Is your Sri Lankan a Filipino? The Case of Sri Lankan Domestic Workers

In 2002, Lebanon Daily Star reporter Reem Haddad published an article named “Seeking Hemalatha,” detailing her search for a Sri Lankan worker abused and beaten by her Lebanese employer. According to Reem, Hemalatha’s “employer had described her as a problem and returned her to the agency” from which she was purchased. Upon return, the agency owner “took out a big stick and started beating my back, my arms and my legs,” shared Hemalatha. “I tried to cover my body but I couldn’t. I was crying and my head began to throb with pain,” she continued. Hemalatha’s story is far from uncommon. In 2005, 17-year-old Sri Lankan worker Sushar Rosky hung herself with bits of tied together cloth from a balcony in Sidon. She had been in Lebanon for less than a month and employed for a mere 20 days. In a 2008 report, Human Rights Watch found that there was “an average of one death a week from unnatural causes among domestic workers in Lebanon, including suicide and falls from tall buildings.”

Each year, more than 10,000 female Sri Lankans arrive in Lebanon seeking employment, a better life and an escape from the constraints of war-ridden Sri Lanka. Instead, they experience mistreatment in the form of physical and emotional abuse. Emotional abuse includes, but is not restricted to: the inability to make phone calls to family, 20-hour work days, limited fiscal compensation, verbal abuse and loss of control over passports and all forms of identification. Physical abuse includes, but is not restricted to: severe beating and burning for ‘punitive’ reasons, house confinement, and restricted access to food, water and hygiene supplies. Most women are drawn to Lebanon as an alluring foreign opportunity potentially providing higher salaries than in Sri Lanka, yet according to the Migrant Services Center, one of Sri Lanka’s largest NGO serving institutions, 40 percent of these workers return no better off than they were before they left.

The reasons for maltreatment are vast and complex, stemming from structural issues regarding classist and racial dynamics within Lebanon’s sectarian society and complicity from both the Sri Lankan and Lebanese governments and agencies in both nations. Domestic labor has become the single largest source of foreign revenue in Sri Lanka and is thus a critical source of funding in the nation’s rehabilitative infrastructure efforts. In 2013, Sri Lanka planned to ban women travelling to foreign nations, except Lebanon, for work in menial jobs due to Lebanon’s role in funding the Sri Lankan economy.

According to Sri Lankan Information Minister Keheliya Rambukwella, however, the government has decided to raise the age of women allowed to work in an Arab state to 25, following the beheading of a 17-year-old nanny in Saudi Arabia. PG Jayasinghe, director of planning, research and development at the Labor Secretariat of Sri Lanka, has stated that “if we demand better working conditions and greater salaries, the receiving countries, like Lebanon, will look to other countries for their labor.” The deep complicity of the Sri Lankan government is fundamental in perpetuating the abuse and maltreatment of Sri Lankan maids across the Arab world.

According to researcher Bjorn Zimprich, “maids are a status symbol,” indicating the drastic normalization of ‘contractual slavery’ in Lebanon – and, although this is another topic, in several other nations, including Sri Lanka itself. He states that, “While employing a cleaner in Germany tends to be embarrassing, the situation is the opposite.” He continued: “In a home’s design, a maid-room, is already an inherent part of the floor plan,” just like a maid is considered an inherent part of the floor.

Scholar Nayla Moukarbel recounts in her work, “Sri Lankan Housemaids in Lebanon: A Case of ‘Symbolic Violence’ and ‘Everyday Forms of Resistance,’” that growing up she did not understand that her maid actually had a life of her own. Nayla viewed the maid as the household’s property, a sturdy piece of furniture; a sentiment that further reflects the normalization of classist and racist power dynamics between the Lebanese population and imported labor. A hierarchy of domestic worker desirability has also formed following generations of labor trade based on Lebanon’s racialized domestic labor economy.

Noukoss, leader of the information campaign at the Christian NGO Caritas, has stated that, “salaries of the maid depend on nationality.” Sri Lankans receive the lowest wage and are considered the most naïve, as many come from rural areas and have barely completed a high school degree. Their vulnerability makes them easier to exploit and enslave. Filipinos have often completed school-level education, tend to be more assertive and thus receive the highest salary of about $200-250 per month.

Attempts to maintain Lebanon’s fragile sectarian balance in the midst of an influx of Syrian and Palestinian refugees are hindered significantly by the legal complications of Asian and African domestic labor. Sri Lankan domestic workers’ visas are tied to the contract with their employer. If they runaway, they become illegal. Furthermore, the worker’s “home” in Lebanon is her place of employment, thus contributing to deep insecurities and psychological pressure in an environment of constant harassment. Employers also retain women’s identity papers as security. The women are thus de facto at their employer’s mercy.

The subjugation of Sri Lankan women stems from the view that they are “too passive and accept the ill treatment.” Domestic workers undergo compulsory training under a Sri Lankan Foreign Bureau of Employment (SLFBE) program prior to employment in Lebanon. The SLFBE program, however, does not imbue workers with knowledge of their rights or awareness of the value their labor brings. Instead, according to Sureika, a domestic who recently left for the Middle East, “we learned in the classes that we should work hard to always please the madame… This is the best way to ensure that we will be treated and paid well.”

These training methods are rooted in Sri Lanka’s persistent patriarchal value system that neglects the fact that a majority of women, both within and outside the nation, serve as sole breadwinners for their families. A critical part of the issue is the dehumanized lens through which Lebanese view Sri Lankan maids. This dehumanization is merely perpetuated by Sri Lankan workers’ internalization of their own inferiority through programs such as the one provided by the SLFBE.

Specific events of runaways, beatings and suicides are occasionally recorded and disseminated by the Lebanese press. Minimal attention, however, is given to the long process of informal contracts and collaborations between agencies, governments and individual actors that partake in the trade of domestic workers. The inferiority of domestic workers is, in some societies, a given dynamic, thus legitimizing abuse and maltreatment. Until the complex economic and social factors underpinning domestic labor trade secure a prominent place in the public consciousness, however, we may continue to see “order above worker” from catalogues sites like Maids-Online.com that allow us to tailor our search according to nationality, age, experience and marital status.