We are being watched !!

[domesticgodessintraining]

A friend just called from the Middle East to say that the bored desperate housewives of Dubai are slagging us off ........

www.expatwoman.com/forum/messages.aspx?TopicID=171798

In fact, I'm really thinking about it now, and there are lots of things I find hard to come to terms with here, but honestly - I don't think the treatment of Filipino housemaids by relatively affluent white, western women is one of them, all things considered.

So am I doing this conversion correctly HillyWallaby? 1,600 QR is 278 Pounds per month for a live in maid/childcare?

Well I think most people pay more if they need regular childcare, but yes, for a live-in cleaner.

A full time Filipino housekeeper gets £300 per WEEK in the UK for exactly the same job. Do you really think that £300 a month is a fair salary.

That works out to around £ 1 an hour for a 10 hour day

Bijou, she isn't in the UK - you can't compare like that and to do so would be stupid.

And I'm quite sure that if most UK families could afford to employ full-time live in help at £300 per week, they would. But they can't. They are lucky if they can spend thirty quid a week on a cleaner for an afternoon. Which is why they come here instead. But lucky old maid that gets to work for the very rich in the UK - she must be sending home a small fortune, relatively speaking.

My old maid was paid way more than the general market rate, she was happy with her lot and when she left and went home she went home with a small fortune to set her up over there. She was more than happy with our arrangement. If I did as you advise then she would be out of a job as most people would not be in the position to pay 300 pounds a week. I really don't think she would thank you.

People in the UK, if they have a cleaner, tend to pay cash in hand.

Is that morally acceptable when you know she's working for 16 hrs pw in an above board pt job, claiming every benefit going and still earning £10-£15 ph tax free?

Because that's what my last cleaner was doing.

There are free public beaches. The reason most westerners discount using them is because we don't want to sunbathe and swim fully clothed from neck to wrist to ankle, and that is what you need to do on a public beach, or risk being stared at/masterbated over (not literally, thankfully ) by the labourers on their day off, or arrested for public indecency!

The other thing I have realised since I have been here is that we often seize upon something about the system here, completely misunderstand it, or misrepresent it, yet it becomes the accepted belief that That Is How Things Are.

Example: People think that women cannot leave the country or drive a car, or whatever, without their husband's permission. It is not because she is a woman, or a chattel, or because her husband is a man, and therefore superior, it is because if she is only here by dint of being his wife, accompanying him whilst he does his job, then he is her sponsor, and he is responsible for her, financially and legally, and expected/entitled to monitor her activities. It could just as easily be a working woman sponsoring her non-working DH.

Everyone needs their sponsor's permission to do anything involving officialdom - especially if they do not themselves work. It is a way of keeping tabs on crime, illegal immigrants, working on the black market and people outstaying their visas.

Im so glad I live in the UK :)

You have chosen to live in a country with legalised racist, xenophobic, sexist, and homophobic discrimination. You chose to do this because the money's good. No one forced you to come on here and talk about it. You chose to defend your choice.

Well, we could extend that accusation to everyone of Irish or African-Caribbean, Indian or Chinese descent who chose to move to the UK thoughout the 50's to the 80's. But people will always go where the work is, and where opportunity is greater than at home, however imperfect it may be. It's nice to be able to be smug about how non-discriminatory and non-exploitative the UK is now but it wasn't always like that. Should our immigrants not have come on a political principle?

And let's not forget it was the presence of those people that brought about eventual change, and made the UK the fair and tolerant place it is now.

Built on slave labour and the proceeds of crime......

Just out of interest Hilly, are you saying the maids and labourers are immigrants with a right to stay in Dubai, and a right to bring their families, etc?

No, they are in exactly the same position as us "westerners". We do not have the "right" to stay in Dubai (UAE actually, it's a bit like saying someone has the right to stay in London).
To be able to live in the UAE you have to have a residence visa. To get a residence visa you have to have a sponsor. I am sponsored by my DH, he is sponsored by his company. If I had a maid she would be sponsored by my DH also, just like myself and the kids.

