Today there was a letter to the editor in the Jordan Times expressing indignation over the treatment of domestic workers in Jordan. I am sad to say, I have ceased to be appalled. Ho hum, dishonor killings of daughters of Jordan continue, why would the daughters of another race be treated any better? The lack of shock meant I even skipped reading this article, which I will now post belatedly.
It is time for Jordan to stop denying cultural racist attitudes for what they are. Even in ranking one another’s importance by skin color.
The continued abuse of domestic workers in Jordan despite recent legislation to protect and promote their rights suggests that the problem is more cultural than legal.
The government amended the Labour Law to extend protection to domestic workers under the legislation and adopted rules to regulate their employment conditions.
Still, the problem persists with no end in sight due, so it seems, to the cultural perception of domestic helpers as some kind of inferior human beings not entitled to all the basic rights that belong to all mankind.
Calling domestic servants “khadamat” has a certain demeaning tone that demotes their status as human beings.
People who recruit foreign girls and women to employ them as assistants to carry out domestic work at their homes must be made to realise that these fine people are entitled to all the human rights that they themselves enjoy.
Those who abuse domestic workers must be made to comprehend that domestic workers are first and foremost human beings who left their homes and families and came from far away nations in order to help many families in the country with their household chores, including rearing their infants and children.
Unless employers who violate the rights of their domestic helpers are held accountable in a court of law and punished, the crisis is destined to continue unabated.
“Ho hum, dishonor killings of daughters of Jordan continue, why would the daughters of another race be treated any better?” As a Jordanian I would scream Ouch!
The “It is not what you know; it is what you can prove” American way of thinking made them have statistics for everything. The U.S. has numbers for high school dropout, unemployment rate, graduate international students, etc. They need these numbers to improve themselves. Unfortunately, in Jordan we treat our problems by looking into the other direction.
Do we have numbers of domestic workers in Jordan and what is the percentage of them who are treated badly? We need to know because if it reached a certain threshold (I don’t know what number it could be) then we need to act at once.
Sadly, it is ho-hum isn’t it? Jaraad, there are certainly not any statistics and I think you would have widespread challenges even defining what constitutes abuse. Are the employers who control to volume of food their helper can eat abusing them? Does it depend on the amount? How much is enough? Are the ones who are verbally abusive in the category? If so, what constitutes abuse? The arena is rife with subjective judgements that are so culturally ingrained that I’m not even sure where the response would begin… Sigh indeed. We get told often that we treat our helper like she’s a princess. In fact, we treat like (gasp, wait for it) a professional who is providing services in our home. Among those services are chef, babysitter, mother’s helper, and housekeeper. Yet, even so it seems that the expectation is that we should treat her roughly and then she’ll be good to us. How that works exactly, I’m truly not sure. Well, I am sure. It doesn’t work…
Darn it, just lost a long comment. Steam.
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