The Saudi authorities, inching their way towards the 20th century, have decided that foreign domestic workers – servants and drivers – should be given one day off at weekends.

The Labour Ministry has also decreed that their wages must be paid into bank accounts. This is meant to put an end to disputes about whether or not wages have been paid. "Bank statements will be relied on to confirm whether the worker has received his/her salary or not," the Saudi Gazette reports.

But look a little closer, and the weekly day off is not quite what it seems. Female domestic workers will be given three options as to how to spend their day of rest:

1. Work during the day off, for extra pay.

2. Stay in the employer's family home.

3. Go out with the employer's family for "recreation".

As several of the readers' comments attached to the news report imply, this more or less amounts to a day off spent under house arrest. It denies them a social life of their own, or the even right to go out alone.

One comment says: "If she stays at home alone, do you think the Madam will not call her every minute? Small things [to do] in the house ... Why can't you let them go out and be with there friends just for a day?"

And if she takes the going-out-with-the-family option, that is unlikely to be fun either. "Recreation? Running after the kids and having to carry tons of shopping bags to the car while the male members munch on donuts? This is utterly crazy." Another comment adds: "The other day I saw housemaids enjoying the weekend in McDonalds looking after children without any food [for themselves]."

Underlying this is the problem of how domestic workers are perceived by their employers in Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region – with a mixture of disdain and fear. Ray Jureidini 
writes that as employees of a household, live-in maids exist in a sort of limbo as "marginal insiders and intimate outsiders" forming a socially invisible presence, yet privy to many of the family's secrets. This can lead to strained relationships where a maid is viewed as slightly less than human and/or as a cunning manipulator who could jeopardise the family’s cohesion. 

With little or no privacy and even less opportunity to develop sexual relationships, many are consigned to sleeping on balconies or kitchen floors. Often they are regarded as asexual beings, though in some households they are viewed as a source of temptation for husbands and teenage sons. 

Nadim Houry of Human Rights Watch, who organised a campaignfor domestic workers' rights in Lebanon, once explained to me that many employers are reluctant to give housemaids adequate leisure time for fear of how they may spend it. 

According to Houry, "When you talk to them about guaranteeing a day off where migrant workers can go and do whatever they would like to do – a real day off, not a day off where they basically accompany their employer to the restaurant to take care of the kids," the reaction is: "You want them to go out and have sex and come back pregnant?"

He continued:

I was at a meeting with an official from the ministry of labour and he kept pushing this point and I said: “You expect someone to stay in Lebanon and live for eight or nine years – you don’t think at some point they will have a desire to have sex?”

It brings back some of the images of racism in the States that we saw in the 1950s and 1960s – the idea that you deny someone’s sexuality because you don’t really recognise that they might have desires, while at the same time [imagining] that if you somehow let them loose, if you release your control, they are these uber-sexual beings that are going to go and whore the entire Sunday afternoon. 

Meanwhile, yet another maid has fallen to her death from a building in Saudi Arabia. On this occasion it seems not to have been a case of suicide but an accident as she tried to escape from her employer.

The Saudi Gazette says the maid (an Asian whose name was apparently not considered worth mentioning in the report) fell from the fifth floor of a building in al-Bahr district of Medina on Sunday:

"Police spokesman Col Fahad al-Ghannam said preliminary inquiry indicated that the maid was trying to escape from her sponsor. She tied several bed sheets together and tried to escape through a window in the apartment. While climbing down, one the sheets was torn, and she fell down on the pavement, incurring multiple injuries and fractures which led to her death."
 

Posted by Brian Whitaker
Tuesday, 11 June 2013