A group of domestic workers gather at their union headquarters in Rio de Janeiro for a class on the law that sets out the rights and obligations of domestic work in Brazil. Learning about the law helps these women defend their rights and combat the vulnerability many of them of them face in the solitude of their employers’ homes. CREDIT: Courtesy of STDRJ

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 20 2022 (IPS)

The Theater of the Oppressed helped her become aware of the triple discrimination suffered by black women in Brazil and the means to confront it, such as the Rio de Janeiro Domestic Workers Union, which she has chaired since 2018.

Maria Izabel Monteiro, 55, came to work in Rio de Janeiro when she was still a teenager, from Campos dos Goitacazes, a city of half a million inhabitants located 280 kilometers away. She has had jobs in commerce and industry, but for most of her life she has worked in other people’s homes.

She began by taking care of a sick elderly woman in Ipanema, an affluent neighborhood next to the beach of the same name. She replaced a white nurse who ate breakfast with the family. But she, the new black caregiver, did not have a place at her employers’ table.

Monteiro believes that all the prejudices of Brazilian society are concentrated in their most acute form against domestic workers, especially if they are black women. They suffer triple discrimination, for being poor black women.

This reality is often addressed by the group Marias do Brasil, created by domestic workers, which adopted the techniques of the Theater of the Oppressed, a method created by Brazilian playwright Augusto Boal (1931-2009), which turns spectators into actors to act out everyday situations and raise awareness.

“It’s pedagogical theater, not therapeutic,” said the trade unionist and actress, who works miracles to juggle her weekly shift at the union, the theater and her work as a domestic.

Monteiro lives in Duque de Caxias, a town of 930,000 near Rio de Janeiro, from where she spoke to IPS. It takes her about an hour by train and subway to get to the house where she works and to the union headquarters, near the city center, and transportation costs her about 10 dollars a day.

Sometimes she and the union directors sleep in the organization’s office to save time and the cost of transportation.

The union has 2,000 registered members, although a smaller number are active. Even though the members are women, the name of the union still uses the masculine form of the word “domesticos” rather than the feminine “domesticas” because it was founded in 1989 before gender-inclusive language came into use in Portuguese. However, the women are thinking of changing the name, as similar unions have done in other parts of the country.

Roseli Gomes do Nascimento suffers frequent acts of discrimination for being a black woman who lives in a poor neighborhood, the Rocinha favela, which sits on a hill between two of Rio de Janeiro’s wealthiest neighborhoods. CREDIT: Courtesy of RG Nascimento

Racist and anti-poor violence

Roseli Gomes do Nascimento, 60, frequently suffers acts of racism and anti-poor discrimination living in Rocinha, the largest favela or shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, which sits on a hill between two wealthy neighborhoods: São Conrado and Gávea.

A taxi driver, for example, once refused to take her from São Conrado to Copacabana, a middle-class neighborhood known for its famous beach. “He said he didn’t drive that route, but he clearly expressed his prejudice that the poor can’t afford to use cabs,” Gomes told IPS, to illustrate the aporophobia – rejection of the poor – with which she lives on a daily basis.

Being followed around by security guards in shops or being denied entry to the buildings where her employers live, until someone talks to the doormen, are other forms of hostility and prejudice faced by Gomes, who currently works as a nanny taking care of a child three days a week.

Her neighbors in Rocinha, whose population is estimated at 70,000 to 150,000, are victims of constant racist violence, “but few complain to the police,” lamented Gomes, who is now determined to speak out against the discrimination she suffers.

Racism has been a crime under Brazilian law for more than 70 years, but the law is almost never enforced.

However, several scandals involving black people tortured and killed apparently because of their skin color, and anti-racist campaigns, have made more people question the impunity surrounding racism.

The Theater of the Oppressed, a method that turns ordinary people into actors to dramatize and comprehend their own situations, helped Maria Izabel Monteiro become a social activist and president of the Domestic Workers Union of Rio de Janeiro. CREDIT: Courtesy of MI Monteiro

Unfair labor relations

Monteiro says labor relations are the greatest reflection of the oppression of black women, a lingering legacy of slavery, which was not abolished in Brazil until 1888.

The Consolidation of Labor Laws, approved in 1942 and containing many of the rights still in force today in Brazil, excluded domestic and rural workers, the very sectors where female labor is abundant.

Women account for 92 percent of domestic workers in Brazil, and black women account for two thirds. A total of 6.3 million people were employed in domestic work in 2019, prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to official data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics.

More than two thirds of female domestic workers are informally employed, which facilitated massive layoffs during the pandemic. They lost 1.5 million jobs, according to Hildete Pereira de Melo, a specialist in gender and economics and professor at the Fluminense Federal University, located in a city near Rio.

As a result, the overall unemployment rate in late 2021 stood at 11.1 percent, compared to 16.8 percent for women and 19.8 percent for black women, according to the Inter-Union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies.

In 1972, a new law recognized some labor rights for women, which were consolidated and expanded by the constitution adopted in 1988. But the real breakthrough only occurred in 2013, with the approval of a constitutional amendment that established rights for domestic workers such as minimum wage, Christmas bonus, vacation days, maximum working day of eight hours and maternity leave.

In other words, they were granted almost the entire list of rights in effect under the labor legislation at the time.

But part of these conquests were lost in 2017, when Congress made labor laws more flexible, for example making it possible to pay domestic workers strictly according to the hours worked, under a new “intermittent work” contract treating them as casual workers, effectively cutting their pay, although it did maintain their rights, Monteiro said.

The Domestic Workers’ Union of Rio de Janeiro organizes talks with specialists and debates on labor rights issues with interested women. On this occasion, they were given orientation on the specific regulations for domestic work. CREDIT: Courtesy of STDRJ

Harassment and violence

Her union assists many women workers, most frequently helping them report rights violations. “But the first part of the complaint is emotional, not labor-related. We offer psychological support, and that’s where my experience in the theater has helped me out,” she said.

Harassment is the most frequent problem reported. Employers pressure domestics to get them to resign, instead of firing them, to avoid paying greater social benefits.

“Things disappear and suspicion is raised about the domestic worker, money is left lying around in visible places, as a trap to accuse them of theft, doubts are cast on what the employees say, with insistent questions such as ‘are you sure?’” Monteiro described.

The domestics feel unprotected, “they are on their own, facing their employers,” generally the husband and wife, and sometimes other family members, she said. For this reason, the union provides a lawyer and seeks a direct dialogue with the employers.

Black women occupy the last rung in terms of remuneration for work, in a ranking in which white men are first, followed by white women and black men. Black men earn more than black women, even though the latter have more schooling on average in Brazil, said researcher Pereira de Melo.

In other words, “the reward for education is higher for men than for women – inequity that rests on policies that Brazilian society should discuss,” she said.

In addition, black women account for 65.9 percent of the victims of obstetric violence and 68.8 percent of all women murdered by men, according to the Patricia Galvão Institute, dedicated to feminist-oriented communication.

This is much higher than the black proportion of the Brazilian population, which is 56 percent of the 214 million inhabitants of this South American country.

Black women comprised 66 percent of the 3,737 women murdered in 2019, according to the Atlas of Violence drawn up by the Brazilian Forum for Public Safety, a non-governmental organization of researchers, police and representatives of the justice system.

Faces of a group of domestic workers in Brazil, during a meeting of one of their unions – a reflection that they are mostly black and poor. They have been fighting for decades for their labor recognition and rights. Today they are organized in 22 unions in states or municipalities and, since 1997, they have a national federation that represents them. CREDIT: Trabalhadoras Domésticas/Flickr

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 24 2022 (IPS)

“Woman, poor, black and illiterate” – most domestic workers suffer quadruple discrimination in Brazil, which made them more vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic, says one of their leaders, Gloria Rejane Santos.

President of the Paraíba Domestic Workers’ Union for the past 12 years, she found herself out of work after coronavirus appeared on the scene.

Of the 6.2 million domestic service jobs in Brazil in 2019, 1.5 million were lost in 2020, estimated Hildete Pereira de Melo, an economics professor at the Federal Fluminense University who has been researching gender and economics for four decades.

Vaccination against COVID-19, which began in January 2021, made it possible to recover only part of the lost jobs.

Paraíba is one of the nine states of the Northeast, Brazil’s poorest region, which is home to 4.06 million of the country’s 214 million inhabitants.

In its largest inland city, Campina Grande, population 415,000, police and labor inspectors freed a woman on Feb. 2 who was working in a home under slavery-like conditions including overwork, unhealthy conditions, rarely being allowed to leave the workplace, and no labor rights.

Helping her colleagues and combating discrimination against domestic workers, who are overwhelmingly black women, is the mission of Gloria Rejane Santos, president of the Domestic Workers Union of Paraíba, a state in Brazil’s poor Northeast region. CREDIT: Courtesy of Santos

Lingering slavery

“The pandemic aggravated the continuation of slavery,” Santos told IPS from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba, a city of 825,000 inhabitants, where two cases of slave labor were discovered and are still under investigation, she said.

