SRI LANKA: Balancing Cost, Benefits of Migration a Touchy Task

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Nov 18 2002 (IPS) - Despite growing concerns about the human cost of overseas migration, Sri Lankan experts are cautious about tightening the procedures for working abroad and say this has to balanced with the risk of undercutting the economic benefits of the labour exodus.

”On one hand, we need to protect our workers. On the other hand we don’t want to lose our share of overseas job markets in the Middle East and Europe to competitors,” said M. Seevaratnam, a consultant at the state-run Sri Lanka Foreign Employment Bureau (SLFEB).

Seevaratnam’s remarks sum up the dilemma faced by labour-exporting countries like Sri Lanka, a nation that has one million workers overseas, most of them women in the Middle East.

He acknowledged the need for the government to find ways of protecting Sri Lankan workers from unscrupulous job agents here and abroad, rape and physical abuse by employers and a host of other problems.

”We need to protect our workers but we also need to be cautious in this process,” S S Wijeratne, chairman of the Legal Aid Foundation of Sri Lanka’s Bar Association, said at a seminar Saturday on legal aid for migrant workers.

”If labour-receiving countries feel we are placing restrictions on foreign employers, they may go to other labour-supplying markets that are less restrictive,” said Wijeratne, who added that the demand for foreign labour in Europe and the Middle East was rising.

Wijeratne said the foundation plans to station lawyers in the Middle East to provide assistance to workers.

Legal experts like him hope that the U.N. convention on the rights of migrant workers would be implemented this year after a 20th country, the last needed for it to come into force, ratifies it. ”We are expecting Bangladesh to ratify it before the end of the year. That I hope would provide added protection to our workers,” said David Soysa, director of the Migrant Services Centre (MSC), a non-governmental organisation.

According to a survey of returnee female domestic workers conducted by the MSC last month, more than 20 percent of those interviewed suffered injuries or physical abuse from employers. More than 50 percent who have returned were under medical treatment for ailments like back pain, asthma, heart disease and other complications.

The study, conducted in 400 households in three Sri Lankan districts that provide the bulk of migrant workers, also found that 24 persons were subject to sexual abuse while in employment. Two of them became pregnant as a result.

”Many returnees also said that they have changed socially and psychologically as a result of their foreign experience, that their families and community failed to recognise it and it was an additional push factor to re-migrate,” it said.

In the sample survey, about 27 percent said their employment experience had a negative impact on the family with problems like divorce or separation, social and health problems, husbands being addicted to alcohol, children dropping out from school and depression among family members. But the survey also found that annual incomes of migrant workers went up to 25,000 rupees (nearly 250 U.S. dollars) a month for 80 percent of those interviewed. Many had previously been homemakers who were not earning any money or were involved in small jobs.

Sri Lanka’s migrant workers are the country’s highest net foreign exchange earner, making some one billion dollars annually.

Such is the power of the industry that the government had to hastily withdraw a proposed 15 percent tax on remittances by migrant workers that it proposed in the budget on Nov. 5.

Public fury over the proposal was spread across the newspapers, television and radio stations, forcing Finance Minister K N Choksy to concede that there had been some misunderstanding and that all references to a tax on remittances were being withdrawn. Meantime, Seevaratnam said the government was considering amendments to the Sri Lanka Foreign Employment Bureau Act, which governs all migrant workers, and would invite suggestions from the public to update it.

”There is a desperate need to update the Act and bring in line with modern trends. It was enacted in 1985 at a time when there were not many women going abroad,” he said.

Priyadarshini Karunaratne, deputy director of the consular affairs division of Sri Lanka’s Foreign Ministry, said new laws were also being drafted for submission to parliament shortly.

These would enable women to register children conceived abroad and apply for Sri Lankan citizenship from the country’s embassies abroad, a right that only males have right now. Right now, migrant women workers who have had children out of wedlock or after being raped are not be able to get citizenship for their children, who end up stateless.

Karunaratne said 273 Sri Lankan migrant workers in the Middle East have died so far this year. Most died from heart failure due to heavy workloads in the homes where they work.

She said the SLFEB also had a safehouse for pregnant women who return home and give birth under the care of the state, without informing their families and husbands who often reject them. ”After the child is born, they either go home or opt for the child to be adopted,” she said.

But Padmini Samarasinghe, a counsellor, says the social cost of migration is so that it is time to ban the export of women labour.

”There are serious problems after women leave their children and go abroad. Yes it is nice to talk of the government earning foreign exchange but what about the children who are left behind to fend for themselves?” she asked.

Samarasinghe, a group director at one of Sri Lanka’s top companies, said her organisation has tried to convince women at a village outside Colombo, who want to go abroad, to do so only when their children are grown up.