Mick Hartley

There was a strange story in Arab News last week:

A Sri Lankan maid who was helped by Riyadh Gov. Prince Salman to return home after she claimed that she did not receive her salary for 13 years arrived in her village to be met by shocked relatives who presumed that she had died more than 11 years ago.

When Girlie Malika Fernando, 53, reached home in Weragama Watte near Wadduwa, 40 kilometers from Colombo, her family could not believe she was alive. They had presumed she had died two years after arriving in the Kingdom to work as a housemaid.

When Girlie Malika Fernando reached home in Weragama Watte near Wadduwa may sound like the start of one of Kipling’s more bizarre tales, but the fact that this story had a happy ending shouldn’t disguise the more general truth that Sri Lankan domestic servants face all kinds of horrendous abuses in the Middle East.

A new report from Human Rights Watch highlights the problem:

The 131-page report, “Exported and Exposed: Abuses Against Sri Lankan Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates,” documents the serious abuses that domestic workers face at every step of the migration process. It also shows how the Sri Lankan government and governments in the Middle East fail to protect these women. The report is based on 170 interviews with domestic workers, government officials, and labor recruiters conducted in Sri Lanka and in the Middle East.
“Governments in the Middle East expose Sri Lankan domestic workers to abuse by refusing to guarantee a weekly rest day, limits to the workday, freedom of movement and other rights that most workers take for granted,” said Jennifer Turner, a researcher in the Women’s Rights division at Human Rights Watch. “For its part, the Sri Lankan government welcomes the money these women send home, but does little to protect them from exploitative bosses or labor agents.”
More than 660,000 Sri Lankan women work abroad as domestic workers, nearly 90 percent in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon. Human Rights Watch found that labor agents in Sri Lanka charge excessive fees that leave migrants heavily indebted, and often misinform them about their jobs. Once abroad, domestic workers typically labor for 16 to 21 hours a day, without rest breaks or days off, for extremely low wages of 15 to 30 US cents per hour. Some domestic workers told Human Rights Watch how they were subjected to forced confinement, food deprivation, physical and verbal abuse, forced labor, and sexual harassment and rape by their employers.
Human Rights Watch found that employers routinely confiscate domestic workers’ passports, confine them to the workplace, and in many cases restrict their communication, even with their embassy. Some employers also withhold wages for months to years at a time. In the worst cases, the combination of these practices traps Sri Lankan domestic workers in forced labor.

Saudi and Sri Lankan officials “swiftly dismissed the charges“:

Waleed Al-Swaidan, chairman of the Saudi Recruitment Committee at the Riyadh Chamber of Commerce, told Arab News that HRW was “trying to make a mountain out of a molehill”.