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RIGHTS-SRI LANKA: Women Have Right To Gulf Jobs and Protection

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Aug 14 1999 (IPS) - Sri Lankan authorities would rather men, than women, seek unskilled foreign jobs but employment agencies and women’s groups say women are a vital part of the overseas labour market and discouraging them would be discriminatory.

Government officials say their efforts to encourage more men to go abroad stems from the fact that the long absence of wives and mothers from homes, often results in their disintegration.

More than one million Sri Lankans, the bulk of them women, work in the Gulf States and elsewhere, mostly as domestic help and other semi-skilled work like sewing machine operation.

“No, there is no declared policy to discourage women from going abroad. But we prefer more men going out of the country on overseas employment,” concedes Labour Minister John Seneviratne.

He explains that the government’s main concern was the problems Sri Lankan women face at the workplace and the impact of their absence on their families. Seneviratne said in the past few months, job opportunities for men has increased in Saudi Arabia.

“This is certainly not so,” counters Punyasiri Aponsu, president of the Association of Licensed Foreign Employment Agencies (ALFEA). “The number in fact is decreasing due to a fall in oil incomes and the economic crisis faced by Gulf countries,” he says, adding that the demand for housemaids however has not eased.

He adds that in some countries he visited recently, he found the local people were employed in skilled and unskilled jobs that were earlier dominated by expatriate workers. “Locals are doing jobs because of the economic crisis,” he points out.

Women’s activists like veteran educationist Jezima Ismail argues that the government has no right to deter women from going abroad, although there is no denying that female economic migration has its share of problems.

“There is a dilemma … home and child care are important but on the other hand women migrants send back almost 100 percent of their earnings compared to the men who send back much less,” said Ismail, chairperson of the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Adult Education.

Since January this year, says Aponsu, the government has been offering employment agencies an incentive to send more men abroad by year end. Those that find jobs for a minimum of 500 people, of whom 300 must be men, can qualify for a tax-free car, an offer that was earlier open to only the tourist industry.

Concern that migration of women has an adverse social impact has been aired by the government. Sri Lanka’s Minister of Women’s Affairs Hema Ratnayake last month appealed to women not to desert their children for foreign jobs at a seminar.

“The money earned by mothers working in foreign countries will in no way compensate for the calamities that follow due to their long term separation from their homes,” she said.

The worst affected were children who were neglected and went astray, she said at the seminar on women that was organised in the central town of Kegalle. Women seeking foreign jobs should “not think twice but thrice before leaving their young ones”.

Most of the women who flock to the American Centre for Labour Solidarity, in Colombo, which offers short courses in aspects of housekeeping, are unemployed or from peasant families.

They see a Gulf job as a chance to make quick money with which they dream of building a home and taking care of their families, says Kamanitha Gunawardene, a programme officer at the Centre. They are often ignorant of the working conditions, she adds.

“Some women cancel plans to go abroad when they hear of the negative aspects of working abroad like the alien environment and disruption to family life,” Gunawardene says.

Sri Lankan housemaids have suffered from physical and social abuse by their employers. At the very least, they are socially isolated, virtually imprisoned in the houses in which they work, leaving only with the permission of their employers.

Their absence from Sri Lanka has spawned a host of social problems: high infidelity, alcoholism, incest and suicide among families of Gulf-employed women.

“If you stop them going, then the country would lose foreign exchange and the state would have to provide jobs for a segment of people who never worked in Sri Lanka before,” argues Aponsu.

If they are to be discouraged from going abroad in search of work, the “government must find avenues of unskilled employment for these women”, Ismail declares.

Researcher Malsiri Dias from the Centre for Women’s Research thinks the extent of the problem is exaggerated. Less than 10 percent of the total workforce is affected, she says. “This is not a major problem but tends to get highlighted in the press.”

Since January, trained government counsellors have been posted in 10 key labour-producing districts of Sri Lanka to meet families and discuss social and economic situations. Part of their task is to resolve the problems of such families.

David Soysa, a director of the Migrant Services Centre says his agency discourages women seeking domestic overseas employment purely because there are no safeguards against harassment and non- payment of salaries.

The Centre is run by a trade union, the National Workers Congress. Soysa, a retired government official, says Sri Lanka should have agreements with Gulf countries like the Philippines, another country that exports female domestic help to the Gulf.

“We have contractual obligations between the Sri Lankan government and employers in 10 labour-intensive countries but these contracts are worthless as employers cannot be prosecuted there for any violation of the contracts,” he said.

 
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RIGHTS-SRI LANKA: Women Have Right To Gulf Jobs and Protection

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Aug 9 1999 (IPS) - Sri Lankan authorities would rather men, than women, seek unskilled foreign jobs but employment agencies and women’s groups say women are a vital part of the overseas labour market and discouraging them would be discriminatory.
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