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Absconding maids cases on the rise

DUBAI — The ‘housemaid’, the typical face of domestic help in the UAE, appears to have a developed a highly nervous set of feet, with more and more of them doing the vanishing act on the sponsor, provoking investigations and prompting the relevant authorities to sound a high alert to curb the trend, and prevent any sort of trafficking in this segment of the labour force.

Khaleej Times did some enquiries on its own, and found out that some loopholes in the rules should be plugged and a closer and more intensive control should be enforced to ensure that the welfare, rights and obligations of all involved parties remain protected even while trying to understand the motivations and mechanism behind the trend.

Brigadier Saeed Mattar bin Bleilah, Director-General of Dubai Naturalisation and Residency Department, gave an idea of the degrees of the trend when he pointed out that the numbers of absconding maids had been witnessing ever higher increases over the last few years.

He said that the numbers of absconding maids reported by their sponsors to the department has been showing a constant rise. “This gives two indications: Sponsors are showing an increasing concern to report such incidents, and the success of the department in encouraging sponsors to do that.”

The result has been that efforts have been stepped up to better streamline, and impose control on the domestic help labour market.

Following investigations, the department found out that the majority of housemaids did the absconding act on the dubious advice of friends and acquaintances of the same nationality, who tempted them to abscond with promises to find them better paid jobs.

“Those who dangle that carrot mostly happen to be people who run dens that offer shelter and support to the housemaids until they had found them jobs on the condition that part of the salary would go to them,” Brig. Mattar bin Bleilah said. “In such cases, the maid is blamed and not the sponsor. But if the sponsor fails to report to the department, he or she is held responsible, and blacklisted — not allowed to sponsor domestic help in the future.”

Eligible sponsors

Families that are desperate for the services of housemaids but are ineligible to sponsor them under Ministry of Interior rules are the ones who then willy nilly become job providers for the absconding maids, with those providing the housemaids shelter and support in the interregnum playing the role of the go-in-betweens.

Brig. Mattar bin Bleilah said that it was rarely that a national, who is eligible to sponsor housemaids, helped ineligible expat families by sponsoring housemaids for them. Even otherwise, the process is not so simple, and easy. The application is assessed on the basis of a set of criteria including the number of individuals in the applicant’s family, the size of the house, etc.

Then again, even where nationals do extend the helping hand to an expat family by sponsoring domestic help to work in the expat household, they do that not for a financial return but for friendship’s sake. “The department is very strict. A national family is allowed to sponsor only a limited number of domestic help. The actual need of a national family is investigated by the department on case to case basis,” said Brig. Mattar bin Bleilah.

Sponsorship transfer

To arrest the ‘absconding phenomenon’ and to help housemaids as well as their employers achieve their needs in a mutually cordial and comfortable environment, the department grants sponsorship transfer, but only on condition of the first employer’s consent, pointed out Brig. Mattar bin Bleilah.

To make sponsorship transfer flexible and applicable, the department gives the first employer the right to a ‘replacement’, get a new housemaid. “Such a relaxation in the rules is applied to all regardless of whether the involved parties were national or expat.”

Elaborating, Brig. Mattar bin Bleilah said, “Suppose I recruit a maid who later proves incapable of meeting my family’s demands, according to my criteria, but a relative or a friend thinks that she can meet his family’s needs, then a sponsorship transfer from my family to my relative or friend’s family will be processed. But my family will not be deprived of the right to a replacement for the maid whose sponsorship has been transferred to my relative or friend’s family.”

Relaxation in sponsorship transfer also took into account the welfare of housemaids, who have opted to work in another country only because they have to support families in their home-country. In many a case, they have sold properties or have taken sizeable loans to pay to recruitment agencies in their home countries.

Most housemaids abscond because they feel that family that has sponsored them is may be unhappy with their performance, and might send them to the home-country. And once after taking the extreme step, they become desperate to find another job because they have to provide for their families back home, or have to pay back debts or both, said Brig. Mattar bin Bleilah. “These circumstances make them easy victims to the illegal practices of housemaid den masters.”

He said that people should not violate the law by employing housemaids who are not on their sponsorship. Breach of the law would put them at risk, and they would be liable to be questioned and punished. “By offering jobs to absconding maids, a practice that has encouraged maids to set their own conditions and to control this market, families might also end up compromising their security because of probable criminal tendencies in the housemaid,” he added.

On another plane to the problem, an Indian family residing in Jumeirah pointed out there was a large population of expatriate women “floating around” in the area offering to work as housemaids in the villas. “Since it is easy to find housemaids, I really do not see why we should spend money on sponsorship,” says A. Kashyap, who has a housemaid on her sponsorship, but often recruits locally for additional help.

A member of another family in Satwa, with both parents working and three young children, had this to say: “With the increasing cost of living we can no longer afford to sponsor a maid and pay the steep charges including a Dh4,800 annual non-refundable deposit. The cost of living is already very high. The government has made it even more difficult. My children are young and need to be looked after and I am compelled to hire domestic help. Recruiting them locally from the many illegal housemaids who flee their sponsors is the only other option available to us. At least, we do not have to worry about sponsorship fees, just pay them a monthly salary ranging from Dh600 to Dh1,000.”

Nevertheless, families which make do with such arrangements also live in constant fear. “The housemaid might suddenly decide to leave us for another home for a just a few dirhams more. Then there is the fear of a labour check. If caught we will have to pay heavy fines. The maid can face deportation.”

Part-time maids

Yet another angle to the tangle is that there have been cases of women offering to work as housemaids after arriving in the country on the sponsorship of UAE nationals who, after charging them a heavy fee for visa and sponsorship expenses, set them free to work wherever they desire. The sponsor in such cases is only too happy to renew the visa for a huge fee ranging from Dh3,000 to Dh5,000.

“I arrived in Dubai about eight years back and have been working as part time domestic help at homes of Arab and Asian expatriates. My sponsor, a UAE local lady, charged me Dh3,000 for the issuance of the visa after which she renews it every three years and allows me to work wherever I desire. It is easy to work part time because I have the option of working in two and three homes in a day and make around Dh1,500 to Dh2,000 every month. I would never make this money if had to work only at my sponsor’s home. Part-time jobs at least helps me return home in the evenings where a group of housemaids share an apartment in Sharjah,” said Noorjehan, a Bangladesh national, who works part-time as a housemaid.

Ill-treatment

Ill-treatment at the hands of the employer is another reason why housemaids abscond. Haseena from Kerala fled her Arab sponsor’s home claimed following physical abuse and inhuman treatment. “I was compelled to run away. But now I’m worried what will I do when my visa expires. Till then I want to make some money working part-time in homes so that I can support myself and my children back home in Kerala,” she said.

NA, a Sri Lankan housemaid, said: “If we flee our sponsor’s house because of ill-treatment, we are caught and imprisoned, then deported. The sponsor seldom gets punished. People forget that also need to be shown kindness and respect.”

That is one side of the story, the other is quite different. Moza Al Amiri, a national woman who had a Filpina maid on a monthly salary of Dh800, said that her maid absconded after a couple of months after she met a woman from her own country in the neighbourhood supermarket. “She was good in every way, with the children and in meeting the family’s demands. I also did my best to give her all kind of support, moral and financial. I used to treat her like a younger sister. But after she met this woman in the supermarket, she completely changed. Her behaviour became different, and she started spending hours talking on the phone in her mother tongue. One day she just vanished, leaving my two little children alone at home. I believe she now works part-time, on several jobs.”

Moza, wondering, said, “Who is to be blamed for such a mess-ups and who will compensate us for the expenses we had to pay for recruiting maids who then leave us for the sake of money.”