We have a Filipino woman who works for us. She has been a citizen here for 25 years and has worked for us for 12. Her sister went to Qatar 15 years ago and has been miserable. We have just finished preparing a sponsorship for her in our country and now need to extract her.
It involves having a replacement passport printed for her in the Philippines, her brother flying to Qatar under his Canadian passport and then bussing her to a neighbouring country to fly out of.
I finished my highschool in Qatar, and a part of the program was an internship. Mine was at QFCHT, Qatar Foundation for Combating Human Trafficking.
It was just a bunch of houses in which maids who don’t have things going well with their Sponsors stay in, waiting for a ticket back home. The QFCHT would just host them and negotiate the sponsor for sending them home.
Like, a 2-floor 5-room or so house that has 10 maids living in it. Their passports are confiscated by their sponsors, who were often times irrational egoistic wretches who believe they’re superior (keep in mind that the sample at QFCHT was the set of maids with the worst sponsors, I’ve seen a lot of kind Qataris who were fair and respectable). I heard though that this sponsor system has changed a while ago, not sure how is it done now since I no longer live there, but hope it’s better.
We once, at our home, needed help cleaning so we called one of those Maid agencies for a temporary cleaning. They sent us a Filipino maid. While she was cleaning, she came across my little library that I had been growing during my ECE bachelors. She looked at the books and asked me if I am studying electronics. Started talking about her graduation project back home. She had graduated from ECE too..
I saw that with Nepali workers too. Many of them were highly educated, qualified, individuals, but I don’t know what financial situation compelled them to come to Qatar to work as waiters, maids, and other jobs that are way below their qualifications.
I tried to learn some phrases in their language to joke with them and cheer them up when I interact with them. It always felt odd being on the service-receiving side. A lot of them were resilient in keeping their smile and sanity in spite of the assholic treatment a specific class of customers. That class earned the “bakla” title.
There are a lot of factors but the ones I could think of right now are salary of engineering graduates here in Philippines are very low and culturally. Culturally in the sense that in provinces, some parents treat their kids as "investment". I paid your college tuition so when you graduate you should start paying back by buying us a house, car, phones, etc. So there's really that pressure to get a high paying job right away.
> Their passports are confiscated by their sponsors
How does this work? As an adult, if someone tries to take my passport I would refuse. If they snatched it out of my hands, I would take it back. If they somehow got the better of me and hid it or locked it up, I'd go to the police.
I could see maybe an abusive situation where going to the police isn't an option because the victim is locked in the house. In that case I'd expect that when the perpetrators are caught they'd be charged with kidnapping for that. And then some other charge (theft?) for locking up the passport.
Perhaps they have a family back home literally starving and it's a sacrifice at the time they think they're willing to take to feed their family and send money home. They're desperate and willing to let a lot of things happen you and I might not be.
They're also in another country that's highly male power oriented, probably talking to a male head of a household, potentially to someone wealthy and even powerful. Meanwhile you may be significantly smaller, may be female (this isn't meant as an insult... just that you may have less muscular mass/strength), and are in a country where someone may claim you stole your passport from their possession and they may literally cut your hands off, where the authorities may even agree with this should you go to them. Or, at the very least, they may no longer sponsor you and you may go home to your starving family with few other options. Some may argue that means the option you had was better, I think it's an argument to promote modern slavery and exploitation.
My situation and I suspect yours are not remotely the same to these folks. If someone snatched my passport, I'm a fairly good sized and a reasonably strong male to muscle myself in (I also have a concealed carry permit, so I have a weapon should I need it). I have several more explicit rights and resources at my disposal, I have a government that issued my passport that will look at it say it's clearly my passport. My stance in such a situation is significantly different, assuming it happened here in the US.
Meanwhile you have examples like Britney Griner who had similar advantages to me, arguably even more given her fame, and even she was detained and at the mercy of the Russian government where we literally had folks like Tony Blinken bartering a hostage exchange for her return. I'm not sure that would be the case if I was detained in Russia on similar charges (then again I probably wouldn't have been targeted as readily, either). The power dynamics in these situations aren't so dry cut but I assure you, these maids have very little power and rights. I recently had a layover in Qatar and even I was a bit weary of that--I tend to like to have layovers in more progressive countries where I'm less likely to deal with some abusive government.
