Domestic workers in Kuwait who try to escape abusive
employers face criminal charges for “absconding” and are unable to change jobs
without their employer’s permission, Human Rights Watch says.
Migrant domestic workers have minimal protection against
employers who withhold salaries, force employees to work long hours with no
days off, deprive them of adequate food, or abuse them physically or sexually,
Human Rights Watch said in a report released in Kuwait City on Wednesday.
The 97-page report, “Walls at Every Turn: Exploitation of
Migrant Domestic Workers Through Kuwait’s Sponsorship System,” describes how
workers become trapped in exploitative or abusive employment then face criminal
penalties for leaving a job without the employer’s permission.
Government authorities arrest workers reported as
“absconding” and in most cases deport them from Kuwait – even if they have been
abused and seek redress.
“Employers hold all the cards in Kuwait,” said Sarah Leah
Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.
“If abused or exploited workers try to escape or complain,
the law makes it easy for employers to charge them with ‘absconding’ and get
them deported. The government has left workers to depend on employers’ good
will – or to suffer when good will is absent.”
Data compiled by Human Rights Watch shows that in 2009, domestic workers from Sri Lanka, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Ethiopia filed over 10,000 complaints about their treatment with their embassies in Kuwait.
Kuwait, which has the highest ratio of domestic workers to
citizens in the Middle East, announced on September 26, 2010, that it would
abolish the sponsorship system (kafala) in February 2011, and replace the
employer-based system with a government-administered recruitment authority.
While this would be an important reform, the government gave
no details on what legal protections would be added for migrant workers in the
country, or whether the reforms would cover domestic workers.
The country’s
more than 660,000 migrant domestic workers constitute nearly a third of the
work force in this small Gulf country of only 1.3 million citizens. But
domestic workers are excluded from the labor laws that protect other workers.
Kuwaiti lawmakers reinforced this exclusion as recently as
February 2010, when they passed a new labor law for the private sector that
failed to cover domestic work.
“It shouldn’t be against the law to run away from an abusive
employer,” said one activist who regularly counsels domestic workers in Kuwait,
and who asked to remain anonymous. “Sometimes these girls, they say, ‘Do you
know what happened to me in that house? They hit me, spat on me...how can there
be a case against me?’”
The Kuwaiti government’s reform of the current sponsorship
system, Human Rights Watch said, should include immediate steps to remove
“absconding” as a legal violation, and to permit workers to change jobs without
an employer’s consent.
The government should also cease arresting and deporting
workers for leaving jobs where employers violated their rights, and should
instead provide domestic workers with emergency shelter and expedited complaint
mechanisms.