Modern-day slavery in Brazil tends to be a more rural phenomenon. There were 1937 workers rescued from slavery conditions in 2021, almost all of them in the countryside of the Brazilian hinterland.

“Many employers demanded that their domestics stay at work all the time,” fearing that they would bring coronavirus back and forth to their homes. “The day laborers who could not accept it, we lost our jobs,” Santos said, referring to live-out domestic workers.

The pandemic thus created conditions for a return to work without time limits, without time off, and with a greater violation of labor rights, which have never been well-respected in domestic work.

The domestic labor market has changed since the 1980s. Live-in maids who worked an unlimited number of days have disappeared, as have domestics who work exclusively for one employer with a monthly salary.

There was an increase in the number of domestics who lived in their own homes and were hired for a limited number of days, who were more autonomous, in a process that accompanied advances in society, with new technologies and new habits, such as eating out more frequently, Melo noted. In addition, homes have become smaller and have lost the “maid’s room,” she said in an interview with IPS in Rio de Janeiro.

Domestic workers from Paraíba, a state in the Northeast region of Brazil, hold a protest organized by their union demanding respect for their rights and compliance with the laws that regulate their activity in the country. CREDIT: STDP

Female and informal

But informal employment is predominant. Nearly 70 percent of domestic workers do not have an employment contract. As a result, they do not have legal rights and are subject to the employer’s discretion, which has facilitated dismissals during the pandemic.

Their vulnerability is aggravated by the fact that 92 percent are women and 66 percent are black women, according to data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics in 2019, the year before the outbreak of the COVID pandemic.

Domestic workers’ trade unions have included the feminine form of the word “workers” – trabalhadoras – in their names, recognizing the overwhelming majority of women in the sector.

Santos, despite presiding over the union, was left without regular work as a day laborer throughout the pandemic, as were “more than half of the domestic workers in Paraíba,” she estimated.

Getting by

Work in the trade unions is voluntary. It only offers limited per diem income from a few sponsored projects, generally for the training of female workers, but “lately we don’t even get that,” lamented the 64-year-old trade unionist, who has six grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

In the last two years she has survived on food basket donations and the emergency aid that the government granted to the poorest of the poor, worth 600 reais (about 115 dollars) in 2020, reduced by half during 2021, when it was only made available for a few months.

“I managed to get it after much struggle, with the support of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, because I was registered as a town councilor, although I was an unelected candidate,” said Santos.

She attributes her decision to accept the presidency of the union to her “vocation”. “I am the daughter of a domestic worker, I suffered a lot watching my mother work hard for scraps of food, some clothes or shoes,” she said.

When she became a trade union leader at the age of 52, she decided to go back to school, and completed primary and middle school. Going to school with adolescents was very difficult, she said, as she was rejected as an “old woman”, especially when it came to group projects.

She then attended an adult education course for high school, where everything went well. But she did not make it into university, where she wanted to pursue a degree in social work. She has channeled that inclination at least partly into her union work.

During the pandemic, the union carried out a permanent campaign to collect food and aid for unemployed members. “We provided assistance to more than 400 families” at the João Pessoa headquarters and the subheadquarters in Campina Grande, she said.

The pandemic forced Roseli Nascimento to replace beef in her diet with chicken, eggs and legumes. A live-out domestic worker in Rio de Janeiro, she lost four of the five days she worked weekly in 2020 and only regained them in mid-2021, when her employers felt protected by the widespread vaccination against COVID-19. CREDIT: Courtesy of Nascimento

Rights

But her main ambition is to “fight discrimination and make society recognize the value of domestic work.” She pointed out that she receives almost daily complaints of mistreatment and other conflicts from her colleagues. In these cases she receives help from a lawyer who has been working with the union on a pro bono basis since 2019.

To illustrate, she cited the case of “a maid who came to the union in tears” after she was accused of having stolen one hundred reais (19 dollars) from her employers. She was saved by a phone call from a son of the family, who confessed to taking the money without telling his parents.

The marginalization suffered by domestic workers in Paraíba is probably stronger than in other states because in that state “90 percent of them are black women,” said Santos.

“I am black, poor and the daughter of a domestic, but since I have an active voice, I decided to use it for the collective good,” she said.

Roseli Gomes do Nascimento, a 60-year-old resident of Rocinha, one of the large, famous favelas or shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro, had slightly better luck than Santos. Also a live-out domestic worker, of the five days she worked during the week, she lost four at the start of the pandemic.

It was not until the middle of the following year that she was able to return to work five days a week, when a good part of the Brazilian population was vaccinated against COVID. Only one supportive employer had kept her continuously employed and even paid her for her day of work during three months in which, for health safety reasons, she stayed away from her employer’s home.

That small income and 115 dollars a month in emergency government assistance for one quarter of 2020 and a fourth of that for nine months of the following year were barely enough to survive on. She lives alone, as her two daughters are now on their own, with her six cats. “I used to have nine, but I gave three away,” she told IPS.

A drastic reduction in beef consumption, sometimes replaced by less expensive chicken and eggs, and a diet with more fruits and vegetables, as well as fewer outings, helped her to live on a reduced budget, with the advantage of losing “about eight kilos, without even dieting.”

Legislators and trade unionists celebrate the first anniversary of the constitutional amendment establishing the rights of domestic workers in Brazil on Apr. 2, 2014. CREDIT: José Cruz/Agência Brasil

Context

Domestic work employed 75.6 million workers, or 4.5 percent of all wage earners around the world, according to a 2021 report by the International Labor Organization (ILO).

Latin America accounted for 18 percent of these workers and Brazil for nine percent, a much higher proportion than the size of the population, which represented 7.4 percent of the total in the case of Latin America and 2.7 percent in the case of Brazil.

In other words, the region has a higher proportion of paid domestic work, a product of its history and slavery, noted economist Melo. Only 20 percent of Brazil’s 60 million families hire domestic workers, a privilege of the upper-middle and upper classes.

Aasia Riaz (24) is one of Pakistan’s 8.5 million domestic workers. She earns about 8,500 rupees (82 dollars) each month. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Feb 9 2015 (IPS)

Sumaira Salamat, a mother of three in her mid-40s, works every day from ten in the morning until half-past two in the afternoon. She travels between three homes, and in each one she dusts, sweeps, washes utensils, and does the laundry. For her efforts, she earns about 3,000 rupees (29 dollars) per month.

Based in the eastern city of Lahore, capital of the Punjab province, Salamat is one of Pakistan’s estimated 8.5 million domestic workers, who daily perform the hundreds of housekeeping tasks necessary to keep a home spick and span.

"We want to be recognised as workers, just like our counterparts working in factories and hospitals are. We would also like to get old age benefits like pensions when we retire; but most of all we want better wages and proper terms of work." -- Sumaira Salamat, a domestic worker in Lahore
Experts here say that very nearly every middle class family in Pakistan employs some form of domestic help, but while the workers are a mainstay in houses and apartments across the country, the terms of their labour are far from clear; few have fixed working hours, benefits, pensions and proper contracts. Abuse is a frequent occurrence, and the laws governing domestic work are murky.

But things are changing. The recent formation of Pakistan’s first domestic workers trade union, combined with the promise of various bills pending in parliament, have workers here daring to hope that their situation might improve very soon.

Rights violations

Speaking to IPS over the phone from Lahore, Salamat says she has been on a four-year quest to secure some basic rights for herself and her fellow workers.

“It’s only in the last year-and-a-half that these women have finally realised the importance of what it means to become a united force,” she explains.

“We want to be recognised as workers, just like our counterparts working in factories and hospitals are. We would also like to get old age benefits like pensions when we retire; but most of all we want better wages and proper terms of work,” Salamat concluded.

Substandard working conditions are one of the primary grievances of employees in this sector. Many are lured into homes with the promise of a good life and a decent salary. What they find when they arrive is something altogether very different.

Take Sonam Iqbal, 22 and single, who has been a domestic worker since she was 15. “When we are interviewed, we are shown a rosy picture,” she claims, “but slowly and steadily the workload is increased and we cannot even protest.”

Long hours of work and low pay are not the only issues. Many female workers complain that they are always the ones held accountable for any loss of money or valuables in the home.

It is hard to state with any accuracy the number of domestic workers in the country. Labour Department Director Tahir Manzoor is not willing to give even a conservative estimate, explaining to IPS: “They [domestic workers] are largely invisible, isolated and scattered among thousands of homes and apartments.”

The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics states that of the 74 percent of the labour force engaged in the informal sector, a majority is employed in domestic work; this includes men and children.

Still, experts are agreed that the bulk of the industry is fueled by a steady stream of mostly uneducated rural women who flock to urban centres in search of work.

