WOMEN-SRI LANKA: Migrant Workers Pay a High Price

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Mar 12 1998 (IPS) - Sri Lankans employed in the thousands in the Middle East in unskilled and semi-skilled jobs send nearly all their earnings home to their families — providing the government with much-needed foreign exchange.

Remittances from the roughly 500,000 migrant workers abroad, some 70 percent of them women, are this tiny Indian Ocean island nation’s second largest source of hard currency earnings after garment exports.

The women workers are mainly house maids, employed like their counterparts from the Philippines and Bangladesh by Gulf Arabs and the large population of expatriates from mainly South Asia and Europe, who dominate white collar jobs in the region.

But they labour under appalling conditions and are targets of rape, sexual harassment and abusive work conditions — non- payment of salaries and excessive workload are some of the commonest reasons stated by housemaids who escaped from their employers and sought shelter in their embassies.

Last year, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, released a report on the rise in violence against migrant women workers, mostly in the Middle East, documenting hundreds of cases.

Sri Lankan women are forced by economic hardship at home to go abroad, in search of employment. Jobs are hard to come by with the 15-year-long civil war bleeding the country. Thousands of women from both Sri Lanka and the Philippines have been snapped up as housemaids in the Gulf because they are educated, and speak English, unlike women from most other developing Asian countries.

For the Colombo government, migrant workers are a valuable source of foreign currency. But they are not counting the social havoc caused by the absence of thousands of women, on two or three year contracts, from their homes, says a sociologist at Sri Lanka’s main university in Peradeniya.

“At home the impact is most damaging — broken houses as a result of the misbehaviour of the spouse, alcoholic spouses, children being raised without maternal supervision, incest, even instances of suicide by spouses and children,” said sociologist Sisira Pinnawala who is an authority on migrant workers.

“Though migrant workers are a valuable resource, in economic terms, there (absence from home) … has important repercussions which can be called negative and harmful,” he argued at a recent international conference at the university.

He said that it was the government’s “moral responsibility” to adopt policy measure that would also take into consideration the social concerns and problems confronting migrant workers. To protect its people was the government’s concern, even if in this instance it means less money for the government coffers.

Last year, the ruling Chandrika Kumaratunga-led government — under pressure to protect its overseas workforce, specially females — announced a rigid contract agreement which the worker, the recruiting agent here and abroad, Sri Lanka’s foreign mission and the employer, were required to jointly sign to ensure some basic protection for the workers.

Sri Lankan labour recruitment firms were very unhappy. They said their counterparts in the Middle Eastern countries, primarily Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), would raise objections and Sri Lanka would be edged out of the Gulf by other countries that do not lay down similar preconditions.

“There is no way we can impose conditions, laid down by Sri Lankan authorities, on the foreign employer, who would look for another source to provide them with a housemaid or skilled labour,” one local recruitment official said.

In fact, the Saudi authorities have raised objections, which are at present being discussed by Sri Lankan and Saudi officials. But as a result of their differences, the entry of new Sri Lankan workers into the Saudi labour market has halted. Saudi Arabia has more than 200,000 Sri Lankan workers.

Pinnawala said that though the government was interested in protecting its citizens abroad, there was little in fact that it could do. The matters involved were highly sensitive, and related to sovereignty, and all governments are reluctant to get involved in anything that would be perceived as interference in the domestic affairs of another country.

In addition to that there were other considerations like trade relations and economic assistance from Middle Eastern countries for instance, on which Sri Lanka is heavily dependent. Also the government was doing its best to expand opportunities for its workers in labour markets abroad.

“Therefore the supplying countries like Sri Lanka would always prefer to keep the existing cordial relations intact and not rock the boat,” the sociologist said. Pinnawala, however, warned that migrant workers are to their government’s “the goose that lays the golden eggs and protecting them is for the survival of the government.”

If overseas employment opportunities dry up, the government would be faced with enormous shortfalls in foreign revenue and the problems of coping with the return of half a million people from the Middle East to swell the ranks of the unemployed.

“Migration of labour that began purely as an income earning phenomena has now been transferred into an industry serving the interests of the government,” sociologist Pinnawala said.