AMMAN — On June
16, the world celebrates the International Day of Domestic Workers, a tradition
that started with the ratification of the International Labour Convention No.
189 concerning decent work for domestic workers in 2011.
اضافة اعلان
A new report
issued by Tamkeen Association for Legal Aid and Human Rights for the occasion
found that domestic workers have filed 346 complaints in Jordan since last
year.
Domestic
workers in Jordan come from a variety of countries, including southeast Asia
and Africa. According to Tamkeen’s report, 131 complaints were filed by Ugandan
workers, 86 by Filipino workers, 34 by Bangladeshi workers, 29 by Ghanaian
workers, and 66 complaints by Sri Lankan, Ethiopian, Nepali, Kenyan, and
Indonesian workers.
The report
indicated that the total number of domestic workers in Jordan amounts to
33,777, including 10,402 Filipinas and 8,095 Bangladeshis, and that there are
30,000 irregular workers who left their workplaces for a variety of reasons.
These workers are usually women who work in live-in arrangements with families,
often under challenging work circumstances with language barriers. Agencies
based in Jordan and other countries in the Middle East recruit women from
abroad and bring them over in cohorts.
The most common
complaint, according to the report reviewed by Jordan News, was
employers withholding personal identification documents, such as passports.
The association
recommended facilitating the transfer of the worker from one employer to
another without a “waiver” required from the first employer, creating an
effective complaints mechanism, and taking each complaint seriously.
"We
noticed an increase in the workers' complaints and this is because of the
pandemic whereby employers have not paid the domestic workers their salaries in
addition to not being able to return back to their countries, which made
things even more complicated,” said Tamkeen’s president Linda Kalash in an
interview with Jordan News.
"The laws
are really strict and help in protecting workers' rights,” she added. “The
problem is not within the laws, it is within the law enforcement."
"Some
people do not follow these rules and regulations,” Kalash explained. "There
is also a lack of following up on these laws among some people."
"There
should be an effective inspection from some authorities for these workers to
make sure each and every worker is getting their rights."
President of
the Domestic Workers’ Recruitment Association Khaled Husainat said in remarks
to Jordan News that reports of reports are “exaggerated.”
A 2011 report
from watchdog Human Rights Watch found that human rights for migrant domestic
workers are “are slim, if non-existent.” The report found that the workers
“face systemic and systematic abuse”, including non-payment, deprivation of
food, and the expectation that they work for up to twenty hours a day.
"I cannot
deny that there are some violence cases against them but not as much as it is
portrayed by some rights organizations," Husainat said. "Some parties
do not want to admit that some workers do abuse their employers," but this
goes unreported by these NGOs, he charged.
He spoke of
some sort of organized escape. “Some
workers decide to escape and leave the houses of their employers to search for
better opportunities and a higher salary but, on the other hand, some domestic
workers who manage to escape encourage other workers to do the same, using
social media as a platform."
He called on
workers to report their complaints rather than leave their workplaces on their
own. "If a worker gets abused in any way, they can easily file a complaint
with the Ministry of Labour or any police station," he said.
"Anything is just better than deciding to escape: we live in a country
that respects human rights and is ready to help anytime."
A lawyer
speaking with Jordan News disagreed with Husainat’s framing of the issue – and
in his particular his admonishment that abused workers not “escape” their
workplaces. Imad Sharqawi, an attorney and an activist in the field of human
rights, told Jordan News that "we should not be using the word
‘escaping’ as the domestic workers are just as like other workers who have the
full right to just leave her work if they do not feel satisfied with it."
"We should
respect that after all; we are dealing with a human who has feeling and must be
respected,” Sharqawi said. “These workers have rights that we should not ignore
them."
"These
workers should have their own private life, too," he said. "Employers’
rights from the workers is to get their work done. Other than that, it is not
their business; they should not be punishing (workers) on matters like having
mobiles or having a day off or even having a lover."
"In
general, I can say that people started to be more educated in how they must treat
their workers. Time is different now," the lawyer added.
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