Their hopes of securing a better future, however, are often dashed when they realize their earnings fall far short of even the minimum wage, which is fixed at 10,000 rupees (about 97 dollars) per month in provinces like the Sindh, home to over 30 million people.

Legal mechanisms

Last month, Pakistan’s minister for Inter Provincial Coordination introduced the Minimum Wages for Unskilled Workers (Amendment) Act 2015, which, if passed, will see wages of so-called unskilled workers increase from 97 to about 116 dollars per month in all the provinces.

But there is no guarantee that domestic workers will benefit from it, since there are no mechanisms with which to check implementation.

In fact, except for mention of domestic workers in two legislations, there is no specific law protecting their rights in Pakistan, says Zeenat Hisam, senior research associate at the Karachi-based NGO Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER).

The two pieces of legislation in question are the Provincial Employees Social Security Ordinance 1965, which states that “employers of a domestic servant” shall be liable to provide medical treatment “at his own cost”; and the Minimum Wages Act of 1961, which covers those employed as domestic labourers.

Despite these provisions, “the government has never notified the minimum wages applicable to domestic workers under this law in the last 53 years,” Hisam told IPS.

Protecting women and children

In December 2014, the Pakistan Workers Federation formed the very first Domestic Workers Trade Union. It has 235 members of which 225 are female domestic workers.

The Union was registered with the Registrar’s Trade Union in Lahore, under the provisions of the Punjab Industrial Relations Act, 2010, and was established under the International Labour Organisation (ILO)’s Gender Equality for Decent Employment project (GE4DE), funded by the Canadian government.

“The ILO is working with Pakistan to bring about changes in laws and policy in accordance with the ILO Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189),” said Razi Mujtaba Haider, a programme officer with the ILO.

Ratified by 17 countries, the convention guarantees fundamental rights to domestic workers, including the right to decent and secure work. With an estimated 52.6 million people employed as domestic workers globally in 2010, the convention governs a massive workforce spread far and wide across the globe.

In keeping with such international standards, Manzoor says the labour department is “working in several areas – building the capacity of the domestic workers so that they have stronger bargaining power; working out a contract form between the employee and employer; fixing per-hour salary to stop exploitation; [providing] benefits and social security and most importantly, restricting employment of children, specially girls aged 14 and under.”

While Pakistan defines a child as a “person below 14 years of age” it does not declare domestic work as hazardous.

Manzoor says the Punjab assembly is on the verge of enacting the Prohibition of the Employment of Children Act 2014, which he hopes will restrict the use of child labourers in domestic settings.

Quoting various media reports, Hamza Hasan, a manager of the research and communications section of the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC), says that between 2010 and 2013, a total of “51 cases of torture of child domestic workers were reported from different parts of Pakistan resulting in the deaths of 24 children”.

He added that in 2013 alone eight children working in homes died, likely from overwork or abuse.

Both industry experts and employees are waiting anxiously for the sweeping changes that will relegate such horror stories to a thing of the past. But until the necessary laws are passed and ratified, Pakistan’s domestic workers will continue to toil for long hours, and low pay.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Millions of Indian women are confined to their homes performing domestic duties for which they receive no compensation. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Neeta Lal
NEW DELHI, Jul 17 2014 (IPS)

According to census data released this month, a whopping 160 million women in India, 88 percent of who are of working age (15 to 59 years), are confined to their homes performing ‘household duties’ rather than gainfully employed in the formal job sector.

Dubbed India’s ‘great invisible workforce’, this demographic is primarily involved in rearing families within the four walls of their homes.

This asymmetry in the workforce, experts say, reflects illiberal economic policies as well as complex social dynamics, which scupper the chances of women in the world’s so-called ‘largest democracy’ to realise their full income-generating potential.

The odds are heavily stacked against women in this vast country of 1.2 billion. Though more women are going out to work, India primarily remains a nation of stay-at-home wives who play a pivotal role in keeping families together in a country with virtually no government-aided social security.

Small wonder, then, that India ranks an abysmal 101^st in a 136-nation survey titled ‘The Global Gender Gap Report’, released by the World Economic Forum in 2013, which tracks international progress in bridging the gender gap worldwide.

“Policy makers should encourage women’s participation in powering the growth of Asia’s third largest economy, which can have a multiplier effect in eradicating poverty and illiteracy.” -- Aditi Parikh, a Mumbai-based demographer and sociologist
The index measures the “relative gaps between women and men” across countries in four key areas – health, education, economics and politics. With so many million women out of the workforce, India’s overall ranking reflects lopsided government policies that are failing to harness the full potential of a key demographic.

“The stay-at-home woman syndrome is a shocking loss to the country as well as to the women themselves,” says Aditi Parikh, a Mumbai-based demographer and sociologist.

“Policy makers should encourage women’s participation in powering the growth of Asia’s third largest economy, which can have a multiplier effect in eradicating poverty and illiteracy.”

Even though women achievers have earned admiration and respect in Indian society, gender-stereotyping results in most women facing a clash between work and family life, especially when they have to prioritise one over the other.

Despite a boom in the education sector, Indian women also remain less educated than men even though they make up nearly half the population.

The literacy rate for Indian women hovers at around 65 percent as per the 2011 census, compared to over 82 percent literacy among men.

This is an overwhelming reason for Indian women’s unemployment, say analysts.

Most Indian women comprise part of the country’s sprawling ‘informal’ sector‘, defined by the absence of decent working conditions as specified by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), lax labour laws and insufficient or insecure wages.

According to a 2011 ILO report, 83.8 percent of South Asian women are engaged in so-called ‘vulnerable employment’ that can in most cases be defined as casual labour or sporadic employment such as the manufacturing of garments and other handmade items produced within the worker’s own home.

Indian women workers represent a considerable share of this segment, which has expanded substantially over the last 20 years, researchers say.

While the percentage of women employed in the informal economy remains high, the number of Indian women engaged in formal, secure and recognised labour is still minimal. Only 14-15 percent of workers in the formal sector are women, a number that has remained stagnant for several years.

India also lags far behind the world’s average when it comes to female representation in management, with women occupying a miserable two to three percent of administrative and managerial positions nationwide.

According to Dr. Manasi Mishra, head of research at the Centre for Social Research (CSR), a New Delhi-based think tank, “Indian women usually tend to drop out at mid-career-level positions as they prioritise personal commitments and find it difficult to balance organisational demands, career aspirations and family commitments.”

Also, despite valiant efforts to build gender diversity in the workplace, corporate India still has less than five percent of women at top management and board levels. Only 50 percent of the women who graduate from business schools enter the workforce, says a CSR survey entitled ‘Women Managers In India – Challenges & Opportunities’.

The persistence of an invisible glass ceiling in the workplace and the prevalence of stereotyped gender roles also contribute to lower representation of women in higher-level positions, Mishra says.

“Society and organisations should work in synergy to prevent [women from dropping out] on the journey from education to employment,” she stressed.

Unfortunately, the problem is not specific to India. According to Ernst & Young’s 2013 Worldwide Index of Women as Public Sector Leaders, women make up about 48 percent of the overall public sector workforce, but represent less than 20 percent of public sector leadership across the G20 countries the consulting firm studied.

Diversity, according to the index, is crucial to delivering more effective governance and increased economic competitiveness.

Ernst & Young also found that the ratios of women in leadership roles vary widely. Over half of Germany’s public sector workforce is female (52 percent), but only 15 percent of women have leadership positions.

In Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, women make up 42 percent of the public sector workforce, but only three percent are leaders.

Russia, with the highest number of women represented across the public sector (71 percent), has just 13 percent female representation in leadership roles.

Here too, India languishes at the bottom of the pyramid with only 7.7 percent of its public sector leaders being female.

Experts say there is an urgent need for gender-sensitisation.

“The precondition for any effective social security policy aimed at women,” explains Amitabh Kumar, head of the media and communications division at CSR, “is the provision of economic security through ownership rights, and the securing of women’s right to resources such as land, housing, energy and technology.

“As long as the State takes no effective measures to ensure these very basic rights for women, we can’t expect even those social security policies aimed at women to have any effect.”

For the time being, it appears that India’s great invisible workforce will remain in the shadows until the government makes a determined effort to bring these women into the light.

(END)

11-year-old Hassan Abdullahi Duale works 12-hour shifts at a car-repair shop in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu. Credit:Alinoor Salad/IPS

By Muhyadin Ahmed Roble
NAIROBI/MOGADISHU, May 17 2014 (IPS)

Twelve-year-old Halima Mohamed Ali wakes up every morning at five am, but unlike her peers she does not go to school. Instead, she begins her duties as a nanny for five children, the oldest of whom is just two years younger than she is.

She starts off by making breakfast, then wakes the children and washes and dresses them in time for school or madrassa, institutions of religious instruction.

