I was surprised and pleased to read this in the Jordan Times on Wednesday. The Philippine government has apparently said it will not approve any more work contracts for its citizens in Jordan, where a large number of Filipina women work as domestic helpers.
Domestic workers in Jordan are mainly from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines, and are often treated like doodoo. By the time I was ready to leave Jordan a while ago, I was so incredibly tired of the classism inherent in the society and in the way people treat each other. (see this post from last spring for one individual instance.) Other instances that my friends experienced were much more insidious and happened in much greater numbers to Americans of Asian descent. Jordan is incredibly classist, but this classism is tied to racism in a place where Asian women in the country largely fall into the category of either domestic workers or sex workers.
What this means for the women who sign contracts to come and work in Jordan, through agencies that make money off of them while simultaneously failing to protect them, is that they come to a place where they are made very, very vulnerable.
Harassment I was made aware of involved Asian American women who were harassed on the street, grabbed in cabs, and accused of stealing while shopping in an upscale department store. White women, while they may be mistaken for a Russian brought in by the trade in women, largely did not face harassment on this level. Two friends had their wallets stolen while at the gym, one white and one Asian American. The police asked the white girl about the chain of events, but repeatedly asked the Asian American girl what she was doing there and whether she was Filipina, even though she produced a passport for them. Another time, a salesperson came to the door of an Asian American girl and asked for her 'madame.' When she said, 'I am the madame,' he just walked away. These are instances of harassment of American students, not Filipina domestic workers.
I'm certain we don't have any idea of the extent of harassment and abuses of Asian women domestic workers (and sex workers) in Jordan. A foreign teacher in Jordan used to overhear his students in a boy's high school bragging about the sexual acts they had done with their family's domestic worker. The Jordan Times article doesn't mention the worser abuses. It says
The decision [of the Philippine government] was taken in light of allegations of mistreatment of Filipina domestic helpers by their Jordanian employers, according to the embassy's legal adviser, Imad Sharqawi.
The article then goes on to report in a rather self-serving, disappointing fashion:
According to Faori, three Labour Ministry committees formed to look into the allegations found that most "were illogical."
The complaints included ill-treatment by employers and being overworked, said Faori who believes the workers' real reasons for wanting to leave their posts were homesickness and cultural differences between Jordan and the Philippines.
Homesickness and cultural differences are a far cry from the
non-payment of wages, physical abuse, and rape reported by the BBC article on the same topic. I personally am more apt to think that serious abuses sent about 200 Filipina women to their embassy demanding to be sent home.
I also have little sympathy for the Jordanian families who
...stand to lose thousands of dollars as a result of the suspension.
In a country where unemployment is so high, why aren't the better-off families hiring domestic workers who are Jordanian? Lord knows many could use the money. My theory is that it's about power and control: girls and women from Amman would go home to their families, who would protect them against any abuses or offenses. Foreign Asian women and girls (many are actually girls) have no such entity protecting them. They live with the family, sometimes in the kitchen, and do not have any enforced time off. (There used to be a mandatory day off for domestic workers in Jordan, which was canceled after families complained that their domestics brought home or met with undesirable individuals.) The family therefore has almost complete control.
A PS: A woman doing PhD research interviewing the domestic workers in Jordan was told by a young Filipina woman that her government had offered her an injection containing two years worth of contraception before she left her country. She intelligently refused the injection.
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