Govt Doing Little to Protect Us From Abusive Maids (curious Arab article)

[kskiska]

JEDDAH, 8 July 2006 — Cases of Asian maids running away and leaving their employers in desperate situations seem to be a growing phenomenon. We tend to hear many cases of maids being abused by their employers but at the same time there are multiple cases of families themselves being abused and treated inappropriately by their maids.

Recently, having only been in the Kingdom for two days an Asian maid ran away from her sponsor’s home. In another case one maid demanded her employers send her back to her home country saying working, as a maid, was not befitting her and in a third case a maid left her sponsor’s house at a critical time when the lady of the house had given birth just a few days earlier.

According to Al-Watan newspaper, many Saudis complain that the Ministry of Labor is doing very little to protect their rights as more and more maids run away. Employers say that they end up losing considerable amounts of money when the housemaids flee and are never compensated. It seems that as soon as the workload increases and maids are asked to rub some extra elbow grease into their work then the women bail out and abort ship.

(snip)

According to the ministry most maids that the center deals with are women who have fled within their first three months in the Kingdom. Many of the maids complain that the living standards are poor in their sponsors’ home; some claim they have been mistreated and others say they are not paid regularly.

more…
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=1§ion=0&article=85015&d=8&m=7&y=2006

[Gormy Cuss]

1. You know, the hired help can be so uppity....

:sarcasm:

What an Up is Down, Down is Up perspective.

[Another Bill C.]

2. The Onion couldn't have put it better.

I had a hard time believing this wasn't satire.

[fasttense]

3. How dare they leave. What do they think that they are free or something?

Those uppity slaves, I mean maids. We bought them fair and square. :sarcasm:

[TalkingDog]

4. I am weeping....simply weeping.

Oh, the abject despair of having to make my own bed and wipe my own arse.

Animals don't live like this!!!! Kill me now. Life is not worth living.





My favorite Future Famous Dead Artist: KarenParker

[Nay]

5. Well, gee whillikers! Those uppity slaves, escaping like that, after

all their employers have done for them! :sarcasm:

[The Icon Painter]

6. Explain Please

How does one 'abort ship' even after bailing out? Are we sure this is not a Freeper perversion of the language?

[Igel]

8. "Abort ship" is a bit of

nonsense that I attribute to non-native speakers doing the writing.

But English has a few different words 'and'. One is a simple conjunction: My boss and I are both married. One is comitative: My wife and I had a kid. Another, more colloquial, indicates consequence or sequence: Hit and run drivers, Drink and get drunk. Yet another, more literary, conjoins synonyms or near synonyms, i.e., it indicates parallelism: captains brave and courageous, he hit and pounded the nail until it was tin foil.

Semitic language culture likes parallelism. That's what I took this to be.

[Vidar]

7. Damned slave just won't stay bought.

[Igel]

9. Yes.

But I didn't find it curious.

There have been a spate of articles in the last couple of years condemning Muslims for maid abuse. Sort of self-criticism at a very, very rudimentary level.

Such articles produce a backlash: But we're also victims. In a communally oriented society, this suffices to achieve neutrality in relations. The victims in the maid-abuse and abusive-maid cases may be different, but it's group-level relations that matter, in a very important sense. (This is, of course, a kind of attitude that's lethal to any sort of individual justice, and is what ripped apart Rwanda, the Balkans, and now Iraq.) But it also undercuts the maid-abuse accusations: it's not abuse, it's just gullible people believing whining.