that bring the women here.
The problems in Kuwait, including a lack of legal protection, are hardly unusual or even regional; this summer, New York became the first state to grant workplace rights to domestic employees in an effort to prevent sexual harassment and other abuses. But human rights groups say the potential for mistreatment is acute in several countries in West Asia, especially those with large numbers of migrant workers who rely on a sponsorship system that makes employers responsible for the welfare of their workers.
That system is particularly entrenched in Kuwait, where oil riches allow many families to have several servants, human rights advocates say. And conditions for some workers here are bad enough that the US department of state in a 2010 report singled out Kuwait, along with 12 other countries, for failing to do enough to prevent human trafficking.
The report noted that migrants enter Kuwait voluntarily, but “upon arrival some are subjected to conditions of forced labour by their sponsors and labour agents, including through such practices as nonpayment of wages, threats, physical or sexual abuse, and restrictions on movement, such as the withholding of passports.”
Informal shelters
The informal shelters here are open secrets and touchy subjects. Embassy officials are loath to talk about them and generally do not allow visitors, citing concerns about the privacy of the women and a reluctance to antagonise Kuwaiti officials, whose cooperation they need in order to repatriate many of the women. The government runs a shelter for about 50 women, but few domestic workers know about the place, according to their advocates.
Kuwaiti officials say that an overwhelming majority of the country’s approximately 6,50,000 domestic workers are treated well and are considered part of the families that employ them. Some bristle at the notion that Ramzan is more taxing.
But even many of those who are not abused can lead lonely, Spartan lives with little time off. Some employers forbid the women to socialise with friends, and the women themselves are often loath to spend much money in their free time so they can save cash for the families they left behind in their home countries.
