RIYADH: US-based Human Rights Watch commended the recent Shoura Council bill passed on July 8 to improve legal protections for the estimated 1.5 million domestic workers as a “step forward toward the welfare of this section of the foreign workers.”
“The bill is a step forward, but Saudi Arabia needs to strengthen the protections and make sure they are enforced,” Nisha Varia, deputy director of the women’s rights division of Human Rights Watch, said in a statement issued to Arab News from New York on Thursday.
She added that comprehensive reforms in immigration policies and police response to violence against domestic workers are also necessary.
The approved bill would go from the Shoura Council to the Cabinet, which can make further changes, if necessary, before it is enacted into law.
“The Shoura Council finally ended its paralysis on these desperately needed protections,” said Varia. “Now the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah and the Cabinet need to remove the flawed provisions and make sure the final law can stand up to international scrutiny.”
Approximately 1.5 million women from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and other countries are employed as domestic workers in the Kingdom. The current labor law excludes domestic workers, denying them rights guaranteed to other workers, such as a weekly day of rest, limits to hours of work and overtime pay.
The bill, under consideration for several years, would require employers to give domestic workers at least nine hours of rest every day, suitable accommodation and breaks. However, Varia said the bill contains vague provisions that would leave workers open to abuse, including the duty to obey employers’ orders and a prohibition against leaving the place of employment without a “legitimate reason.”
A 2008 Human Rights Watch report, “As If I Am Not Human: Abuses Against Asian Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia,” documented how domestic workers often worked 18 hours a day, seven days a week, and had little power to collect owed wages in labor disputes.
Foreign missions that have domestic workers in the Kingdom regularly receive complaints of labor abuse each year. Excessive workloads and unpaid wages are among the most common complaints. In addition, Human Rights Watch research found that many domestic workers are restricted to their workplaces, sometimes locked in and forbidden to leave. Other problems in the system persist, such as contract substitutions — when promised contractual obligations are eliminated after the worker arrives on the job and in many cases has become indentured to loans made to pay the labor recruiter in her own country. Fearing reprisals and deportation, these workers are then stuck at lower pay scales than promised by recruiters and even by minimum wage laws in their own countries. The Philippines, for example, requires maids to be paid minimum wage in their host countries and will not approve them for work abroad without contracts showing acceptable wages. However, after arrival they have new contacts drawn up to lower their wages.
Many more cases of abuse probably go unreported, Human Rights Watch said, given domestic workers’ isolation in private homes, employers’ ability to have workers summarily deported, and migrants’ lack of information about their rights.
Saudi Arabia”s restrictive kafala (sponsorship) system, which ties migrant workers’ visas to their employers, means employers can deny workers the ability to change jobs or to leave the country. Human Rights Watch interviewed dozens of domestic workers who said their employers had forced them to work against their will for months or years. Other domestic workers were subjected to physical and sexual abuse. A similar sponsorship system is used in the United States under the H2 visa regime.
