The UN Refugee Agency has published several reports condemning Oman for failing to address rampant employer abuse and exploitation, as well as for subjecting migrants to poor living and working conditions. A list of the agency’s reports can be found here.

Excerpt:

I am a proud Omani, but the general attitude among locals here towards South Asians & Southeast Asians makes me sick. I’m using housemaids as an example only. The same applies to construction workers who have built this country block by block (literally) and other low-skilled laborers. Whenever I try to discuss this with colleagues or friends, they claim that the abuse of migrant laborers is worse in other GCC countries and that laborers are better off in Oman. As if that justifies ill-treating another human being!

The aim of this column isn’t to criticize government policies, per se, but rather to address the issue from a human perspective. Nearly sixty years ago my father’s family lived in a cave in the mountains of Dhofar. My grandmother was out with the animals from sunrise to sunset. Like most Dhofaris living in the mountains at the time, every day was a struggle to find food and water. Today, almost every single Omani household has one or two maids whom they treat with very little respect. What went wrong along the way and when did we stop being humble?

Something I find quite interesting is that Oman was one of the very last nations on earth to abolish slavery in 1970. It’s incredible to think that people who actually owned slaves are still alive today. I mention this because perhaps in some way this is linked to how many Omanis view and treat their domestic help, and why they feel the need to have them in the first place. Naturally, slavery is a taboo subject that no one discusses in public here.

I know it’s not fair to generalize because there are plenty of really great employers who treat their labourers as humans. By employing help Omani families are indirectly supporting immediate and extended family members in their employees’ respective countries. However, that does not by any means justify low wages, forced labour, threats, blackmail and confiscation of passports..

Read the full piece here.

Migrante-Middle East regional coordinator John Leonard Monterona said some of the distressed OFWs discretely managed to call him yesterday as they plead for their repatriation.

“I am expecting a call from the distressed OFWs after some of their kin in the Philippines called me last week also seeking assistance for their OFWs’ repatriation,” Monterona confirmed.

Monterona said most of the distressed OFWs were run away from their employers due to alleged abuses and labor malpractices by their employers.

“Most of them have been in FWRC for 2 to 3 months, while others for over 6 months,” Monterona calling the PH embassy to fast track the repatriation of the distressed OFWs.

Among the 30 distressed OFWs is OFW ‘Ruby’ (not her real name), who is only 19 years old, from Maguindanao.

OFW Ruby was deployed by a local agency in Manila on July 10, 2011 as a household service worker, but she only works for 10 days in her employer in UAE.

Monterona found out that the counterpart Abu Dhabi-based agency of the Manila-based recruitment agency transferred OFW Ruby to Al Ain to work for another employer.

“She was brought to Oman by her new employer, where she also ran away over alleged abuses and maltreatment,” Monterona added.

Monterona said: “Clearly, OFW Ruby was a victim of human smuggling. She is underage and should have not been deployed in the first place.”

Illegal recruitment, human smuggling still rampant

On Sunday, Monterona said his group continuously receiving, on a daily basis, an average of ten (10) cases of OFWs as victim of illegal recruitment and human smuggling.

“Our group monitoring of illegal recruitment cases in the Middle East revealed that an average of 10 OFWs were victim of illegal recruitment asking for assistance,” Monterona revealed.

Monterona citing POEA 2010 statistics, it handled 1,648 cases of illegal recruitment but it only acted and resolved 283, translated to 17.2% disposition rate; 1,365 cases were pending at end year of 2010.

“On 2004, only 12 persons were arrested and 6 recruitment agencies were closed, out of the 1,648 case of illegal recruitment handdled by the POEA,” Monterona noted.

Illegal recruitment cases disposition recorded by the POEA which was its highest rate recorded on 2004 with 44.5% or 650 cases have been acted out of 1,462 illegal recruitment cases.

“The low incidence of illegal recruitment and trafficking cases officially recorded by the government is due to the govt. agencies and labor offices abroad reluctance to pursue and provide support to OFWs to file cases against illegal recruiters,” Monterona added.

He observed that instead of providing support to the victims of illegal recruitment, labor officials are often cited by the victims discouraging them to file cases either in host country labor court or in the POEA or in the National Labor Relations Commission (NLRC).

Monterona urges the Inter-Agency Committee against Trafficking (IACAT) headed by Vice President Jejomar Binay, also presidential adviser on OFWs concerns, to work hard in filling and pursuing cases against illegal recruiters and human traffickers.

Meanwhile, Monterona lauded the Supreme Court in upholding the Nov.29, 2005 life sentence verdict of the Zamboanga City Regional Trial on two human traffickers who had sent four women, including a minor, to work as prostitutes in Malaysia.

“We would like to see more illegal recruiters and human smugglers prosecuted and send behind bars, while we call on our fellow OFWs and would-be OFWs to be vigilant and report any illegal recruitment and human smuggling activities to the concerned authorities,” Monterona ended. # # #

Written by:

John Leonard Monterona

Migrante-Middle East regional coordinator

The designation of countries as safe follows an amendment of the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act which specifies that the Filipino Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) must certify that countries to which Filipino workers are deployed protect migrant workers’ rights. The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) then needs to approve this certification. The law specifies that the Philippine government will only allow deployment if the host country meets at least one of these demands: it “has existing labor and social laws protecting the rights of workers; is a signatory to and/or a ratifier of multilateral conventions, declarations or resolutions relating to the protection of workers; and has concluded a bilateral agreement or arrangement with the government on the protection of the rights of OFWs.”

