May 13, 2004

Domestic help is seen as a blessing in this part of the world. Lifestyles are also such that management of homes without extra help seems cumbersome if not impossible. However, quite often the employers end up paying a heavy price, and it’s not so easy to tell who to pin the blame on, writes S. Rehan

IS domestic help within the privacy of homes worth all that it is made out to be? Amidst the affluent home of Karachi’s elite Defence Housing Authority are many free standing apartment buildings, signifying the rising middle class homes in the erstwhile posh area.

A two-bedroom apartment in one such building is in a state of shocked mourning. The cause is the death of a toddler by drowning in a bucket of water in the bathroom while the mother was away shopping. The child, along with her elder brother aged less than two years, was being supervised — as per daily routine — by the house maid, herself a young girl, barely a teenager.

The case is not in an isolated one. There have been numerous cases of violation of duties on part of domestic help — abuse of children, rape, theft, dacoities and even murders. Yet, over the years, employment of staff within homes has shown a steady rise.

A few months ago, Fakhra Sikander*, a well-to-do housewife, was hospitalized under critical care at the ICU of an affluent private hospital after having been attacked by her maid. The woman was massaging Fakhra in the privacy of her locked bedroom when the maid assaulted her with a lamp, breaking Fakhra’s skull.

The aggression did not stop there but continued with violent battering, resulting in broken ribs, fractures and severe bleeding for the employer. Leaving the apparently lifeless Fakhra to bleed, the assailant made away with a few precious jewels. Miraculously, the injured woman regained consciousness and dragged herself to the porch where house staff employed by neighbours saw and helped her.

“Though we have no statistical records of crimes being committed by household staff, incidents do come up regularly that have been duly recorded,” says Rehan Hannan, deputy chief, Citizens Police Liason Committee (CPLC) South. “Very often class disparity becomes a motivation for theft with many a housewife complaining of minor pilferage in rations as well as jewellery, cash and other trinkets lying around.”

“Nobody can justify theft, but social injustice is a crucial factor towards it,” says senior psychiatrist Shifa Naeem. “We don’t respect servants as individuals — at times they are treated like virtual slaves. The vast dichotomy in their lifestyles to the homes they live in causes major adjustment problems, and the deep social divide they are exposed to leaves a marked stamp on their psyche. Observing the financially privileged class being wasteful brings upon a sense of disillusionment and at times even anger.”

This is often cause for robbery. Afshan Safdar, a local school teacher vowed never to employ a maid again after she recently had most of her jewellery worth over Rs five million stolen by her full-time maid who had been with the family for barely a week. However, soon after the incident, Afshan overcame her resolve and resorted to the hiring and firing of domestic servants that has been her routine for years.

According to Zia Awan, president of the Lawyers for Human Rights and Legal Aid (LHRLA), there aren’t any particular laws for domestic servants in Pakistan. Most work around the clock on a minimal salary and are not even given a day off on Eid or other public holidays, a view which Hannan seconds.

“Servants are the most vulnerable class in our society. There are no time limits for them, the employer’s behaviour towards them is usually demeaning and the salary they get is next to nothing,” says advocate Awan. “Because they are from a class that is vulnerable while their employees are usually influential, workers are charged with theft even for minor transgressions like disobedience, not following instructions properly or any other trivial matter.”

However, where stories of harsh or even strict treatment by employees makes the rounds, many times such behaviour is often cautionary action to prevent any untoward incident. While many maids now reside with families on an individual basis, countless others come and go on a part-time basis, catering to approximately five families in a neighbourhood. Most, if not all homes in large cities employ at least one for various chores, ranging from cooking and ironing to sweeping and dusting, paying a stipend that varies with locality, size of the employer’s family and nature of the work.

Mrs Irfan for instance, has a roti wali, a woman to do the ironing, and a cleaning lady for dusting, mopping and so forth. All three are collectively paid a sum below Rs1,500. For every day off, other than the alternate Sunday, the wealthy employer, who incidentally goes for Hajj and Umra annually, deducts the requisite amount.

Even in the turbulent, violence infested times that Karachi has seen in the past, Mrs Irfan would not accept the regular transport strikes as a valid reason for staff not coming to work. Her maids complain of her extreme stinginess, relating that they are given food left over from the family’s meal’s plates so that “it does not go to waste,” and are told that “a cup of tea and an aspirin costs Rs5”.

The employer justifies her stance as disciplinary; otherwise she claims, and in cases rightly so, that servants greatly abuse the leniency shown towards them. “If we are late to work even by five minutes we lose a part of our daily earnings, but these people come and go as they please,” complains Yasmeen, a school teacher. “If you are strict, they threaten to leave. No one in our family is home the entire day and we depend on them to run our house. If you throw one out, the rest of the workers coming to the neighbourhood boycott your house. How is one supposed to keep a balance?”

According to the report of the United Nations Economic and Social Council Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery (23rd session), an organization in Mumbai, India, representing domestic workers, which has convinced employers to allow domestic workers a day off per week and a month off paid holiday each year also managed to establish minimum wage levels for them in 1988. It is also urging both the national and state governments to adopt laws fixing the minimum age for domestic workers as 14.