War and famine in Somalia have forced Halima, and thousands of others like herself, to abandon the dream of education and become workers instead. UNICEF statistics from 2011, the last time such data was collected, show that half of all children between the ages of five and 14 hailing from the country’s central and southern regions are employed.

In Puntland and Somaliland, which have been more stable than other parts of Somalia for the past two decades, more than a quarter of all children work for a living.

The grueling jobs for which they are hired – mostly manual and domestic labour – pay little but demand a lot.

Halima says she works from “sunrise to sunrise”, cooking, ironing, washing floors, bathing the children, and finally putting them to bed before calling it a day. “It is a very stressful job,” confessed the girl, who has never set foot in a classroom.

She’d love to shirk her duties and bury her nose in a book, but her 50-dollar monthly salary is a lifeline for her family of five, who have no other breadwinner.

Surrounded by her mother and young sisters on one of her rare half-days off, Ali told IPS, “If I miss even a single day of work, my family will go to bed hungry.”

It is a tremendous burden for a child, but compared to the hardships the Ali family has endured, sending young Halima off to work is not the end of the world.

Originally hailing from the Dinsor district in Somalia’s southern Bay region, located about 266 km from the capital Mogadishu, the family fled the deadly famine in 2011, narrowly missing becoming statistics along with the nearly quarter of a million pastoralists who starved to death as a fierce drought consumed the countryside and resulted in hundreds of thousands of livestock deaths.

When they finally reached Mogadishu, the family took shelter in a makeshift camp called Badbaado, which means ‘salvation’ in Somali, along with 50,000 others refugees.

At first, the camp’s occupants received food rations, shelter and medical assistance, Ali said, but when the United Nations declared an end to the famine in February 2012, the flow of aid slowed to a trickle. Few of the displaced have been able to find work – lacking formal education and possessing no skills beyond the ability to farm or rear livestock, they have turned to the only option open to them: sending the children out to make a living however they can.

Though Halima is exhausted at the end of her 17-hour workday, she is glad of the chance to provide for her family.

Her story echoes those of countless others in the East African nation, according to Mohamed Abdi, programme manager of Somali Peace Line, an organisation that promotes and protects the rights of children.

“Hundreds of girls are brought to Mogadishu from rural areas where there is [extreme] poverty and famine conditions … to work as domestic servants in middle-class homes. They work long hours for food, lodging and low wages, which they send back to their families,” Abdi told IPS over the phone from the capital.

“Lucky ones” like Ali get paid on a regular basis, Abdi said; many others have their meagre salaries withheld for months, are cut off from their families, abused and treated like slaves.

He strongly believes that the on-going violence across Somalia, caused by the outbreak of civil war in 1991, will ensure a steady stream of child labourers, as desperate families lose jobs, and hope.

“When we try to convince parents not to send their children to work, they ask us for alternative sources of income, which we cannot provide,” he admitted.

Citing a human development report released in 2012 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Abdi said more than 70 percent of the population of 10.2 million are classified as “low-income”, with 73 percent of all Somalis living on less than two dollars a day.

The unemployment rate is one of the highest in the world, with 54 percent of all Somalis between the ages of 15 and 64 out of work.

Little Hands, Low Wages

In addition to being vulnerable to informal labour conditions such as long hours, children like 11-year-old Hassan Abdullahi Duale also receive lower wages than their adult counterparts, even when they perform all the same functions.

When his father was killed in a suicide bomb blast in Mogadishu two years ago, Duale – the only boy in the family – left school and took a job in a car-repair centre where he works 12-hour days to support his mother and two young sisters.

Dressed in his ‘uniform’ of an oil-soaked Arsenal T-shirt and matching shorts, Duale tells IPS that his uncle got him this job so his family would be able to eat. Though he is tempted to quit and go back to school, he feels responsible for his family.

With the idea of formal education a distant memory, his only hope is to make a career as a mechanic. For now, however, he is paid far less than his co-workers, and is sometimes even forced to do their jobs without earning a single extra coin for his efforts.

“On a good day, when there are lots of cars to fix, I earn 50 Somali shillings (about 2.5 dollars) a day. On bad days, I am just given my lunch and sent home with nothing,” said Duale, sweat dripping down his face.

“The adults earn about 150 shillings (roughly 7.5 dollars) each day, and sometimes they take my earnings by force. There’s nothing I can do and no-one to complain to, so I just wait for the next working day,” he added.

The director-general of Somalia’s ministry of human development and public services, Aweys Sheikh Haddad, said his country’s constitution bans child labour, adding that the government recently ratified an International Labour Organization (ILO) convention forbidding the worst forms of child labour.

But challenges in law enforcement mean these commitments on paper have not amounted to much in practice. Various studies and reports have found children as young as five years old engaged in virtually every industry, from construction to agriculture.

In addition to their exploitation for military purposes – operating checkpoints, becoming suicide bombers or taking up arms, for instance – children all across southern Somalia can also be seen working on the streets, washing cars, shining shoes and selling khat, a plant that contains an amphetamine-like stimulant.

“The government believes that making education more accessible to the children can help to eliminate child labour and we are in the process of [implementing] such programmes aimed to bring more children back to school,” Haddad told IPS.

“We have launched the ‘Go-2-School’ initiative, which aims to provide one million children with free education,” he added. However, these plans have yet to bear fruit: according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), only 710,860 youth out of 1.7 million primary school-aged children are enrolled in any kind of education.

Without a drastic interruption of the vicious cycles that perpetuate child labour, the future looks bleak for Somalia’s youth.

Dwindling land access in Ethiopia is a critical issue for 80 percent of the population who make a living as small farmers. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Ed McKenna
ADDIS ABABA, Dec 21 2013 (IPS)

The return of 120,000 young undocumented migrant workers from Saudi Arabia to Ethiopia has sparked fears that the influx will worsen the country’s high youth unemployment and put pressure on access to increasingly scarce land.

As a result, a growing number of young Ethiopians are choosing to migrate to Sudan to circumvent an indefinite travel ban slapped by the Ethiopian government last month on Ethiopian workers traveling to Middle Eastern countries."I was forced to work seven days a week, 20 hours a day. I was not allowed to leave the house. It was hell." -- A 23-year-old woman who just returned from Riyadh

Esther Negash, 28, is from a family of nine that lives on a four-hectare farm dedicated to growing maize in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia. She has been out of work since leaving school 10 years ago.

Negash’s family recently decided to use their savings to fund her migration to Khartoum in search of employment.

“In the last two months, there have been many people returning from Saudi Arabia. This makes things worse for people like me who cannot find work,” she told IPS.

“The rains were short this year and we did not have a good harvest. My family is large, if we don’t get a good harvest then it is very difficult. We heard about work opportunities in Sudan and thought this was our only solution.”

A large number of Ethiopians migrate every year in search of brighter economic prospects, with the Middle East being the dominant destination.

Saudi Arabia’s crackdown on undocumented foreign workers began after a seven-month amnesty period expired on Nov. 3. Since then, 120,000 Ethiopian migrants have been repatriated to Ethiopia after being corralled in a deportation camp for two months, where conditions are reportedly abject.

Many Ethiopians have reported human rights violations at the hands of their employers as well as while under the control of security forces inside the camps.

IPS spoke to a 23-year-old woman who had just arrived in Ethiopia after working as a domestic in Riyadh for two years. Her account is similar to many other experiences narrated by returnees.

“My employer would sexually abuse me and beat me. I was forced to work seven days a week, 20 hours a day. I was not allowed to leave the house. It was hell,” she said.

“They did not pay me for one year even though I worked also for their relatives. I am so tired and so sad. [But] I am so happy to be back in Ethiopia,” she told IPS.

Despite the many terrible experiences recounted by Ethiopian returnees, poverty and limited economic prospects will continue to force Ethiopian workers to migrate to countries like Sudan and overseas, says the International Labour Organisation, which is working to make regular migration methods more attractive for Ethiopians instead of using unaccountable and illegal brokers to facilitate their migration.

“After the ban, people will try any means possible to work abroad due to a lack of employment opportunities in their home country,” George Okutho, director of the ILO Country Office for Ethiopia and Somalia, told IPS.

“These returnees travelled to Saudi Arabia looking for economic opportunities with a greener pasture mindset in the hope that they could send their family remittances to raise living standards at home. However, most of the time migrant workers are acting on misinformation about the prospects and country of destination,” he said.

A lack of education and skills make Ethiopian migrants especially vulnerable to working in dangerous and exploitative working conditions, both at home and abroad, said Okutho.

“The problem is many of Ethiopia’s migrant workers are uneducated and ill-eqipped even for the domestic work they seek outside the country,” he said. “The result is that even if they go to the Middle East or Sudan, they can earn a little more than when at home, but because they are untrained they end up working in very extreme and difficult circumstances without knowing their rights. “

The Ethiopian government’s planning and logistical capacity has been overwhelmed by the rapidly rising number of returnees. An initial expectation of 23,000 returnees jumped to 120,000 in one month.

