JEDDAH, 8 July 2006 — Cases of Asian maids running away and leaving their employers in desperate situations seem to be a growing phenomenon. We tend to hear many cases of maids being abused by their employers but at the same time there are multiple cases of families themselves being abused and treated inappropriately by their maids.
Recently, having only been in the Kingdom for two days an Asian maid ran away from her sponsor’s home. In another case one maid demanded her employers send her back to her home country saying working, as a maid, was not befitting her and in a third case a maid left her sponsor’s house at a critical time when the lady of the house had given birth just a few days earlier.
According to Al-Watan newspaper, many Saudis complain that the Ministry of Labor is doing very little to protect their rights as more and more maids run away. Employers say that they end up losing considerable amounts of money when the housemaids flee and are never compensated. It seems that as soon as the workload increases and maids are asked to rub some extra elbow grease into their work then the women bail out and abort ship.
In his search for a suitable trustworthy, polite and hardworking maid, Rashed Abdul Rahman went abroad with his family. He thought he could find a maid and also have a short break away from home. While on holiday they met a potential housemaid who they employed for a month to see how she worked. Rashed and his family found the woman well behaved, hard working and displaying good manners but as soon as the family brought the woman to Riyadh she vanished into thin air.
Rashed was left heartbroken and upset. “She tricked us, she had it all planned,” he said.
A short time later the family received a call from the police saying that the maid had been caught in Jeddah working as a housemaid in an illegal network involving other runaway Asian housemaids. It turned out that the ringleader was a man for whom the maid had worked in a brief stint a while ago.
In a similar case, Muna Sulaiman, a working woman and mother of a three-year-old, complained of her housemaid who ran away a week after her brother’s maid disappeared leaving her in a desperate situation of having to juggle household chores with work and children.
One Saudi mother, called Um Abdullah, said one day she found her four-month-old daughter’s head swollen and noticed the baby was having problems breathing.
Um Abdullah and her husband became worried. They took the baby to hospital to be told by a doctor that the girl had been hit in the head. Um Abdullah’s husband was furious and rushed home to reprimand the maid only to find that she was missing.
Many maids enter the Kingdom legally and then run away to work in lucrative illegal networks to be paid up to SR1,200 a month.
Fawzieh Al-Bakr, a lecturer at King Saud University in Riyadh, said the phenomenon of housemaids running away is dangerous to the community, government and security resources. Fawzieh believes there is a sinister network behind the phenomenon of maids running away. She says that three years ago she herself was put in a difficult situation when her maid ran away.
The Ministry of Social Affairs and police deal with the responsibility of runaway maids at the Center for Maids Affairs. The center employs receptionists to follow up complaints and a number of female workers supervise detained maids and ensure the women are given food and shelter.
Most runaway maids are deported after all fines and payments that maids are responsible for are paid in full. However, many employers complain that they are never compensated for the financial losses they incur in bringing maids into the Kingdom.
According to the ministry most maids that the center deals with are women who have fled within their first three months in the Kingdom. Many of the maids complain that the living standards are poor in their sponsors’ home; some claim they have been mistreated and others say they are not paid regularly.
With maids running away and many Saudis having to face the brunt of financial losses it is perhaps time the government did something to maintain the rights of Saudi employers who are abused by their dishonest maids.