To be able to bring your family to live with you in the UAE you have to sponsor them, and to do that you have to meet certain criteria - income being one of them. It doesn't matter who you are, what nationality or what job you do. If you don't meet those criteria you are not able to sponsor anyone. That's it.

WRT maids earning £300 per month in the ME vs £300 per week in the UK; in the ME it's usually disposable income - no tax, no outgoings.

Everything GM said.

Also, to put something else into context, I remember being open-mouthed and appalled when I realised that there is a fixed (minimum) rate of pay for certain nationalities, and so for example, as far as maids go, the pay scale goes (roughly)

Filipina
Indian
Ethiopian
Sri Lankan
Indonesian

or it might be a different order - can't quite remember! But it's all about supply and demand. The minimum rates tend to be set by their own governments as conditions for allowing them to come and work here en-masse, not by the UAE or Qatari government. So when manpower agencies bring them in for work they have a package pre-arranged at home - just like my husband did, and it is based on their experience and skill sets, and what their own expectations are, and what makes it worthwhile for them to come here compared to staying at home - just like it was with us.

The Filipinas tend to earn more because they speak much better English, are more likely to be literate or to drive, more likely to be happy to live with Westerners' dogs, more likely to be Christian and therefore find it easier to adapt culturally into a house of northern Europeans or Americans etc, they are more clued up about what standards we would expect with child-rearing, and they are more likely to have relevant work experience, and less likely to abscond. They also have very wide networks of friends and family here which keeps them sane and happy, so it is safer investing the (considerable) sum to sponsor them. Some of the other ladies from the other countries can struggle with all of that, so you get what you pay for, like anything in life.

And as the Westerners (sorry to keep using that phrase but it's a useful catch-all for Brits, North Americans, Northern Europeans and Antipodeans!) tend to want those qualities, and are more generous when paying for them than the Arab and African and Asian employers who just want slaves that's what the ladies from the Philippines get.

They are much less likely to want to work in an Arab household where the pay and conditions will be worse - but they rarely need to, and the Gulf Arab families prefer muslims (usually Indonesians and Malaysians) anyway.

And as far as Indian/Pakistani/Filipino expats bringing in their spouses and children - yes of course they can. But the cost of living here is cripplingly expensive for them (and pretty damned expensive for us too actually - rent and grocery shopping are easily on a par with London) so whilst it does happen, they would often rather keep their families at home, visit each year, and send the money home - where it goes a great deal further. Because after all, money is why they are here.

Obviously in my last paragraph I am talking about Indian/Pakistani/Filippino/African blue collar and manual workers. There are plenty of highly skilled professionals and businessmen from those countries in the Gulf as well, and they are the ones most likely to have their families with them, for obvious reasons.

Sorry Desertgirl - I came to this thread late, and have only just picked up on your post that said this:

*HuntyCat, I know what you are saying but it is slightly naive. Minimum wages are different everywhere; there is a reason for that - you can't just fasten on to the UK minimum wage and say anything else is exploitation.

Almost every housemaid I have come across here sends the vast majority of her income back to the Philippines or Sri Lanka or wherever it is. They don't need much of it here in the UAE; accommodation is provided; food and toiletries are supposed to be provided, as far as I can tell the Filipino network here looks after itself in terms of providing everything for less (unofficial "taxis", etc) - in any case, the government of the Philippines, for example, sets its own minimum wage for overseas domestic workers, and it is absolutely nowhere near the UK minimum.

I"m not justifying anything; yes there are people here who pay ridiculously badly (most such people are not British expats) but the thing is there are still girls falling over themselves to come here - and these are cousins, sisters, daughters of maids already here, it isn't people being ripped off by dodgy agencies. So the 'slave' owner (is it slavery if you are paying the applicable minimum wage? not everyone does, but many people pay more) is giving someone employment, who wants employment, and supporting several people back in Sri Lanka/Nepal/the Philippines/Ethiopia. Whereas the people who sit and wring their hands and say that this is appalling - may have a point, but generally aren't doing anything at all for those people, who do desperately need it.