In Bangladesh, another organization is trying to establish minimum standards by persuading employers to sign a contract of employment in which their servants’ responsibilities and remuneration as well as rights are specified.

In Manila, local organizations have helped domestic workers organize themselves in order to call for improvements in their working conditions, meeting once a week in a local park for mutual support and to share their experiences. Telephone hotlines have been established to allow domestics to report cases of abuse.

The current draft of the ILO’s new standard on child labour proposes to focus on suppressing the worst or ‘most extreme’ forms of child labour. Although the current draft of this new standard makes no explicit mention of children working as domestic staff, the proposed non-binding guidelines to the convention suggest that authorities pay particular attention to the situation of children under 12, and the special situation of girls.

The recommendation also suggests that a determinant of whether a form of child labour should be considered ‘extreme’ includes “work under particularly difficult conditions such as for long hours, during the night, or without the possibility of returning home each day.” Such a provision is clearly intended to address the issue of live-in domestic work.

However, there have been no similar efforts made by any governmental or non-governmental agency in Pakistan. The late 80s and early 90s saw an unprecedented rise in thefts by immigrant workers employed as cooks.

An alien registration drive by the CPLC was meant to provide a measure of security in the area since in the absence of any identifying information, such criminals went untraced, disappearing underground to resurface again in a different locality a few months later. About five years ago, the news of a cook sexually abusing a young boy barely two-years-old made headlines.

Hannan of the CPLC states that locally there are many cases of women and children who are brought to the cities to work as servants from rural areas like Chiniot, Potohar, rural Multan, etc. They are ‘leased’ out to families for a fixed period of time, usually on an annual contract, arranged by a broker or middle man who is paid the entire annual salary of which the women are given a mere percentage, and that too only at the end of their tenure.

It is in cases like these that there is a high risk of theft, for to expect any individual to work unrewarded and without compensation is an inhuman expectation. “These ‘advance walis,’ as they are inevitably labelled, are employed because it is easier to dominate them since it is generally believed that they are not street smart. Also, since they come from outside the city, they do not take days off to visit friends and family because they have no home in town. Many times the contract is not honoured and the people hired run away with the money paid, leaving no trace,” says Hannan.

Domestic help has always been an integral part of the subcontinent’s social set up. Till around 30 years ago, entire families resided as domestic help in well-to-do homes, pledging their loyalties and services for generations on end. All members played their part: the father would be the gardener, or the chowkidar, and the women would help in the homes in return for residential quarters, food and a nominal stipend.

Today, the role of the proverbial bua (maid), as the women were invariably called, has been greatly trivialized and undermined, both by the employers as well as the employed. “Even young children treat them with disdain all of which has a distinctive effect on the psychological makeup of any person — irrespective of class, social background or profession,” stresses Dr Naeem.

A woman in Lahore was murdered late last year when she fired a maid who was having an affair with her driver. “In many instances the women are blackmailed by the male servants and succumb to protect their own jobs when faced by the threat of complaints — often without any basis — to employers about trivial matters. So the women will wash clothes for the other servants, give them hot rotis, clean up their rooms, etc., to maintain peace,” says psychiatrist Dr Unaiza Niaz Anwer. “There was a girl working at my place who was reasonably good looking and who had got used to the comforts of city life,” says Dr Niaz Anwer. “Her mother got her married to somebody in rural Punjab and obviously there was a vast contrast. She was used to a much more enlightened life style and became depressed. In fact before she got married, she almost eloped with a driver.”

Masooda, thirty something mother of two, complains of Fatima, a young girl aged 12 who was recently hired by the family, who had no qualms at being caught during escapades in their driver’s residential quarter.

In Morocco, a major NGO carried out research in 1995 about the situation of young maids living with their employers. Although recruitment agencies are not legally entitled to supply employers with pre-teenage girls, the research revealed that over 70 per cent of the maids interviewed were below 13, with a quarter below 10 — statistics that would probably show strong local cultural resemblance if recorded.

Growing economic and social disparity is the cause of numerous social evils. An employer complains of misuse of the family phone by her teenage maid, chatting with suitors, many of whom did not even reside in the city, pushing the employing family’s phone bill to astronomical levels.

Another gate-keeper would rent out his employer’s premises to couples dating, charging Rs500 per hour when the family would be at work during the day. The young mother of a toddler complains that maids would give her child cough syrups and at times even naswar to ensure he slept throughout the day while she and her husband were away at work. Another housewife laments that she had to ask her 27-year-old maid to leave because of her “overt interest in my husband.”

Domestic help is a luxury for urban third world cities because of availability as cheap forms of labour. Over reliance on them to maintain palatial homes and run them while the so-called ‘house’ wives barely lift a finger, leaving young children in their care with minimal supervision is cause for grave concern if not shame. While in the West people take pride in sharing home responsibilities, people here consider it a great shame to clean their homes or are just plain lazy to do so.

Lifestyles are such — huge homes, enormous gardens, women being frowned on to even answer doors, guests dropping by unannounced even on weekdays, and a regular social obligation every few days not to mention the ‘necessary’ afternoon siesta — that management of homes without extra help seems cumbersome to most. Parveen, a 20-year-old mother of three proudly states she has never bathed her youngest child and “hardly changed his clothes ever” because she has “excellent maids.” Who is to blame?