“We are engaged with the Saudi government and we are working hard to return Ethiopians stranded in Saudi Arabia,” Dina Mufti, foreign affairs spokesperson, told IPS.

“The number of Ethiopians working illegally is much higher than we anticipated. The Ethiopian government recognises that these people will need employment and so we are trying to create opportunities to assist these people, many of them young, and rehabilitate them back into their communities,” she said.

Dwindling land access in Ethiopia is a critical issue for 80 percent of the population who make a living as small farmers. In the mountainous region of Tigray, the average land availability per household is 3.5 ha.

As life expectancy increases, the potential for subdividing farm plots reduces, leaving many of Ethiopia’s youth food insecure and unemployed.

In the last year, a large number of young people have joined regular protests staged in the country’s main cities to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with high unemployment and inflation.

The inundation of over 120,000 people has the potential to further disenfranchise youth in Ethiopia, where the majority of the population of 91 million earn less than two dollars a day.

Hewete Haile, 18, lives outside Sero Tabia, a small town where youth unemployment is spiraling. Out of 2,200 households, 560 young people between 17 and 35 are unemployed, without access to land or income.

Outside the Sudanese embassy in Addis Ababa, Haile is queuing with several hundred other young girls, mostly from remote rural villages, in hopes of obtaining a visa to allow her to look for work in Khartoum.

Hewete’s friends say a domestic in Khartoum is paid eight dollars a day compared to four dollars in Addis Ababa.

“I would not be leaving my country if there was a way for me to work and make a good income here in my country,” she told IPS.

“If Sudan does not work out then I will travel from there to the Middle East. I know what happened in Saudi Arabia. I would not be leaving Ethiopia if I could get work here, but it is getting more difficult all the time,” she said.

Paulina Nuza, Ernestina Ochoa and Petra Ermillo Martínez (left to right) discussing issues raised at the global congress of domestic workers in Montevideo. Credit: Victoria Rodríguez/IPS

By Inés Acosta
MONTEVIDEO, Oct 29 2013 (IPS)

“We have come together to join forces, to be heard, because we want to speak for ourselves,” said Ernestina Ochoa, a Peruvian domestic worker, at the close of the founding congress of the International Domestic Workers Federation in the Uruguayan capital.

Uruguay was chosen to host the Oct. 26-28 meeting because it was the first country to ratify Convention 189 of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which establishes basic labour rights that the great majority of domestics around the world do not enjoy. The congress was attended by union leaders from more than 50 countries.

But even in Uruguay or other Latin American countries with ground-breaking national laws aimed at protecting domestic workers, enforcement is a major problem. And in Asia and the Middle East, the situation is much more critical.

“For many years only non-governmental organisations spoke for us, through studies and research…but we domestic employees and our unions have done the day-to-day hard slogging,” said Ochoa, vice president of the International Domestic Workers Network (IDWN), which changed its name to Federation at the congress.

“Now we have said ‘enough’s enough’, let’s found a large federation that unites us, let’s work together to organise ourselves, defend our rights, create unions, improve the laws and help countries where there are no laws, empower domestic workers, train leaders and have a voice vis-à-vis governments and employers,” she said in an interview with IPS.

The IDWN was founded after the first global congress of domestic workers was held in 2006 in Amsterdam. The umbrella organisation, which currently has member unions in 87 countries, was established to fight for the adoption of ILO Convention No.189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers (C189), which went into effect in September.

Map of progress made by domestic workers. Credit: Courtesy of Human Rights Watch (click to enlarge)

At that time, Ochoa said, they had no idea how much they would grow. She said it had become necessary to create a federation to achieve independence, especially in negotiations with global institutions.

Progress has been made in many Latin American countries, such as Uruguay. But most countries in the world do not have legislation on domestic workers, the Peruvian trade unionist lamented.

C189 establishes “the first global standards for the more than 50 million domestic workers worldwide – the majority of whom are women and girls, and many of whom are migrants,” says the report “Claiming Rights: Domestic Workers’ Movements and Global Advances for Labour Reform”, presented at the congress in Montevideo.

“According to the ILO, almost 30 percent of the world’s domestic workers are employed in countries where they are completely excluded from national labour laws,” adds the study published jointly by the IDWN, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), and Human Rights Watch.

The report says live-in domestic workers, girls and migrants face a heightened risk of abuse. And while child labour declined in other sectors, child domestic labour actually grew by nine percent from 2008 to 2012.

Nisha Varia, senior women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, said change was slow in Asia and the Middle East.

And she told IPS that while advances have been made in Latin America, the challenge in this region is in translating the new legislation into actual improvements in the lives of domestic workers.

The basic rights established by the C189 include weekly days off, limits to hours of work, a minimum wage, overtime compensation, and social security.

So far, C189 has been ratified by Bolivia, Germany, Guyana, Italy, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Philippines, South Africa and Uruguay.

The report also notes that the Philippines, as well as Argentina, Brazil, Kenya, Spain and Venezuela, which have not yet ratified the convention, adopted labour reforms that protect domestic workers.

Graciela Espinoza, with the Uruguayan union of domestic workers, STUD, said “we still have to put our house in order,” referring to her country, despite the adoption of a law on domestic labour, the ratification of C189, and three collective bargaining agreements negotiated with employers.

“There have been many improvements,” Espinoza told IPS. “But there are still domestics who are not officially recognised as workers, and until they are, we have to continue fighting.

“The day society as a whole recognises our work as domestic employees will be the day when we can say: we have reached one goal, now we have to move on towards the next.”

The trade unionist said the most significant changes have been seen since 2006, when a law on domestic labour went into effect, and especially in 2008, when the first national collective bargaining agreement was signed. “That was when the revolution happened in Uruguay,” Espinoza said.

The proportion of domestic workers registered in Uruguay’s social security system climbed from 32 percent in 2004 to 66 percent today. And over half of the registered domestics have labour accident insurance.

Her colleague Lucía Gándara said that “even though Uruguay was the first to ratify C189, rights here are violated, including the right to organise,” which protects labour activists from being fired or abused by their employers because of their trade union activity.

“Domestic workers who form part of the STUD secretariat cannot attend meetings if they are held during their working hours, because they are fired,” Gándara said.

As Espinoza explained, “we work in isolation from each other, a situation that works against us as a union; for example we cannot carry out an occupation of a building – we can’t occupy a family’s house – as a protest measure.”

“The most we can do is explain to the employer the rights and duties of domestics, and that’s what we’re doing. In these cases, the domestics sometimes continue working, and in others they’re fired,” she said.

Despite the lingering problems faced by domestics here, Paulina Nuza, a member of Peru’s Training Centre for Domestic Workers (CCTH), told IPS that “Uruguay is a model.”

“Domestic workers in Peru do not earn decent wages and do not have the same conditions as other workers,” she said. “Although there is a gender equality plan that says that 50 percent of the one million domestic workers in the country are to be insured by 2017, not even six percent of us are currently insured.”

Bangladeshi workers at a Singapore construction site. Credit: Kalinga Seneviratne/IPS

By Roger Hamilton-Martin
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 11 2013 (IPS)

New international migration figures released by the United Nations Wednesday show that more people than ever are living abroad. Around 232 million of the global population of seven billion are considered international migrants, simply defined as persons living outside their country of birth.

The statistics collected by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs show that despite having been dampened by the international economic crisis, international migration has weathered the storm and is still on the rise – if at a slower rate than in 2008 when figures were last released.

In a statement, Wu Hongbo, U.N. under-secretary-general for economic and social affairs, stressed the positive impact of migration on development, saying “migration broadens the opportunities available to individuals and is a crucial means of broadening access to resources and reducing poverty.”

The U.N. team has been preparing estimates for the last four years, with a majority of the data being drawn from national censuses. When data is missing for a country, estimates are made by extrapolating a trend based on previous censuses. This can be difficult – for example in Lebanon, the last census was taken in 1930. In Afghanistan, the government is currently trying to collect data, but it has been decades since the last census.

The United States is still the world’s most popular destination, with around 45.8 million migrants, having gained around one million migrants per year since 1990. The second largest gain since 1990 has been Saudi Arabia which has received seven million. Europe and Asia are the continents with the largest migrant populations hosting around two-thirds of all international migrants worldwide.

In 2013, 72 million international migrants were residing in Europe, compared to 71 million in Asia. The statistics show that migration is highly concentrated in 10 countries, including the U.S., Russia, Germany and Saudi Arabia.

According to Bela Hovy, chief of the Migration Section at U.N. DESA, a strong trend has been the rise in movement from countries in the Southern Asian region to countries in Western Asia.

