“I have only six months left and then I will go back to the Congo,” says Angelique, speaking to IRIN from across the balcony the next morning. “You see, Madame has cut off all of my hair. Every day I clean and cook. I sleep on the floor in the kitchen and I can’t take any more of this life.”

[..]

“Even the dogs are allowed to go out but we’re stuck,” says Angelique, who did not want to give her real name for fear of retribution. “We’re like slaves here.” Angelique earns just US$100 a month, three times below the minimum wage, and sends all of it home to Congo.

Due to the absence of legal protection, several countries have placed restrictions on travel to Lebanon.

[T]he absence of protection for their nationals has prompted key labour-source countries to restrict travel to Lebanon. Ethiopia officially bans its citizens from coming to work in Lebanon, while since November 2007, migrant Philippine workers are only legally permitted to travel to Lebanon if paid a minimum of $400 per month. Currently, the set rate is $200 for Philippines, $100 for Africans and $150 per month for Sri Lankan workers.

Sri Lanka is now considering banning women migrant domestic workers from going to many countries in the Middle East, including Lebanon, starting in 2009

The IRIN report can be read here.

According to today’s GDN:

MANAMA: Bahrain has stopped issuing work permits to Bangladeshi nationals. The restriction follows directives issued late last night by Interior Minister Shaikh Rashid bin Abdulla Al Khalifa.

This was revealed by Ministry entry-points, search and follow-up assistant under-secretary Colonel Yousuf Al Ghatam in a statement.

Bangladesh Embassy Charge d’Affairs Saiful Islam said the move had left him and his colleagues in shock and said officials would appeal against it, adds GEOFFREY BEW.

“For one person the government is punishing a whole nation, which is not acceptable to us,” he said.

“We will appeal to the government to reconsider this and I will contact the Interior Minister and other high-ranking officials.

“We will ask them at least to delay implementing this restriction. There are thousands of Bangladeshi people working in the cold and heat for the development of Bahrain.

“We have a good relationship with the people and respect Bahrain. The government should not take such a harsh action.”

A group of MPs called for a ban on Bangladeshi workers on Sunday following the death of Bahraini Mohammed Jassim Dossary who was killed in an attack after an argument with a Bangladeshi mechanic at a workshop in Suq Waqif, Hamad Town on Friday.

This doesn’t solve anything, and is nothing but a foolish decision justified by racism.

The Abu Dhabi Police have referred the case to the Public Prosecution for appropriate action under the residency and labour laws against the domestic servant, the legal sponsor and the man for whom the housemaid was working.

Click here for the original article.

A police official who did not want to be named told Khaleej Times the maid was apparently trying to escape from the apartment of her employer.

The maid, he added, had arrived in the country three years ago and was under the sponsorship of a friend of the Arab family for whom she was working at the time of the incident.

The alleged attempt to escape from her employer’s apartment took place early in the morning while the Arab family was asleep. She tied a rope to a balcony railing and tried to lower herself. However, she lost her balance and fell. Also, she hit the air-conditioner of a restaurant which was jutting out before she hit the ground.

The head of the Arab family when questioned by the police about the incident said, “We treated her well. We have no idea why she committed this act.”`

The police are investigating.

Click here for the original article.

Darmianti binti Jaba Saleh only realised where she was when she pulled out the pile of money she had been given.

Written across the top of the notes were the words “Bank of Iraq”.

Darmianti was having her medical check-up prior to being placed as a domestic worker in the Kurdish north of Iraq.

The only problem was that she had not been told she was going to Iraq at all.

When she left her home in Indonesia, the agent sending her had told she was headed for Kurdistan - a safe place, he told her, on the border with Iraq.

Somewhere she could find a good job and make good money, much better than the money she had made a few years ago in Jordan.

But instead, Darmianti was flown to the Middle East, put in a taxi and driven five hours down to Arbil in northern Iraq.

‘Very afraid’

When she found out where she was, she said, she felt completely deceived.

“I wanted to go home that day,” she said. “I was very afraid, especially when we heard the booming sounds outside. We’d all be crying in our rooms.”

Read more here.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Oil-rich Gulf nations, already facing labor protests, are getting new pressure from India, which wants them to pay minimum wages for unskilled workers.

The move by India — which has 5 million workers in the Gulf, making it the largest source of migrants — is the strongest push yet by workers’ home countries to win better conditions for their citizens. In the past, countries focused on maintaining the flow of billions of dollars workers send home every year, not their welfare.

Indian officials say they hope to sign bilateral agreements with Gulf nations setting minimum wages that would be spelled out in contracts enforced by both India and the host countries, whose economies depend on imported labor.

Gulf nations have so far resisted, fearing higher wages will accelerate already rising inflation. But officials are feeling the heat.

Migrant workers have been holding larger and more violent strikes. Rioting broke out last week in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates during a protest demanding an increase in wages that have declined with the falling dollar.

The vast pool of cheap labor from India, Pakistan and other parts of Asia has been key to the Gulf’s monumental boom in recent years. Such workers outnumber native citizens in much of the region.

But labor abuse is frequent. Often, recruiters have workers sign one contract in their home country, then force them to sign a new one at a far lower wage once they arrive in the Gulf.