YOu can't change things from the outside muttering in. You can't, either, expect that if you turn up somewhere you will instantly improve it. But things are getting better here and elsewhere in the ME, and I firmly believe that some of that is attributable to the quiet, persistent, influence/persuasion/etc of expats just doing what is in their power to do.*

That just about sums it all up nicely.

I do hope Hilly's not trying to imply that treatment of immigrants in the UK in the 50s-80s, bad as it was, is remotely comparable to things that still go on in Dubai. Because it wasn't. People weren't kept for years in effective bonded slavery, passports withheld. I've posted before about treatment of Irish family and community members when they emigrated, and am sure black and Asian MNers would have similar stories, but it wouldn't compare. You'd have to go a way further back in British history to find anything similar: very telling.

Re slave market, I think that was mentioned not because people don't realise Dubai has changed, but because it wasn't very long ago. There will be a significant slice of the Emirati population who will remember when you could (legally) buy a slave there. Slaveowning societies throughout the world have shown its hard to grow up unaffected by that, if its what you see around you. Certainly, many anti-slavery activists have come from slave owning groups. But they've never been the majority. So I hope nobody's going to pretend a person's attitudes to the serving class couldn't possibly be influenced by having grown up when they could legally be owned.

Lastly, while the maids are in Dubai because its a better gig for them than elsewhere, it would be nice to see fuller acknowledgement from some of the expats that they're underprivileged in comparison to you. While they benefit from being there, you also benefit from their presence, massively. You all seem very keen to compare their lives favourably to other Filipinas: we could do with some honest reflection about their lives compared to yours too. I suspect what we'll get instead is whataboutery, though.

It depends on what you mean by underprivileged compared to us.

Theoretically they should have all their basic needs met - accommodation, food, toiletries, legal status, medical care, time off and flights home annually.

Many expats don't get any of the above (but one would assume they earn more). Those of you quite familiar with EW will probably have read of expats (some British) who are not saving any money whilst living in Dubai, just living from month to month but while that's the only place there's a job for them, they'll keep plugging on. They probably consider themselves lucky to have a job rather than privileged.

Oh and fwiw I do my own laundry/housework/cooking/childcare. I tend my own garden, walk my own dogs and drive my 7 year old car myself.

I've had false nails done twice in all the years I've been in the ME and have never had a pedicure. I pay my neighbour over the back to do my hair, shave my own legs, paint my own nails (and house) and my eyebrows are courtesy of the tweezers in my own bathroom.

There seems to be a generalisation that expats are generally pampered tarts siting on their arses doing fuck all while their grossly overworked maids wait on them hand and foot.

And yes, I am privileged in comparison to most maids, but then I'm one of the lucky ones.

I'm surprised you actually need it explaining to you why they're underprivileged compared to you, but ok. Presumably we can take it as read that the ones in violent and/or slave situations are worse off than you, so we'll just focus on situation the posters on this thread describe.

One, they don't have their families with them. Most of you do. While I defend the right of poor women to take jobs away from their families for 11 months a year if they think its in their best interests, it must be so painful. Two, you and/or your DPs can earn a lot more money than they can. Of course, their money may well go further when sent back to the Phillippines than yours would in the West. But then you could go and settle in a poor country where your money would go much further, too. Indeed, it'd probably be easier for you to settle in a poor country than it would for them in a rich one. You have more options. I appreciate that there are Westerners in Dubai who have no spare cash. But that isn't likely to include any of the maid employers on this thread: if money were that much of a problem, you wouldn't hire help.

Thanks for sharing all the information about your personal grooming habits, I guess.

Flangelina, how incredibly arrogant.

Why do we need to give you any 'honest reflection' of 'their lives compared to ours'. That hasn't been the topic of the discussion.

For goodness' sake. I really don't think many expats don't know how lucky they are compared to so much of the world's population, including the lower paid workers here - it would be difficult not to be more aware of that fact when you are faced with it up close the way we are here.

But we don't have to shout about it every time we say anything; any more than you have to confirm how lucky you are compared to most of the 6 billion every time you speak.