Distressed maid to return home
DOHA: The exploitation of domestic workers like maids begins in their home countries with manpower agencies demanding huge sums to provide jobs overseas.
Since the job-hunters mostly come from poor families, they have to struggle to collect enough funds to satiate the greed of the recruitment agents.
Once here, some domestic workers, maids in particular, find the going tough as working hours can be long and tiring with no weekly offs, reports Al Sharq.
The daily reported the case of a Filipina maid who claimed she worked from morning until evening each day with no weekly rest. She said her sponsor did not allow her to venture out of the house or even talk to the cook or gardener.
She said she cleaned the washrooms of the household which employed her every day and was also sent by the sponsor to the homes of her mother and other close relatives for the cleaning work.
Unable to cope with the situation, the maid said she pleaded to return home but the recruitment agents here who had got her the job demanded $5,000 as compensation.
Already in debt as she had spent a huge sum to get a job here, she said she was in no position to pay that kind of money.
The daily raised the issue with the manpower agency concerned and its officials said they had spent a lot of money on recruiting maids, and in this case they had paid for the maid’s travel here and also lost the fee of QR7,000 they were to get from her sponsor since she was not willing to continue in the job. “But we have eventually decided to send her back,” the agency said.
The daily spoke to a lawyer, who said an employer was not allowed by law to ask a maid to work in a household other than his.
He claimed that there were a lot of human rights violations, especially with regard to housemaids.
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