“The workers are left high and dry by the private agents, who take a lot of money and then not a single promise they make they fulfill when they reach the destination country,” said Bernard Sami, director of the Arundohaya Migrant Initiative, a group in southern India that works with workers headed to the Gulf.

India runs the risk that companies will simply replace their Indian workers with migrants from poorer countries, which happened to the Philippines when it set minimum wages for its maids in the Gulf.

The Indians in the Gulf, like other foreign laborers, work largely in construction on massive building projects, sending home more than $20 billion every year.

In February, Indian Ambassador to Bahrain Balkrishna Shetty broke new ground when he announced a minimum wage of $265 per month required for all unskilled Indian workers in the country, who currently make from $160 to $225 a month.

Bahraini companies resisted the increase, which was scheduled to begin March 1. That helped spark more than a month of strikes by thousands of Indian workers in Bahrain.

Bahrain’s Minister of Labor Majeed al-Alawi said India had no authority to enforce such a measure in the Gulf. The most India can do, he said, is to try to bar its workers from traveling to the Gulf if they don’t get a contract with the minimum wage.

“It is in their jurisdiction to do it in their country,” said al-Alawi. “All we say is that he (Shetty) cannot apply it in Bahrain or any other Gulf state.”

India scrapped its proposed minimum wage at the beginning of March, according to Shetty. But Bahraini companies reached a deal increasing the salaries to an amount less than $265 a month with improved work conditions, said Salman al-Mahfoudh, deputy head of the General Federation of Bahrain Trade Unions.

But al-Alawi noted that since then, companies have begun to look to workers from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.

The Philippines experienced a similar shift away from its workers in the Emirates last year when it instituted a $400 a month minimum wage for maids. Virginia Calvez, the labor attache for the Philippines consulate in Dubai, said demand for Filipino maids dropped by 50 percent.

India brings much more weight to bear than countries like the Philippines and Indonesia because of its size and growing status as an economic superpower.

Surk reported from Dubai and Abbot from Cairo, Egypt. Associated Press writers Reem Khalifa in Bahrain; Scheherezade Faramarzi in Lebanon; Teresa Cerojano in the Philippines; and Zakki Hakim in Indonesia also contributed to this report.

One hot june day in 2006, I saw what slavery really meant. In a rundown mansion in a slum of Bucharest, Romania, a pimp offered to sell me a young woman he described as “a blond.” She had bleached hair, hastily applied makeup, and she apparently suffered from Down syndrome. On her right arm were at least 10 angry, fresh slashes where, I can only assume, she had attempted suicide. The pimp claimed that he made 200 euros per night renting her out to local clients. He offered to sell her outright to me in exchange for a used car.

It wasn’t the first time I had encountered a slave in bondage. It wasn’t even the first time I had been offered a slave for sale. Over five years on five continents, I had infiltrated trafficking networks and witnessed other negotiations to buy and sell human beings. Worldwide, I’d met more than 100 current and former slaves.

Many people are surprised to learn that there are still slaves. Many imagined that slavery died along with the 360,000 Union soldiers whose blood fertilized the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment. Many thought that slavery was brought to an end around the world when most countries outlawed it in the 19th century.

But, in fact, there are more slaves today than at any point in history. Although a precise census is impossible, as most masters keep their slaves hidden, baseline estimates from United Nations and other international researchers range from 12 million to 27 million slaves worldwide. The U.S. State Department estimates that from 600,000 to 800,000 people — primarily women and children — are trafficked across national borders each year, and that doesn’t count the millions of slaves who are held in bondage within their own countries.

Let me be clear: By “slaves” I mean, very simply, those who are forced to work, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence. That is the nice, neat, horrible definition I have used since I began studying the subject in 2001. It was brought home to me more vividly than ever by the tears of that young woman in Bucharest.

Read the full article here.

SHARJAH, United Arab Emirates — Protests and violent skirmishes over rising prices are hitting parts of the Middle East, a region already beset by strife but otherwise enjoying an unprecedented, oil-fueled economic boom.

On Tuesday, hundreds of workers demanding higher wages to counter soaring food costs rioted at an industrial park tucked amid this Persian Gulf emirate’s desert scrub. They burned and battered dozens of cars and buses at an American-owned contracting company, then ransacked and set ablaze parts of the company’s offices.
…
Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have all been socked with soaring inflation. Because they peg their currencies to the U.S. dollar, those currencies have followed its sharp fall.
…
The region is heavily dependent on expatriate labor, many from Southeast Asia, who send much of their earnings home. As the value of their remittances falls with the dollar, they are growing frustrated.

That anger is now increasingly turning into violence. On Tuesday, hundreds of workers for Drake & Scull, an electrical and mechanical engineering contractor owned by U.S.-based Emcor Group Inc., rioted. The government put the number of workers involved at 1,500, while a Drake spokeswoman in Dubai said the number was much lower.

Sharjah workers’ riot brought under control - Sify News, India:

The situation in the Al Sajaa district of Sharjah, where around 1,500 workers of a sewage and maintenance company went on the rampage demanding salary hikes, has been brought under control.

