The Foreign Service Journal, December 2013

30 DECEMBER 2013 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL In practice, however, the system favors the powerful. Not only are the laws governing it routinely disregarded; but also, since there is no real market competition for employees and they enter the country with fewmeaningful legal rights or freedoms, they are without recourse when problems arise. Even if one argues that kafala is not technically slavery, the institution permits the development of all kinds of slave-like situations. Indeed, “running away” from one’s sponsor is often the only real form of escape from terrible working conditions. And there are plenty of runaways who then live in legal limbo, lacking passports and local documentation because their sponsors have taken the documents from them, a widely practiced contraven- tion of the laws. The treatment of domestic workers usually falls far short of any legal norms issued by their countries of residence. The acceptable range of pay varies widely, as do normal working hours. Some employers refuse to let their domestic workers leave the home without permission, imprisoning them inside; and many deny their employees use of a phone. It takes little imagina- tion to appreciate the kinds of abuse women who are so thor- oughly hidden from society may experience. Domestic work for a Filipina, or a Sri Lankan or Indonesian woman may resemble indentured servitude, if not imprisonment. Domestic workers try to find work in households where there are stronger cultural expectations for basic human rights, usually among Western expatriates. Often these arrangements can be quite beneficial, where remuneration for work is relatively above market price, with days off, sick-day compensation, and so forth. But a far larger swath of guest workers toil in homes or factories where conditions are abusive, unjust, isolating and unrelenting, and where the employee has no remedy. My Place in the System During our tour in Qatar, we employed a Filipina (I’ll call her “Lola”) to work in our home. I had serious reservations about sponsoring and employing her, but mostly because I was squea- mish about losing our family’s privacy and because I felt that hiring a domestic employee violated my American work ethic. (I still think cleaning one’s own toilet is good for the soul.) But with my husband’s long work hours, the long list of house- keeping tasks in the large house assigned to us, and trying to care for a toddler and a nursing newborn, an “extra pair of hands around the house” eventually came to sound like a good idea. After all, having some kind of household help was part of the cultural fabric of Doha, as well as within the American embassy community. Lola’s original American sponsor/employer had been abruptly fired by his Qatari company when he was traveling outside of the country. Because his legal rights in Qatar were nullified overnight, so were hers. If she did not find a new sponsor or host quickly, she would face deportation to the Philippines. Worse, she still owed significant debts to the agency that had arranged her passage to Qatar, and there were financial pressures back in the Philippines, too. She contacted us to see if we could help, and we agreed to hire her. My husband worked through the process of securing her “release” from her previous American employer, and we helped her get settled into the maid’s quarters of our house. A closet at best, it at least granted her (and us) some real privacy, with a separate entrance and exit, a private bathroom and a door that Lola could lock to keep us out. Shortly after Lola came to work for us as a “live-in,” it dawned on me that our new arrangement was one with which I had only a literary acquaintance. Since I had been raised in a typical middle- class American family—no “help” whatsoever—having a live-in housekeeper was more the stuff of an evening BBC drama on PBS than real life for me. Along with “Mommy” and “Daddy,” I was now called “Madam” and my husband “Sir.” (Even when I insisted she call me by my name, in a naive attempt to relax the palpable power dynamics, she could never bring herself to do so.) And I began to understand that, as Caitlin Flanagan aptly put it in her 2007 book, To Hell with All That: Loving and Loath- ing Our Inner Housewife: “My relationship with [my domestic employee] would turn out to be the most legally, morally and emotionally complicated one of my life.” Life as ‘Madam’ Lola and I eventually arrived at a workable rhythm to our shared existence, but I found my role in the home harder to jus- tify with her able presence. Odd sensations of territoriality welled up in me at times, even as I was enormously grateful for her help keeping the miles of tile in our home clean—no small feat in the Domestic work for a Filipina, or a Sri Lankan or Indonesian womanmay resemble indentured servitude, if not imprisonment.