“What’s new is enormous construction activity in West Asia, causing movement from developing countries like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, to move to those areas,” he told IPS. “Saudi Arabia is the biggest recipient, along with Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.”

Currently, there are 2.9 million people from India living in the UAE.

This has implications for development in that remittances are becoming a big factor for people in those South Asian countries. “It’s good for migrant families and their countries. The kids staying behind are able to go to school and get healthcare,” said Hovy.

However, there have been issues with rights violations of workers in the West Asian destination countries, notably for domestic workers, often women. Human Rights Watch has expressed concern that workers are especially vulnerable in the Middle East.

“The failure to properly regulate paid domestic work facilitates egregious abuse and exploitation, and means domestic workers who encounter such abuse have few or no means for seeking redress,” the group notes.

A landmark change has been the recent drafting of the International Labour Organisation’s Domestic Workers Convention, which came into effect last week.

Hovy explained the changing face of international migration in terms of population migration from developing to developed countries.

“In 1990, most international migration was global South to global South, but since 2000 this has changed,” he said. “Now, South-North has become as common as South-South. Most international migrants originate in developing countries, but they are settling almost equally in countries of the global South as the global North.”

Nowadays, six out of 10 international migrants reside in the global North.

The population of working-age people among international migrants proved to be significantly higher than in the global population, reflecting the large movement of workers to West Asian countries. Some 74 percent of all international migrants are aged 20-64, compared to only 58 percent of the global population.

In Europe, Germany, France and the United Kingdom host the largest migrant communities. However, as a percentage of their total populations, relative to other European countries their figures were among the lowest.

Worldwide, refugees accounted for a small part of the migrant population, according to the report. The UN-DESA works closely in conjunction with The U.N. Refugee Agency to incorporate accurate figures for refugees in its migration data. Asia hosts the largest number of refugees at 10.4 million, with this number affected in recent years by conflicts and unrest in the Middle East.

A protest by domestic workers in Costa Rica for an eight-hour day. Credit: Daniel Zueras/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Sep 4 2013 (IPS)

An international convention enters into effect on Thursday that could eventually extend labour rights to as many as 100 million domestic workers across the globe, a constituency that has historically been bypassed by national laws.

The new Domestic Workers Convention, a binding agreement passed under the auspices of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in 2011, has thus far been ratified by nine countries. Those governments will now be tasked with ensuring that their national labour legislation both extends to domestic workers and ensures those workers a decent work environment."Probably the most significant holdouts right now are the countries of the Middle East." -- Jo Becker of Human Rights Watch

Such positions include maids, nannies, in-house cooks, caregivers and other labour in private homes – workers that have long been considered to be among the most exploited anywhere in the world. Proponents are not only lauding the convention’s specifics but also suggesting that the accord will do much to solidify the social and official understanding of domestic work as on par with any other employment.

“The victory of the ILO Convention was a monumental step forward in our fight for recognition that domestic work is work,” Jill Shenker, field director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), a U.S. advocacy group, told IPS.

“As the ILO Convention comes into force, we can either stay in the past, when domestic workers were seen as servants, as slaves, and their work not considered valuable or real. Or legislators can be at a leading edge of the wave of change in recognising that domestic workers are workers, and their work deserves to be respected and protected.”

Official numbers suggest there are around 53 million domestic workers around the world today. Yet the ILO reports that many experts expect this number is actually as high as 100 million people, some 83 percent of whom are women and children.

Such numbers would constitute around 3.6 percent of the total global workforce, and up to 12 percent of all workers in developing countries. Yet these workers have traditionally been excluded from national labour protections.

“The ILO flagged this issue as far back as 1965, warning that domestic workers needed stronger international standards, but there’s been inaction since then largely because these workers didn’t have a constituency raising the issue,” Jo Becker, advocacy director for Human Rights Watch’s children’s rights division, told IPS.

“Because they were part of the informal sector and seen as difficult to mobilise, domestic workers have also traditionally been excluded from the trade unions, which have a lot of sway at the ILO. So for many years no one was really paying attention to their interests.”

Becker says that situation started to change within the past two decades, when networks began to form in Latin America alongside notable national movements in Tanzania, South Africa and the Philippines.

The idea of pushing for an international convention started coming together around 2006, and the final text now appears to mostly satisfy labour rights activists. Ratifying countries will be required to ensure that domestic workers receive the same rights as other workers (including receiving clear terms and conditions of employment), to offer protections for migrants, and to prevent child labour and workplace abuse.

The convention calls for particular oversight of recruitment agencies, one of the key routes by which migrant domestic workers are find employment abroad. Countries will also be urged to institute a broad array of grievance and investigative mechanisms.

“We’ve found domestic workers making just a tenth of the prevailing minimum wage,” Becker says. “Yet the experience following the imposition of stronger legislation has been interesting. South Africa introduced a minimum wage for domestic workers in 2002, for instance, and found that it led to both more people willing to work as domestic workers and lowered poverty rates.”

Mideast holdouts

To date, just nine countries have ratified the Domestic Workers Convention (Bolivia, Germany, Italy, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Paraguay, the Philippines, South Africa and Uruguay), though several others are reportedly in the process of doing so. Importantly, those that have moved towards ratification include countries from nearly all regions, including a mix of both developing and developed economies.

Further, since the convention was adopted in 2011, dozens of countries have undertaken legislative reforms in line with the accord’s guidelines. Earlier this year, for instance, Brazil amended its Constitution, while the Philippines and Argentina adopted far-reaching laws.

“Of course, there are some key countries that we would like to see ratify this convention – Indonesia, for instance, has a large number of domestic and migrant workers,” HRW’s Becker says.

“But probably the most significant holdouts right now are the countries of the Middle East. There have been many reports of abuses against migrant domestic workers in that region, but so far no Middle Eastern country has ratified the agreement – that’s the region that’s missing so far.”

Both the United Kingdom and the United States remain notable exceptions, as well, though their representatives’ stances on the convention have differed greatly. While the U.K. showed antipathy towards the ILO negotiations and has stated that it will not ratify the accord, the United States played a key role in urging that the convention be binding.

Still, the signing of international treaties remains politically fraught in Washington. While a Labor Department spokesperson told IPS that the U.S. government “strongly supported” the convention’s adoption, it appears that the administration will not be pushing for ratification anytime soon.

“In 2012, we submitted [the convention] to the U.S. Congress and to the governors of the states and U.S. territories as required by Article 19 of the ILO Constitution, for their information and appropriate action,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

“Determining whether a convention is appropriate for ratification requires a rigorous and comprehensive review to establish full compliance at both the federal and state levels. [This convention] has not yet undergone such a review.”

Despite the legacy of a strong labour rights movement in the United States, for decades domestic workers here have been left out of some of the country’s most notable federal labour rights protections. These include regulations on wages and benefits, hazardous workplace conditions, compensation in case of injury, the right to organise and others.

“Many in the U.S. believe that the basic minimum standards laid out in ILO conventions hardly apply to the U.S. labour market because we already have strong labour rights compared to other countries,” the NDWA’s Shenker says. “But domestic workers in the U.S. are fundamentally excluded from some of the most basic labour protections offered to other workers.”

Lahandapurege Ariyawathie feels she got off lightly – if returning home with 24 nails embedded in your body is lucky.

Ariyawathie, 52, from the southern Sri Lankan district Matara, had left to work as a domestic worker in Saudi Arabia in early 2011 with hopes of building a house back home. She worked only five months, and returned home with oozing wounds after burning iron rods were inserted into her skin by her employers.

“I feel I got off lightly, worse things could have happened to me,” Ariyawathie told IPS standing in front of her new house – built by the Foreign Employment Bureau and the National Housing Authority after her return and the ensuing controversy.

She has reason to feel lucky. On Jan. 10 this year Rizana Nafeek, a 25-year-old maid jailed in Saudi Arabia for the accidental death of an infant in her care was beheaded without any notification to the family or Sri Lankan authorities.

“The same would have awaited me,” says Ariyawathie, who says she still has six metal objects in her body.

Nafeek was in prison since 2005 and on death row since 2007. She was sent to Saudi Arabia on a forged passport when she was 17. According to her family and others familiar with her case, job agents manipulated the poverty-stricken family and sent the young girl to Saudi Arabia for household work.

Rizana Nafeek

She ended up caring for a four-month-old infant, work she was untrained for. The infant choked while Nafeek was bottle-feeding her. Activists say that Nafeek received neither proper trial nor the appropriate consular and legal support.

Her family from the remote village Muttur in the north-eastern Trincomalee district is resigned to their fate. “What can we do, we have to go on, nothing more can be done,” her father Abdul Mohammed Nafeek told IPS.

Researchers say such helplessness is instilled into domestic workers and their families by recruitment agencies and scouts who travel to remote villages to locate women like Nafeek.

“That is what people have been led to believe, that there is no protection, that they are in a foreign land without any protection,” Miyuru Gunasinghe from the Law and Society Trust, a national human rights advocacy body told IPS.

