Tricked and Trapped: Human Trafficking in the Middle East, ‎pdf 4.1 MB

Withholding of wages
Employers and agents are aware that domestic workers travel abroad to earn
money for their families, and so the withholding of wages obliges them to
stay on, in the hope that in due course they will be paid. If they leave their
employers, they take the risk of never receiving their wages. A 60-year-old
Indonesian woman who was interviewed by the research team in a detention
facility in Kuwait had worked for the past six years for the same employer
but had never received a salary and had decided to escape. As a “runaway”,
she had ended up in custody and was awaiting deportation back to her home
country. She had little hope of being paid her arrears of salary.
In Jordan, the NGO Tamkeen provided free legal advice and shelter to
37 Sri Lankan domestic workers who had not received their salaries from
employers for whom they had worked for between 2 and fourteen years. 78
Tamkeen also noted that out of the 757 domestic worker cases they had taken
on, 465 were about the total or partial withholding of salary. 79 In Bahrain,
statistics collected by the Migrant Workers Protection Society showed that
between January 2011 and July 2012, 115 out of the 196 women sheltered
complained of low pay and unpaid wages. 80
These practices contravene national law in all four countries studied, where
regulations and standard contracts oblige the employer to pay a monthly
salary to the worker. 81 In the majority of the cases the salary is paid in cash,
78
Interview with an official from Tamkeen, Qatar, 15 Oct. 2012.
79
Tamkeen: Between a rock and a hard place, p. 7.
80
In 2011, 70 women complained of non-payment of salary and seven of insufficient
wages. In the first half of 2012, 30 complained of non-payment of salary and eight of
insufficient wages (interview with officials from the Migrant Workers Protection Society,
Bahrain, 25 Sep. 2009). The Migrant Workers Protection Society was established in
2005 under licence from the Ministry of Social Development. Its main objectives
are to help educate and guide expatriate workers to understand their rights and their
responsibilities; to create public awareness about the abuse and exploitation of expatriate
workers and to explain the community’s role in combating it; and to act as advocate for
the expatriate worker community with government authorities and institutions.
81
Jordan, Ministry of Labour, Regulation for Home Workers, Cooks, Gardeners
and Similar Categories, No. 90, 2009, art. 4(b); Lebanon, Ministry of Labour, Work
contract for migrant domestic workers, No. 19/1, 2009, art. 6 (“the salary shall be
disbursed in cash directly to the second party, in pursuance of a written receipt to
be signed by both parties or in pursuance of a bank transfer with a written receipt to
be signed by both parties as well”); Kuwait, Standard recruitment and employment
contract for domestic workers, 2010, art. 5(2) (“the second party [employer] shall pay
a full salary to the third party [employee] from day one at work with him, at the end of
every calendar month, given that it’s not less than 40 KWD per month under receipt
voucher signed by the third party”); UAE, Employment contract of domestic workers
and similar categories, 2007, art. 1 (1) (“The first party agreed to employ the second
party in the occupation of — with a monthly salary of — fully paid at the beginning of
each month in addition to the worker’s meal and drinks. Both parties shall sign a receipt
proving the payment. The receipt shall be made in Arabic and English and shall be kept
63