Can a ban on Jordan work?

Sri Lanka is considering banning domestic workers to Jordan if they do not receive a positive response to repatriate 250 odd workers who are at the shelter operated by the Sri Lankan Embassy in that country. However, a closer look shows that there are deeper issues that need to be addressed in connection with Jordan.

A report on Migrant Domestic Workers (MDW) released by Human Rights Watch late last year estimates that as many as 30,000 Sri Lankan women work in Jordan with many of them receiving the lowest salaries of all MDWs – around US$ 100 to US$ 150 a month. Wages have remained low despite moves to raise basic salaries to US$ 200 a month by law, which is yet to be implemented.

More disturbing is the systemic victimisation of workers by law, officials, employers and recruiters on both sides of the migrant worker issue. Pressing financial needs have led hundreds of thousands of women to migrate as domestic workers to Jordan, where many face systemic and systematic abuse.

This results from a recruitment system in which employers and recruitment agencies disempower workers through deceit, debt, and blocking information about rights and means of redress; and a work environment that isolates the worker and engenders dependency on employers and recruitment agencies under laws that penalise escape. Jordanian law contains provisions and omissions that facilitate mistreatment, while officials foster impunity by failing to hold employers and agencies to account when they violate labour protections or commit crimes, and belittling or ignoring a disturbing pattern of abuse.

Such instances of deception and exploitation – especially when combined with labour and physical abuses within a legal and practical environment that punishes escape – may in some cases amount to forced labour under international law, which defines this as work extracted involuntarily under the menace of penalty.

This report, based on research conducted in Jordan in 2009 and 2010, records abuses experienced by some of the 70,000 Indonesian, Sri Lankan and Filipina women who comprise Jordan’s three MDW population groups.

Human Rights Watch documented employers and recruitment agents beating domestic workers, almost always locking them inside the house around the clock, depriving them of food, and denying them medical care. Employers generally required workers to work more than 16, and sometimes up to 20, hours a day, seven days a week.

The most common complaint that local aid organisations and embassies of labour-sending countries received involved non-payment of salaries. Domestic workers often had no privacy, sleeping on balconies and in living rooms, kitchens and corridors. Many employers also forced domestic workers to work after their two-year contracts expired.

These are all issues that have been heard time and time again not only from Jordan but also Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and a host of other countries. If the Government decides to ban housemaids from travelling to Jordan, they have to apply the same precedent to other Middle East countries as well since abuse takes place across the board. The more challenging issue would be to find alternative jobs for these women within Sri Lanka. In Colombo it is common to find housemaids being paid US$ 100 or more but whether that salary can be given to large numbers of women is questionable. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that the sticky issue of migrant workers will be solved with a simple ban. A more pragmatic short term solution would be better monitoring of maids through embassies and providing them with job guidance, training and swift rescues from abuse.