A film that caused a stir recently threw light on some uncomfortable shadows of migrant worker abuse and rights in the GCC in the ’eighties.
Aadujeevitham (The Goat Life) is a powerful cinematic distillation of a true-life story of a Malayalee worker who is enslaved in inhuman conditions as a desert goatherd. Such is the impact of the film that people are saying it will undoubtedly sweep awards worldwide.
For many of us who have been living in the GCC since the past 40 years, the circumstances of the protagonist’s desert incarceration are familiar. Many barely literate persons hocked the family jewels, mortgaged their homes and came to the Gulf on the wings of an ‘agent’s’ promise that they would get room, board and a decent job and make their money back in six months. Often the story went awry and promises were broken and lives were torn asunder.
There are so many stories of men (not so much women) simply disappearing and how community volunteers and social workers bring families together across the ocean.
I recall in 1982, my husband had to recruit an accountant for his group and offered the job to a bright young man in Mumbai. The next day, the man came to meet us with his wife who was utterly distressed. Turned out she was from Kerala and her father had worked in Saudi Arabia, coming home only once in two years for a couple of months. She was afraid her married life would also go AWOL and did not want her husband to take the job. It took a lot of gentle persuasion to make her believe that she too would join him and that they could build a life together in Bahrain.
How much things have changed since the ’eighties and ’nineties. In Bahrain at least, the change stems from the time that the Crown Prince and Prime Minister abolished the tying up of workers in a maze of sponsorship conditions and gave expats the right to choose their workplace. This led to the LMRA and Tamkeen being established and rewrote human rights expectations.
But films like Aadujeevitham are an important record of how things used to be and we must never forget the depravity that we freely inflicted on our fellow-humans. For so many people, the GCC workplace was a ticket for the family to claw their way upward – I have met domestic workers, bus drivers and waitresses who have put their children through school and college on the strength of their salary earned here; entrepreneurs who have established businesses and flourished and together these people have helped build the modern GCC states.
We need to remember that each one of us, whether driver or nurse or CEO, if expat, are all migrant workers and must carefully help to nurture the environment of safety, respect, diversity and inclusion that will bring out the best in us all. How do we do that? By calling out unfair practices when we see them, by implementing the best conditions for those working under us and with us and by pushing for government to recognise needs and direct change.
Stories like Aadujeevitham should never get an update. They should only be a marker of what things were like and how they have changed for the better.
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