The workers burnt office documents, broke glass facades of the first floor of the labour accommodation building and burnt and damaged vehicles of the company on Tuesday, according to the WAM news agency.

Director General of Sharjah Police Brig. Humaid Mohammed Al Hudaidi, accompanied by the Assistant Undersecretary of the Ministry of Labour, Humaid bin Dimas, labour officials and directors of police departments and civil defence teams rushed to the riot scene.

The anti-riot team surrounded the labour accommodation while the civil defence team put out the fires that had engulfed offices and vehicles.
…
[Al Hudaidi] called on the workers not to resort to violence and subversion, leading to destabilization in the United Arab Emirates.

- Police quell subversive acts by 1500 labourers in Sharjah -Khaleej Times, United Arab Emirates:

Al Hudaidi noted that some even attempted to attack police and the labour officials at the riot site. He said that 15 days ago the workers had selected their representatives to submit their salary hike demands to the labour office. Based on those demands, the labour officials discussed the demands with the officials of the company, which is owned by a nearby emirate to Sharjah. It set up a labour accommodation site in Al Sajaa district.

“Even before the workers received reply, a group of workers incited them to go on rampage and burnt vehicles and properties of the company,” Al Hudaidi said….

- Emirati Police Break Labor Strike -The Associated Press: “Police said that at least 500 workers carried out “subversive acts” at a work camp in the emirate, or state, of Sharjah, according to the official state news agency, WAM.”

- Violent uprising - 7DAYS, United Arab Emirates - Mar 18, 2008, By Fareed Rahman A labour protest turned violent in Sharjah yesterday, with 3000 angry workers setting light to vehicles and a storeroom at their camp.

[You can read the discussion and original post here.]

From the AFP:

MANAMA (AFP) — Around 1,300 migrant workers helping to build a luxury coastal development in Bahrain have gone on strike to demand higher wages, a company official said on Sunday.

The workers are employed by the contracting firm GP Zachariades to work on the Durrat al-Bahrain development in the south of the wealthy Gulf archipelago.

“Around 1,300 workers on the Durrat al-Bahrain project have been on strike since Saturday to demand an increase in their wages,” the firm’s health and safety chief Abdul Wahed al-Umran told AFP.

The workers have been confined to their living quarters by police while labour ministry officials try to persuade them to call off the strike, Umran added.

Official figures state Bahrain has approximately 270,000 expatriate workers who are mostly from the Asian sub-continent and employed mainly in unskilled jobs.

Umran said the labourers downed tools after hearing that around 750 workers employed by Almoayyed Contracting Group last week forced the firm to boost their salaries after going on strike for two days.

The striking workers on the Durrat al-Bahrain project earn between 120 and 180 Bahraini dinars (319 and 478 US dollars) a month, Umran said.

Durrat al-Bahrain — the Arabic for “Pearl of Bahrain” — is a multi-billion-dollar residential and commercial development consisting of 15 man-made islands set out in the shape of a necklace.

Workers employed in non-vital sectors are permitted to strike in Bahrain, unlike in other oil-rich Gulf Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

International Rights groups have criticised Gulf states for their treatment of migrant workers, on whom they rely to power their booming economies.

In March 2006, 2,500 labourers rioted in the UAE at the building site of Burj Dubai, which is still under construction but has already become the world’s tallest skyscraper.

The incident prompted the New York-based Human Rights Watch to call on the UAE government to “end abusive labour practices” and describe labour conditions as “less than human”.

For the past 28 years, Mrs Bala, now in her 70s, has been helping Bahrain’s migrant labourers, most of whom come from the Indian subcontinent, in any way she can.

A practising lawyer, she has helped solve scores of labour disputes, talked dozens out of suicide, clothed and fed hundreds of workers too poor to buy adequate clothing or feed themselves, and provided much-needed kindness in a world that tends to ignore them.

Her friends refer to her as the ‘Mother Teresa of Bahrain.’

And, to the 350,000 migrant labourers responsible for Bahrain’s breakneck development Mrs Bala is seen as a surrogate mother.

‘She is like a mother to us. She has adopted us,’ said Mohammed Rashid, a 25-year-old labourer from Bangladesh.

He is wearing a thick sweater and two woolly hats given to him by Mrs Bala.

As he sets out from his labour camp for his evening job of washing cars, she cautions him to wrap up warm.

Mrs Bala does not have children, but likes to say that she has ‘adopted the whole of Bahrain.’

Throughout the kingdom’s labour camps she is a familiar figure. When she arrived in Bahrain from Hyderabad, India, in 1979, she started helping labourers with gifts of food and clothing.

‘It was the Prophet’s birthday and I wanted to do something to help people who had less than me,’ she explains.

A devout Muslim, she began distributing food supplies and basic necessities. In winter she would bring warm clothes, bedding and heaters, and in the summer she would distribute water, air-conditioning units and cold drinks.

She also started making frequent visits to sick and injured labourers in Salmaniya Medical Complex.

‘It was heart-warming and also eye-opening,’ she explains. ‘They were people who had nothing but were always so happy to have a visitor and they would have tears in their eyes because someone was kind to them.’

Read more of this wonderful and hopeful article here.