I think you watched too many movies. In real life this even happens to people from the west working there. They need your passport to take a copy, and then it's gone. You're going to fight them then and there? Good luck with that, security and the cops won't be nice to you.
I once worked at a company where some had to go to Dubai to install one of our systems. Some of my more knowledgeable colleagues refused to go, and after hearing their stories, I would also never go.
It sounds like you're describing a movie plot set up to me. Any time I've given my passport to an official I received it back immediately. And you're saying the police are in on the scam? That's fiction as far as I'm concerned.
I guess that's my answer though. Things are just drastically different in some places and the authorities are on side to support the perpetrators rather than the victims.
18y ago I had to attend a meeting in an Italian city. The building had security and they asked us to give them our passports and that we'll get them back on our way out.
I was a bit confused, but as a junior developer I wasn't going to make a scene for that,.when apparently nobody from the group was blinking at the request (perhaps everybody was thinking the same?).
Luckily a senior manager from $bigcorp barged in and when asked to hand his password just confidently yelled "there is no fucking way I'm going to give you my passport" and walked through. We followed.
This is a society set up for this sort of thing. You are physically isolated both at the home level and the community level. There is nobody you can run to. It is a physical taking of your passport. Your desire to get it back or any words you might have in you don't change the fact that your passport is gone and you are isolated.
There is a "breaking" period for most of these workers where they are demoralized as well.
I used to live in a country with shitty police. An American I knew there reported several crimes. The officer would ask for his ID and when he opened his wallet the officer would extract his cash and send him on his way. Weirdly, he always believed it would be better next time, but this was actually the good level of service. The locals never went to the police because they knew to expect worse. The police in many countries serve only the powerful and themselves.
10's of thousands of cases (trafficking cases, not legal cases) and a handful of convictions of 'sponsors' show that the likelihood of coming out on top in such cases is very small.
It was only because of all the controversy over migrant workers rights during the prelude to FIFA World Cup in Qatar that holding your employees passports became illegal.
Before that, employers had the right to do so and it was (might still be) the norm.
Refusing to hand over your passport is like refusing to hand over your passport at immigration.
I think snatch is not the right term, but an agreement between employer and employee that former gets to keep the passport in the duration of the employment. This is illegal but the host country I think just doesn't impose this law or the employee is scared to report to authorities since they are oblivious or ignorant of the said law. Mainly they just want to get a job, get paid regardless.
i would imagine that if taking of passports is common knowledge by now, they'd just have a fake passport to give away and hide the real one. Then they can leave when they got their money from their job, or sees a better opportunity and have the ability to move.
I know maids from my mothers village in kerala India that have been imprisoned there and passports taken away. Some of them have had no contact for decades.
lots of men are imprisoned there too in similar circumstances. People think slavery is a relic of the past but We have the highest number of slaves now in history of humanity.
> People think slavery is a relic of the past but We have the highest number of slaves now in history of humanity.
Like Eva Kaili who was defending Qatar in the European Parliament. In that case it seems that a few bags of money was the culprit for her ignorance though, along with a few drinks in some kitsch club there.
Yea that might be a visible example of corruption but the way I see its exploration of weak humans by a larger wealthy set human beings.
There are men imprisoned on fishing boats in asia where public turns a blind eye because of their own selfishness. And then there is slaves digging up cobalt in africa with their bare hands( JRE episode recently ) to supply us gadgets.
I think politicians just give us a way out to absolve ourselves from the exploitation that we all are willingly involved in.
There is also significant cases before and currently in South Korea, namely illegal immigrants working at farms with nigh-slave labour conditions and factory workers in Samsung/Hyundai etc large multinationals
I like how US federal overtime laws specifically exclude agricultural workers.
I cannot imagine any reasoning to do this other than to take advantage of farm workers that are poor and probably do not know English.