As the language of the law indicates, none of the conditions include enforcement of protective laws or treaties, which is a major problem in the region. In none of the countries in the region are sponsors allowed to beat their workers, drive them to suicide, under-pay them, not pay them at all or confiscate their passports, and yet such practices are all too common due to lack of enforcement. Therefore, we must look at the facts of the ground and not treaties, laws or bilateral agreements in order to determine whether countries can be regarded as “safe”.

Such a bottom-up approach easily reveals that neither Israel nor Oman are safe for migrants. Oman often does not enforce the regulations on minimum wage and hours of work for migrants (while doing so for its citizens) and domestic workers continue to be excluded from the protection of Oman’s labor laws. Most unskilled migrants have their passports confiscated by their employers and their movement restricted while some employers threaten, beat and sexually harass their workers or prevent them from leaving their job.

In Israel, the labor laws apply to all migrants, however, enforcement is also lacking. The Israeli government does nothing to ensure that workers who come to Israel are not indebted to recruitment agents. This debt, which takes at least one year of labor to repay, prevents migrants from complaining about abuse, fearing they will lose their jobs, won’t be able to find a new employer (which is usually the case, since recruitment agencies have no interest in finding the worker a new employer when they can bring a new worker who will pay the recruitment fees) and lose their job. Most migrant laborers in the agricultural sector are not paid the legal minimum wage and many employers confiscate their workers’ passports. Several employers who were found to be in violation of Israel’s labor laws including serious violations of work safety did not lose their license to employ workers. Inspections of work places are rare and recently, the Israeli police decided to close the branch of its police that was designed to monitor crimes by migrants but also combat human trafficking and prevent exploitation by unscrupulous recruitment agencies.

The most troubling part about this qualification it how little it will matter. If the Philippine government imposed a ban on all countries in the region except Oman and Israel, it would have at least done something to protect its workers from working in countries like Lebanon and Kuwait where suicides or migrants are so common it’s not even news. However, the POEA has already announced that it will continue deploying Filipino workers to countries that the government itself determined were not safe for migrants. The POEA said “conditions in other countries will be continuously reviewed and evaluated and deployment will only be halted if a ban is put in place.”

Migrant-Rights.org member Elizabeth contributed to this report from Israel.

In a very enlightening debate I had with a couple of managers a while ago, I was stunned to see how smooth it was for them to openly defend paying an Indian 10% of what they pay to a Jordanian, knowing that both will pretty much accomplish the same amount of work, simply because the Indian was… well, a bloody Indian!

The Omani girl in the office, who I am still not sure whether she has 20 exact black Abayahas or she never changes her outfit, cracks the hell out of me every time she tries to start a “global” conversation going on about the world around us, it is one of my greatest pleasures in this place to listen to her and get blown away day after another by the way she was brought up and the ideas that were stuffed in her brain. The latest of that was a few days ago; she was passing by an Indian assistant, who apparently never showers, then covered her nose with disgust, when she approached me, she mumbled that the guy smells so bad, but guess what, to her, it was not because of his body fluids, it was due to the fact that he was not a Muslim!

In the first few days after I arrived to Muscat, I was sent for a couple of check ups and some paper filling to get my residency. Now, despite that fact that bureaucracy was not as bad as I thought it would be, I had one of my first encounters with open racism in its most clear forms; as I was sitting on a long bench outside some hall waiting for one of the papers to get done, a group of Indian workers arrived to do the same, those poor guys were accompanied by their Omani employer who ordered them to sit on the bench and wait. They all obeyed at once and rushed to the bench, this is when one Omani, who was apparently an employee there, noticed that they left spaces between each other that could fit a couple more, so he started cussing and shouting at them to squeeze in together. Although I can promise that it was the first time he saw them, he called each and every one of them stupid and commanded them as if he was their master. The poor workers squeezed in as if their lives depended on it, and when they did that, I got squeezed in with them, this is when the same Omani spotted me and immediately asked me to move away from them; “I am sorry for those idiots, you can sit on the other side.” He assured me. To my understanding, the only difference between me and them was that I had a whiter skin and did not wear slippers.

Life goes on here like that, until you get to a point where you don’t know whether it’s wrong or right, you see everyone settled to it; from the Indian down the chain to the Englishman on top.

Cross posted from MideastYouth.com

The report suggests that some of these workers are committing suicide so that their families in financial distress receive the “blood money” for them in the sum of 15,000 Omani riyals ($39,000). The money is paid to the families of people who die as a result of negligence, including car accidents.

Mr. Ramakrishnan, an Indian migrant worker whose friend committed suicide, said that the embassies can do more to help migrant workers in distress if they saw it as a priority.

…it looks like safety measures are disappearing into thin air. Seen below are workers working in Ruwi without protective helmets/headgear.