Gunasinghe said some countries like the Philippines have signed bilateral agreements with Saudi Arabia to safeguard the rights of workers. “The Philippines is a great example, it suspended sending workers to Saudi Arabia for a year till it could negotiate an agreement.”

Bilateral agreements do more than guarantee minimum pay, stipulated working hours and living conditions; they include worker rights. Sri Lanka has such agreements in place with Bahrain and Jordan. The agreements also make sure that all workers are treated equally and not according to individual contracts or tribal laws.

Despite the public outcry over the beheading, the Sri Lankan government is yet to indicate that it is lobbying the Saudis for a bilateral agreement.

Following a proposal made by foreign employment minister Dilan Perera two weeks after the beheading of Nafeek, the Cabinet approved a proposal to raise the age limit for domestic workers seeking employment in Saudi Arabia to 25 years. For the rest of the Middle East it remains 23 years.

The workers also have to complete a residential training programme of 21 days and obtain a national level housing keeping certificate.

Gunasinghe said that increasing the age bracket hardly serves the purpose. “You can be 25, but if you have studied up to only level 5, don’t know English and cannot operate any appliances, we are left with the same problem.”

The researcher said that the government should stress training and sending qualified workers at a higher pay.

Ariyawathie went to the Gulf after the three-week government programme that included language training.

But she got into trouble with her employers because she could not communicate with them, nor could she operate electrical household appliances. “I was abused because I could not understand what they were telling me.”

Law and Society Trust’s Gunasinghe said that the government should consider stringent laws to govern recruitment agencies, and redraft the foreign employment bureau act to include workers’ rights. In its current form the act only deals with promoting foreign employment.

She says if the millions who work overseas are given voting rights, politicians will become more attentive to their needs.

Despite the low skills and low pay (some domestic workers are paid as little as 100 dollars per month), worker remittances are the highest foreign revenue earner for the island. This year they are likely to bring as much as five billion dollars.

There are an estimated two million Sri Lankans working abroad. At least 800,000 are female domestic workers, most in the Gulf. Saudi Arabia still remains their most favoured destination.

But there are subtle changes taking place. Since late 2011, when reports of abuse spread in the media, some workers have shown a reluctance to fly to Saudi Arabia. Agents have been paying a premium of 800 dollars for any woman who departs.

In Muttur, Nafeek’s home village, women have led a signature campaign seeking a ban on sending domestics to Saudi Arabia.

“People think Muttur remained silent. It did not, we did not get justice. We do not want Rizana’s death to be just another statistic,” said Mohammed Jihad, a social worker from the village.

“It’s really painful to work and not get paid. And I can’t report them, because I don’t have documents, or a contract,” Rossana, one of the many immigrant women working as domestic employees and caregivers in Spain, told IPS.

Rossana *, 32, came to Spain in February 2011 from the Dominican Republic, where she has three children, ages 15, eight and four, who depend on the money she sends home.

She worked in the northeastern Spanish city of Barcelona for six months caring for an elderly woman until her death, when she was laid off without indemnification. Since then, “there’s been hardly any work, and undocumented immigrants like me aren’t hired for the few jobs that there are,” she said.

A seminar on “Women, Migration and Caregiving” was held by organisations of women immigrants on Thursday Nov. 29 in the eastern city of Valencia, to discuss situations like Rossana’s.

Many immigrant women in Spain care for the elderly, children, or other dependents. They also do the cleaning, ironing and cooking. In Spain, 65 percent of all household workers are immigrants, mainly from Latin America. In most cases, their remittances help support their families back home.

According to the latest National Employment Institute survey, 592,000 of the 667,000 domestics in Spain are women, and just under 400,000 are enrolled in the social security system.

“There are situations of abuse that verge on slavery,” Spanish economist Carmen Castro, an expert in public policies and gender equality who was a speaker at the seminar, told IPS.

“When you get a combination of woman, domestic worker and immigrant, the situation of vulnerability and precariousness is aggravated,” said Castro, whose presentation was called “What to do with caregiving: alternatives for another model of society”.

Rossana had been deceived before. Once she found a job over the internet, caring for an elderly man in a hospital every night for 10 days. But when her stint was up, they didn’t pay her. “There are many here who have gone through the same thing,” she said.

Some have had positive experiences, such as Nancy, a young Venezuelan woman who cared for a child for over a year and was granted legal residency status thanks to the efforts of Remedios, the boy’s mother.

Remedios, Nancy’s employer, told IPS how happy she was with her work as a nanny.

In 2011, some 50 Colombian immigrants and former immigrants created the Spanish-Colombian cooperative Coomigrar, to fight for greater recognition of the work of domestics and defend their rights.

For now, the organisation is working with women in the Colombian city of Pereira and the Spanish cities of Valencia and nearby Alicante. It was one of the groups that organised the seminar.

Coomigrar aims “to gain recognition for the work that women do, and improve their working conditions,” said Luisa Vidal, coordinator in Spain of the Colombian women’s group Sisma-Mujer, which is carrying out a project supported by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID).

Since July 2011, Coomigrar has been providing professional services in Colombia in caregiving for children, the elderly and other dependents, and for domestic work.

But in Spain, the focus of the group for the time being is awareness-raising on the rights of domestics, and making their role as agents of development more visible, while providing training for the group’s members.

“No society is sustainable without the work of caregivers,” political refugee Leonora Castaño, coordinator of Coomigrar, told IPS.

Castaño said that compared to other groups of workers, domestics in Spain are lagging in terms of respect for their labour rights, despite a new law that improved their situation.

The law, which went into effect at the start of 2012, is aimed at moving domestic workers out of the informal economy. Their working hours are now set at a maximum of 40 per week, and employers are legally bound to give them a written contract of employment, enrol them in social security, and make the corresponding payments.

But Vidal told IPS that “Many employers are still not hiring their domestic workers under contracts,” as required by the new law.

The legislation, seen as falling short by the participants in the seminar, failed to create more stringent rules for firing domestics, and did not extend the right to unemployment benefits to them.

But besides the requirement of a formal contract, the law establishes a minimum wage and increases severance pay from seven to 12 days of salary per year worked. It also requires that employers give 20 days notice of termination of employment. And it guarantees free public healthcare coverage as well as a retirement pension.

Spain is one of the European countries hit hardest by the global financial crisis. With a record high unemployment rate of 26 percent – the highest in Europe – amounting to six million people unemployed, social inequalities have deepened.

Many immigrant women who worked as caregivers and domestics in Spanish households have found themselves unemployed, and are returning to their home countries. “There are times when I say I want to go, but then I think I’ll just keep struggling,” Rossana said.

Coomigrar, which is becoming a source of assistance in the crisis, recently helped two Colombian women who returned to their hometowns to find jobs, Vidal said.

“The work done by those who care for people who others are unable to care for must be respected and valued,” psychologist Luz María Arias, a member of the Colombian cooperative who has lived in Spain for 12 years with her family, told IPS.

During the seminar, Arias said it was a positive thing that the term for domestics has gone from “servants to household workers.” She also said that there is greater awareness now, although “there are still people who take advantage.”

The new law refers to “household workers” and “family home services”.

But for Rossana and many others, only the terminology has changed – the conditions they face remain the same.

* Rossana and other sources who spoke to IPS asked to remain anonymous.

Tomson Chikowero was ashamed of his job. He did not want anyone finding out what he did to earn a living, so he used to wake up early every morning and leave his home in Hatfield, a residential suburb in Zimbabwe’s capital city Harare, under the cover of darkness.

And he would return only after sunset when no one could see him carrying the bags of plastic bottles that he collected from people’s trash that day.

Tomson Chikowero carrying the bags of plastic bottles that he collected from people’s trash for recycling. People like him have become Zimbabwe’s unlikely climate change ambassadors. Credit: Stanley Kwenda/IPS

For the middle-class Chikowero, who was formerly employed as a builder but lost his job in 2010, collecting plastic and cardboard boxes from people’s trash to resell was embarrassing at first. But now he has become one of a handful of unlikely climate change ambassadors here.

Climate change has already had an impact on the country, with the Meteorological Service Department confirming that rainfall here has declined, while temperatures have risen in the past few years. It will, according to a study released on Mar. 21 titled Strengthening national capacity for climate change programme in Zimbabwe, place the country’s food security and economic growth at risk.

However, trash has a role to play in climate change mitigation in this southern African nation. A 2010 publication by the United Nations Environment Programme titled Waste and Climate Change said: “after waste prevention, recycling has been shown to result in the highest climate benefit compared to other waste management approaches. This appears to be the case … also in developing countries.”

Barnabas Mawire, the country director for Environment Africa, an environmental NGO, agreed that recycling is important for Zimbabwe.

