Editorial»
Hard labour
APR 04 -
The 2007 Foreign Employment Act banned gender-based discrimination against women who want to work abroad. It eased restrictions that barred women from seeking foreign employment and adopted special measures to secure women’s security and rights while seeking jobs out of the country. Women’s rights activists, backed by United Nations Development Fund for Women, pushed through the legislation, but the Act’s implementation has proven tricky. When cases of widespread abuse of Nepali women in Gulf countries started to come to light, one after another, the government banned women from migrating to high-risk destinations like Lebanon. But thanks to legal loopholes and alternate (albeit illegal) routes through India, many Nepali women continue to seek work as domestic helpers in Gulf countries. An estimated 20,000 Nepali women now work in Lebanon; another 12,000 are making their living in Israel, another popular destination for Nepali women.
Recently, in a much-publicised case, a Nepali woman who had been raped while working as a domestic helper for a Lebanese family was provided US $15,000 in legal settlement from the family. But the cases which come to light are only the tip of the iceberg of the sufferings Women Migrant Workers (WMWs) endure. As most of them have no legal documents to account for their presence in host countries, they face immense hurdles in bringing the cases of abuse to light and in prosecuting the culprits.
In 2009, an alarming increase in the suicide rate among Nepali women workers in Lebanon prompted the Nepali government to stop the migration of women to the Gulf state. But the decision came more as a reaction to the mounting cry for action rather than as an outcome of a principled and well-thought out stand.
The issue of WMWs has been contentious since the passing of the 2007 Act. While the Act had plenty of backers, at least at the start, the voice of skeptics got louder as reports of physical and psychological abuses of WMWs started to trickle in. Some have called for an outright ban on WMWs from Nepal. But others, including a big chunk of women’s rights activists, maintain that such a ban impinges on women’s right to choose their own course in life. Seeking better protective measures for women migrants is the way forward, they maintain. These include improving domestic laws, bilateral agreements between the source and host countries regarding the rights and safety of workers as well as recourse to various international conventions on migrant rights.
One of the biggest reasons for the disenchantment of women who take up difficult jobs abroad is their unrealistic expectations of the benefits that accrue from their constant toil. The high rate of suicide among Nepali women in Lebanon is attributed, in no small part, to the lofty promises of unscrupulous middlemen involved in the illegal transfer of women from Nepal. If nothing else, the continued (and rather public) wrangling of the two sides to the WMW debate should makes prospective job seekers a little more circumspect about their rosy futures abroad.
Posted on: 2010-04-05 07:39
Headlines
Advertisements
