I’m going to make an observation that may well brand me prejudiced in many circles – there is a clear difference between how Western employers generally perceive their domestic workers’ personal lives and the way Asian and Arab families react to the same. Mind you, this is a generalisation but it holds for most cases. Western employers usually don’t interfere in the private lives of their domestic workers but paradoxically, if there is a boyfriend or girlfriend in the scene, they encourage the couple to go on dates and the pregnancies and birth of babies of married workers are celebrated.
Asian and Arab employers, on the other hand, take an active and inquisitive interest in the family life of their domestic workers but short of making them use a chastity belt, everything is done to discourage romantic relationships . Of course, it is part of the culture in most Asian countries and certainly in the Arab world, that women have to be virtuous and this means guardians have to watch for ‘inappropriate’ relationships.
Many employers explain away their strictness by saying that the woman’s family has ‘entrusted’ her in their care and they must ensure she is not emotionally tricked. Men are not so closely monitored and there are so many cases of couples in the expat community leading a double life because they are happily married in Bahrain – and the husband is pretty happily married in his home country too!
But to deny a legally married couple access to each other – where is the logic in that? The report recently that a young Indian couple – the wife, a domestic worker and the husband, a waiter in a restaurant, were not allowed to meet has shaken many of us. Here was a couple who obviously had planned their migration to Bahrain so that they could work and make a life together. Since the woman came from a family where the parents were working in the GCC, they were not unfamiliar with the grinding loneliness that often assails migrant workers, especially in the lower echelons. But they assumed that they would have each other and manage.
Imagine their dismay when they were told by the wife’s employers that she could not meet the husband. What’s more, it is alleged that all the negative points of domestic worker conditions caught up with the wife – long working hours and little rest, no weekly holiday. The subsequent death of the wife and the alleged misinformation to the husband is still being investigated and is another story. I want to focus on how employers twist the so-called concern for the moral well-being of the woman domestic worker to deny her basic rights – the right to a weekly holiday and the right to a relationship.
Would I encourage my domestic worker to develop a relationship with a man? If she is a mature adult who can make sensible decisions and manage the consequences then it’s none of my business. Is she already married? Then it would be adultery and I would certainly not encourage it. Moreover, I would not welcome a strange man into my home even if he were her husband – they can meet outside my home.
But that does not allow me to use this faux concern as a smoke screen to curtail her worker’s rights. I cannot deny her a day off or monitor her free time and phone time under the pretext of safeguarding her against sexual predators. That is human rights abuse and hypocrisy together and it is time we call it out.