“Recycling helps climate change (mitigation) a great deal…If industries recycle plastic bottles and scrap materials they will not use the same amount of energy they would use if they were making plastic or metal from scratch. If they recycle, they would use less raw materials and energy and that has been proven to reduce the carbon footprint,” he told IPS.

The United States’ Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) factsheet on recycling stated that “recycling plastics uses only roughly 10 percent of the energy it takes to make a pound of plastic from virgin materials.”

While there are no estimates on how much Zimbabwe would save in greenhouse gas emissions, recycling in the United Kingdom currently saves more than 18 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, the annual emissions of 177,879 passenger vehicles.

But many Zimbabweans are not aware of climate change or mitigation efforts. This southern African country has no climate change policy, though it is in the process of formulating one with the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

So when Chikowero first started collecting trash he, along with the hundreds of others who sort through people’s trash to collect plastic and cardboard boxes for resale, merely did it to earn a living in a country with an unemployment rate of 70 percent. A kilogramme of plastic can be sold for between seven and 10 dollars.

While there are no official figures on how many people earn a living from this, the sight of people collecting trash from Harare’s suburbs is a common one. Plastic buyers at the Mbare Musika market in Harare told IPS that they deal with over 200 garbage collectors every day.

The market is the biggest in the city, and has an organised area for buyers of recyclable material. In addition, Mukundi Plastics, a packaging and recycling company in Harare’s industrial area, said that they receive deliveries from about 100 people a day.

Recycling is important to the country. According to the Environmental Management Authority, a government body set up to protect environmental services and goods, Zimbabwe is running out of landfill sites.

In addition, the Journal of Sustainable Development in Africa 2011 said that Zimbabwean households generate solid waste amounting to 2.7 kg per day, of which only 47 percent is biodegradable. Authorities often resort to burning trash as a way of disposing it, a practice considered harmful to the environment.

Recycling is a great way to combat this.

Chikowero first learnt about climate change and how recycling can reduce carbon emissions when a buyer mentioned it to him and other trash collectors as a way of encouraging them to continue their work.

“We were just doing this for the money when we started, and I wondered why people are interested in buying plastic bottles and cardboard boxes, until we were told what happens once the plastic is bought from us,” Chikowero said. It is recycled by both local and international companies for the manufacture of soft drink bottles and cereal boxes.

He also did not realise that by encouraging domestic workers in the homes he collected trash from to separate paper from plastic, he was helping Zimbabwe with climate change mitigation.

According to the study Strengthening national capacity for climate change programme in Zimbabwe, commissioned by the government and U.N. agencies, the nation lacks the capacity to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

“I asked them to separate plastic bottles from the waste that they put in their rubbish bins. At first they were hostile to the idea, but with time when they became familiar with me and understood why I was asking them to do so, it became easy,” said Chikowero.

The more people embraced the idea, the easier his job became. And he is now able to collect larger amounts of plastic in less time, thereby earning more money.

Currently he collects plastic from 50 blocks of residential flats in Harare’s city centre and the outlying areas of Eastlea.

The caretakers of these flats are also fast becoming part of his sphere of influence. “They help me a lot and that makes my job easy,” said Chikowero as he pointed to a notice by the caretaker encouraging residents to separate their paper and plastic from the rest of their waste on a wall at the St. Tropez Flats in Eastlea.

Here, housemaids Idah Ndadziyira and Tatenda Munjoma told IPS that three other plastic collectors passed through the building on a regular basis, and that they, like Chikowero, taught them about climate change and the importance of recycling.

“I did not know what it was about. In fact I thought it could only happen in other countries and not in Zimbabwe until the plastic collectors educated me about it… I am now sharing the information with other people,” Ndadziyira told IPS.

Chikowero has now gotten every third house in the Eastlea suburb to recycle their plastic, and other households are steadily catching up.

“It’s now a way of life. That’s why this movement is growing,” said Chikowero.

Even the country’s National Climate Change Committee coordinator, Dr. Toddy Ngara, acknowledged the efforts of trash collectors like Chikowero.

“Their work is commendable, they have helped a lot in cleaning our cities and are now helping to clean the environment with their contribution to the recycling industry,” Ngara told IPS.

The government’s climate adaptation committee has promised to consult and use them as ambassadors in developing a national climate change strategy.

The director of environment at the Ministry of Environment, Irvin Kunene, said at a climate change policy meeting in Harare in early May that “all stakeholders including trash collectors will be consulted in crafting the country’s national climate change policy.”

And it has made Chikowero proud of his job.

“Now, I am no longer ashamed,” he told IPS.

* This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

As the number of domestic workers flooding into Jordan from Indonesia, Philippines and Sri Lanka reaches 140,000 annually, non-governmental organisations on the ground are working hard to protect migrant labourers’ rights and expose the terrible working conditions in the rich households that employ them.

“Occurring out of sight and individually, abuses against domestic workers are many,” Luna Sabbah, director of the renowned Adaleh centre for human rights, asserted.

The majority of these domestic workers are women. Over the last thirty years, their presence in the country has literally skyrocketed: in 1984, there were only 8,000 female migrant domestic workers in Amman; today they are more than 10 times that number.

This evolution can be partially explained by a growing disinterest among Jordanian women to engage in domestic labour and, from employers’ perspectives, the eagerness of many households to acquire a cheap workforce that can be exploited at will.

Often deprived of basic freedoms and contact with the external world, migrant women workers find themselves in an extremely vulnerable situation, especially since they do not speak the local language and are basically bound to their employers, who often force the women to sign “labour contracts” they do not understand.

Impossibility of returning home

Thanks to the relentless work of NGOs like the Adaleh centre and Tamkeen, an organisation that archives workers’ complaints and labour violations, details of these abusive working arrangements are finally coming to light.

“The employers don’t feel worried,” Tamkeen’s director Linda Al Kalash, who won the French Republic’s human rights prize back in 2011, told IPS.

“They exploit and perpetrate every kind of violation against their domestic workers: total or partial deprivation of wages, restriction of freedoms, interminable hours, no days off, insults, even physical and sexual abuses,” Al Kalash explained.

She said that the number of workers’ complaints has already reached 500 this year.

“Complaints are generally settled in a tribunal,” she told IPS, adding that the seizure of workers’ passports is a common practice that requires legal deliberation.

However, simply lodging complaints does not always yield results for the plaintiff. First, the violations need to be recognised by the ministry of employment, which often decides to ignore them.

Women are also routinely mistreated by public security forces, who disregard the legal rights of foreign domestic workers.

“There have always been so many rights for women in Jordan, but only on paper,” Sabbah noted.

Indeed, Jordan ratified international conventions against forced labour and traffic in persons in 2009, while female domestic workers were integrated into the Jordanian Labour Code back in 2008.

However, the country is yet to ratify the comprehensive International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families.

Meanwhile domestic workers see the window of opportunity for preserving their rights closing fast.

When a domestic worker escapes the house where she works, she has nowhere to go and finds herself shackled by the accumulation of fees for each day she doesn’t work, especially if her legal work permit has expired and she is living on the mercy of her employer.

Unable to pay the fees, these women often end up in detention.

“At the moment, 35 domestic workers have been in prison for over a year because they accumulated astronomical fines and no one can pay their return journey ticket,” Sabbah said with a touch of bitterness.

NGOs playing a crucial role

The Adaleh centre and Tamkeen work with all the parties involved in the crisis: ministries, public security forces, prison personnel and broker agencies, among others.

In 2010, Adaleh gathered the necessary funds to send eight detained workers back to their home countries and managed to shut down three broker agencies. The NGO also forced many employers to pay withheld wages.

That same year, Tamkeen won authorisation from the ministry of employment for migrant workers to open bank accounts and enact basic regulations on the treatment of undocumented workers.

One of the most comprehensive projects involves the reinforcement of the existing legal framework on the migrant domestic workforce. To this end, Adaleh formed a united front of legal workers to assist migrant workers in their fight for rights.

Tamkeen also bolstered itself with competent lawyers to defend the implementation of international conventions in Jordanian tribunals.

“We try to force those who should execute the laws to actually do (their duty), by publishing statements, by testifying about violations in the media, by suing perpetrators before tribunals. Sometimes all it takes is a simple phone call to ensure that the proper authorities implement the law,” Al Kalash revealed.

The campaign for domestic workers’ rights also includes creating public consciousness around the issue. Efforts are currently underway to educate the police on how to deal with real or potential victims of abuse; influence public opinion on the issue; build trust between NGOs and the prison system and work closely with broker agencies’ managers and with embassies’ personnel.

According to Al Kalash, the greatest challenge will be to change society’s “contemptuous look” towards migrants.

Jordanian women in particular have an extremely negative attitude toward female migrants. Al Kalash told IPS that domestic workers often fall victim to Jordanian women, who are likely lashing out against years of repression and male dominance by attacking the only people in society who are more vulnerable than they.

(END)