Mary came to work in Lebanon in July. She had held a decent job in her hometown of Manila, Philippines, making $86 a month as a quality controller at a clothing factory. Earlier this year, she met an Egyptian businessman who told her she could earn $400 a month working as a maid in Lebanon. She thought it was a good opportunity to give her five children a better life.
Mary left the children with her mother. Upon landing at Rafiq Hariri International Airport, she says she was issued a tourist visa, and was met by her new employer, her ‘Madam’. The Madam told Mary her salary would be far less than expected: $200 per month. From thereon, Mary’s situation only deteriorated.
“My mother had a heart attack on July 23, and died. Now there is no one to take care of my babies,” Mary said. She tried to do the housework, but could not stop crying. She wanted to go home. Her employer was unsympathetic.
“My Madam said that if I don’t stop crying, she will throw me out the window, and burn my things,” Mary said. “Madam said she wanted me to die, and my children to die and go to hell.”
Mary said her employer beat her and used a fork to scratch deep grooves into her underarms, leaving scabs visible two weeks later. Mary was terrified and heartbroken, so she ran away. In August she found refuge at a shelter for run-away migrant domestic workers north of Beirut. Mary was waiting to speak with a lawyer to get her passport back from her employer and figure out how she was going to get home.
Although a victim of human trafficking, Mary was lucky to be in the shelter. Many of her fellow run-away maids end up in the General Security’s jails, waiting for their cases to be heard.
To be fair, this is not how most Lebanese treat their migrant domestic workers. But with few regulations, and a country already swamped with problems, incidents like Mary’s are not uncommon. Advocates for workers say the problem is that the 200,000 migrant domestic workers from Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Ethiopia and other countries have little legal recourse against abusive employers.
Invisible under the law
“The labor law does not apply to domestic workers,” said Martin McDermott, a priest who has worked with Lebanon’s migrant domestic worker population for 15 years.
The problem has come to the attention of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, who in September issued a fatwa criticizing the treatment of maids in Lebanon, and calling for better protection of the workers and legal reform.
According to McDermott, the International Labor Organization and NGOs like Caritas Migrant Center and Human Rights Watch, the worst situations migrant domestic workers find themselves in are physically or sexually abusive. Other bad cases include employers who do not give their maids food, lock them in the house or force them to sleep outside.
These kinds of abuses can lead to suicide or death in an attempt to escape, according to Nadim Houry, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. He said that in less than two years, 40 maids committed suicide and 24 more died in falls from balconies.
“Many domestic workers are literally being driven to jump from balconies to escape their forced confinement,” Houry said. “All those involved […] need to ask themselves what is driving these women to kill themselves or risk their lives trying to escape from high buildings.”
According to Houry, much of the abuse suffered by maids in Lebanon is not that dramatic. Most practices are normalized and accepted in Lebanon, even though they are prohibited by either human rights conventions that Lebanon is a party to, or by Lebanese law.
In a 2005 study of 500 migrant domestic workers in Lebanon by Dr. Ray Jureidini at the American University of Cairo, 56% of maids reported working more than 12 hours per day, 34% said they did not have a day off and 31% said they were not allowed to leave their houses. Anecdotal evidence suggests employers often withhold payment in order to insure maids will not run away.
This spring, Human Rights Watch started “Put Yourself in Her Shoes,” an advertising campaign pointing out the day-to-day abuses that maids endure, hoping to change Lebanese employers’ treatment of their maids.
Employers and employment agencies also confiscate maids’ passports to prevent them from fleeing: only 1% of live-in maids in Jureidini’s study reported possessing their own passports. Rania Hokayem, project manager at the Caritas Migrant Center, said that Lebanese confiscate their maids’ passports to protect themselves, because the law does not.
“For them, it’s a guarantee,” she said. “The employers consider that they invested a lot of money to bring a person to Lebanon to work for them, and in case she runs away from the house, this would be a loss. So they consider that keeping the passport in their hands will not give the chance for the worker to think about running away.”
Hokayem said the Lebanese labor code does not cover domestic help, leaving the employer largely responsible for the $2,000 it costs to bring a maid to Lebanon and making the maids vulnerable to abuse by the employer and the employment agency. Moreover, the laws on the books to protect workers are rarely enforced. The maids’ legal status in the country is defined by the contract they sign with the employer, which is based on the kafalah (sponsorship) system.
Kafalah ties a maid’s legal residency in Lebanon to her employer, who then controls her freedom of movement, work hours, days off and pay. The system is also inflexible: if employers do not like a maid, they are basically stuck with her, possibly leading to situations of conflict and abuse. McDermott said that many employment agencies also ‘bait and switch’, forcing maids to sign a different contract than what they agreed to in their home country.
“The employment agency will supply their own contract, often it’s in Arabic, she doesn’t know what she’s signing anyway and she doesn’t get a copy,” he said. “These girls are simple, they’re not used to dealing with sharks and legal ways. So they can be taken advantage of.”
The contracts do not specify work hours or conditions. The common wage is $125 to $200 per month. In interviews, workers routinely say they were promised more by their employment agency before they arrive in the country.
In 2005, Lebanon’s then-minister of labor, Trad Hamade formed a committee to look at ways to bring migrant domestic workers under the labor code, with the committee’s first objective to create a unified, standardized and legally binding contract for maids and employers.
The contract would have set out rules for on-time payment of wages, working conditions and work hours. The draft was finished and awaited approval from the minister. But before the Hamadeh could approve the contract, he resigned along with the rest of the Amal and Hizbullah ministers in November 2006. During Lebanon’s 18 months of political deadlock, other officials in the ministry asked the committee to submit a new draft. Hokayem said it was a big setback for the contract.
“When we finally reached the end, we had to go back to beginning, and discuss all the issues we had already discussed during the previous year,” Hokayem said.
The new minister of labor, Mohammad Fneish, declined to comment for this article. Hokayem is optimistic that he’ll take up the issue. But others are less hopeful. They point out that those who employ maids are often wealthy and politically connected: and they would stand to lose if the maids gain.
