"Maids For Sale"

[NotYourCisterinAus]

Freedom United sent me a link to this article (with attached petition) about the sale of migrant domestic workers in Kuwait through online apps: Maids For Sale

You won’t see them on the streets of Kuwait, but pick up a smartphone and you can easily search thousands of pictures of domestic workers, categorized by race, and listed by price. Put up for sale for a few thousand dollars.

An undercover investigation by BBC Arabic found a booming black market for migrant domestic workers in Kuwait, all facilitated through apps — including Facebook-owned Instagram. Using hashtags to find listings of the women, those searching to buy a domestic worker can then negotiate the sale through private messages.

It’s not just Instagram; apps approved and provided by Google Play and Apple’s App Store, as well as the e-commerce platforms’ own websites, are guilty of hosting the content.

“What they are doing is promoting an online slave market,” said Urmila Bhoola, the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery.

“If Google, Apple, Facebook or any other companies are hosting apps like these, they have to be held accountable.”

Bumping for you and to remind me to come back to this later

Just awful!

The sellers almost all advocated confiscating the women’s passports, confining them to the house, denying them any time off and giving them little or no access to a phone.

I seem to recall similar goings on with construction workers in Qatar. It really is modern slavery and it is sadly of no surprise to me that tech companies are enabling it.

Yes, coming to you from the tech firms that brought you "wife likely to run away from you? Install this tracker app on her phone."

Tech companies are perfectly happy to enable sex slavery so more mundane forms are likely to induce nothing more than a shrug from them. They seem totally amoral.

Not to mention their involvement in selling women's bodies as incubators.

Ugh... This shit has been going on at least since the 1970s. All Gulf countries have similar policies and horrific treatment of domestic workers. Migrants' passports have always been confiscated and kept with the employer unless you're lucky enough to be working for a good company. Newspapers frequently report on maids who have attempted suicide, tried to run away and been beaten and raped. Men are employed as drivers and gardeners and get treated pretty badly too.

I hadn't realised that digital apps have made all of this so much easier. Horrible. I hope this gets more widespread attention.
Countries like India and the Philippines don't have the bargaining and political clout like the US or UK when it comes to negotiating with oil rich Middle Eastern countries. I still don't know what can be done, but the more awareness globally the better. :(

Nonny I first heard about these issues with regard to the FIFA World Cup being awarded to Qatar and similar situations of passport confisication etc around migrant labourers.

Major sporting events can be a way to highlight and press for change, it happened with the Seoul Olympics but it requires international pushback on a large scale and I worry that there is little willingness amongst the chattering classes to get involved in the same way today.

Very similar happens in the UK.

One thing Labour did in power was to break the link of the visa of the maid so a maid who was badly treated could seek employment as a domestic worker with another family.

It was one of the first things the conservatives overturned. So a badly treated maid who runs away becomes an instant illegal immigrant.

SOme African countries have banned their citizens from applying for domestic work in Arab countries, butt they still go. The money offered makes it worth the risk.

Arnold you're right that the FIFA world cup in Qatar did a great job of exposing what's been going on for decades in these countries, but I'm not sure how much people are willing to boycott or put international pressure on these issues.

It's a very different era Nonny. The Seoul Olympics came at a time when sports stars had been active in civil rights movements and governments had organised boycotts of the two previous Olympics. Now we are in a time when politicising sport is frowned upon even though it is inherently political, otherwise we'd be seeing the best 8 people line up for the 100m final not the best three from this country or that country.

I don't see it happening to be honest.

sashh presumably the visa situation applies across the board? And presumably a whole raft of European workers could be caught up in it due to the whole brexit mess? I fear that as far as the UK is concerned these matters may be about to take a turn for the worse.

It never fails to astound me that the tech companies can continue to believe in their own morality when they fully know they are enabling things like this.

Not only do they support the sale of maids in this new slavery trade, they also support the sale of Yazidi "brides" kidnapped by ISIS and in other countries support the sale of child brides for dowry. There's nothing new under the sun sadly, but technology is making it a hell of a lot easier to take away people's rights.

Bloody hell! Not much point having laws against something if people are not prosecuted when they break them.

Video and report on the BBC page
www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50228549

Petition on the Freedom United page

sashh presumably the visa situation applies across the board?

Not really. If a company, say a bank or a university sponsors someone's visa they may help with things like finding accomodation but they do not dictate where you live, sleep and what you eat. They also do not stop you socialising with others.

Maids are women, usually young and always vulnerable, linking the visa to a single family / person does make them effectively a slave.