Website helps Lebanon's migrant workers expose abuse
Migrant domestic workers in Lebanon are not protected by labor laws, but a new website hopes to give them a voice to speak out against abuse.
This year on International Workers' Day, on May 1, domestic migrant workers demonstrated in the streets of Lebanon, protesting their lack of rights. That same day, Dipendra Uprety launched the website This Is Lebanon to gather the testimonies of domestic workers and their families. Domestic workers have no rights in Lebanon, because they fall under the “kafala,” or sponsorship, system, which is not regulated by labor law. Some of them, therefore, perhaps unsurprisingly, are subjected to untold abuse.
A 2010 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report explained, “The domestic worker sector is rife with complaints of nonpayment of wages, excessive working hours, forced confinement, and even physical and sexual abuse — fueled by Lebanese labor law that excludes MDWs [Migrant Domestic Workers] from standard labor protections afforded to almost all other categories of workers, such as the right to a weekly day of rest, paid leave, benefits, and worker compensation.”
As a consequence, as documented in 2008 by HRW, one domestic worker dies per week by trying to escape, by killing themselves or after being beaten. On June 5, an Ethiopian domestic worker committed suicide in Marjayoun, in the south, and another died trying to escape her sponsor via a seventh-floor balcony in Sin el Fil, a northern suburb of Beirut.
With the help of an international team of volunteer translators and editors, Uprety launched This Is Lebanon to denounce abusive work conditions and living arrangements and to provide a platform for domestic workers in Lebanon and their families to speak out. “My wife and I were involved in helping Nepali domestic workers when we lived in Lebanon, and when we had the opportunity to emigrate to Canada, we vowed that we would continue the fight for their rights,” Uprety told Al-Monitor.