So politically, the nation wanted people to have a minimum, albeit pathetic, pay to quality of life at work ratio. But even then, it was okay to explicitly screw at least one tribe of people. And entering 2023, there is still no political impetus to fix this.
Everyone gets screwed commensurate to their organized labor power. Industries of "illegal" immigrants have the least leverage, and that's reflected in institutional legal frameworks
This is the question we should be asking. As an African I know a few people, qualified teachers who migrate to UK and US to care for elderly there. I don't think the world wants to answer that question. I see headline after headline on the plight of refugees and immigrants and yet the people in leadership positions for those countries where immigrants come from are never really asked any tough persistent questions. I see the same leaders addressing the UN and often accusing the countries that accept refugees from their own country of ill treating them. Talk about hypocrisy. Anyway a root cause analysis is needed but everyone seems content to deal with the symptoms so the underlying problems causing desperation and seeking of greener pastures at all costs continue.
In Philippines the jobs are concentrated on the capital Manila, and a couple of Metropolitan cities. But the rest are in the province with scarce job opportunities. Plus residing in the capital is not easy with cost of living very high and crowded. Mainly the salaries are very low plus survivorship bias to those who made it.
She cannot get her old passport. If her "employers" know she is leaving, they will stop it.
I won't post about how we plan to get her out but I believe it is a good one and it has very littler risk to her or their brother. Perhaps when it is all done will feel ok posting more.
It is costing us a lot of money in the end, but the woman we employ is part of the family at this point and it's important to us that her sister is safe. We will employ the sister on her landing in our country and will do so for at least a year.
Not 100% sure what you are implying?
OP seems to be not from Qatar (notorious for being a modern slave labor economy) and in turn implies a good worker/emplyer relationship.
Quite a few people from poorer countries seek better conditions and employment elsewhere for understandable reasons, whats so wrong in this case?
No, I don't. I tried to point out that the beginning of that sentence is triggering something in me that the writer did not intend but that jumped out at me anyway. Whether you feel that that contributes to the discussion or not is not my problem. The same could be said for your comment, and yet, here we are. What strikes me is that just pointing something like that out would result in a barrage of comments all pointing out the same thing which I had already pointed out in the original comment: that I realized that it wasn't meant that way.
Thanks for that vote of support, I haven't ever seen such an idiotic response to an innocent remark on HN before. I'm still confused about it, it's as if people read the first 4 words and not the rest of my comment and then decided to have a pile on orgy.
There are lots of uses of "have" that are not property. "I have many friends," "I have a butcher in town who does great work," "I have 10 employees in my business."
Beyond a token effort to be reasonable in word choice it is not his responsibility to try and hedge against the unforeseeably long tail of potential misinterpretations. Your jump to conclusions response is your responsibility, not his. His language was fine.
But that's not what it says, it literally says 'we have a Filipino woman, who works for us'. The difference is subtle and that's what made it jump out at me. If it were written the way you just did that likely would not have happened. I assume this is because this isn't my first language even though I use English more than Dutch these days but oddities like that jump out at me likely much more pronounced than they would to someone who is born into the language.
If I had written something to the same effect it would likely have been 'A Filipino woman who works for us' just to avoid that sense of possession, doubly so because of the context.
Apologies, I did not cut-and-paste but wrote it out, that was not intentional, and any change in the expression can be ignored, to me it still reads just the same, I checked my original comment and there I fortunately did get it right.
i was chalking it up to the language difference as well, i was aware that english isn’t your first language. i see what you are saying but for example i have a black engineer who works for me, and he’s one of my best. and neither of us think he is a slave. nobody native speaking english would bat an eye at that sentence even formed that specific way. with the comma though, i would agree with you. it’s subtle.
I figured pointing out that I realized that the OP did not mean what I read into it would pre-empt the ridiculous barrage of follow up comments and pile-ons but that was wishful thinking on my part.
Do you feel that your responses to each subsequent comment have added value to this thread? Would editing the your parent comment have been the less selfish approach?
It involves having a replacement passport printed for her in the Philippines, her brother flying to Qatar under his Canadian passport and then bussing her to a neighbouring country to fly out of.