Without the freedom to look for new work, the work permit system actively encourages exploitation, writes SARAH CAREY
THERE’S AN argument I use to defend Irish people against the charge that we are a desperately racist nation. I say that we tend to be racist in the abstract. People enthusiastically exchange myths about social welfare payments or assure each other that Nigerians are scam artists to a man. But once we get to know an individual it changes and keeping a popular African in town has been the subject of more than one campaign by good folks. Sure, once you get them into the local GAA club, everyone comes round.
This argument is not helped at all by a recording used by the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland (MRCI) in its campaign to highlight the problem faced by legal immigrants under the work permit scheme.
The tape features a Filipina who has been hired as a domestic servant. For two years, she’s worked six days a week from 8am to 6pm for €800 per month, which works out at about €3 an hour.
The tape records her conversation with her employers, who sound like a normal middle class couple with country accents. In the background you can hear their children whom she minds. She says she wants to look for a job where she can get the minimum wage.
They’re not too pleased about the prospect of losing their cheap labour and both husband and wife proceed to threaten her in a truly menacing tone.
They tell her that she can’t leave her job as her work permit applies only to her employment with them. When she says she can stay with a friend while she looks for a new job, they assure her she’ll be acting illegally and will be deported to Manila. According to the man, she’ll be sent back in shackles and chains. He’ll drop her to the airport immediately without her wages and they can replace her with another girl from the Philippines tomorrow.
The purpose of the campaign is to persuade the Government to make a simple change to employment legislation. The problem for the maid from Manila is that her rotten employers are technically correct on one point. They hold her work permit and no matter how badly she’s treated she’s trapped.
If the Government changed the system so that the permit was valid for whatever employment she secured, she could walk out the door and leave the creeps behind her. As it is, she’s effectively bonded to them. Without the freedom to look for new work, this system actively encourages exploitation.
What shocked me was how thoroughly this couple despised and dehumanised a woman who lived in their house. There’s nothing abstract about their mentality.
They don’t have the luxury of boxing her into some stereotype about scamming the State for undeserved payments, possessing appalling driving skills or lying about her asylum story. She’s a hard-working woman trusted to care for their children.
The only way they can treat her like this is if they don’t recognise her as a person whose feeling and rights are equal to theirs. It’s not unusual for employers to feel that way about employees, but the fact that she’s foreign means they can immediately discount her rights – she’s less entitled because she’s poor and from another country. This is racism.
It struck me then that most of the time when we’re talking about racism, the conversation takes place within pretty narrow parameters. Mostly we mean dreadful incidents like the murder of Toyosi Shittabey in Tyrrelstown that prompt public handwringing over racial tensions in working class areas. For the commentators, politicians and experts, it really is abstract. A rise in the number of foreigners in certain localities presents major challenges for communities where the competition for resources creates tension anyway.
The kind of people who exploit Filipina maids are not the kind of people who have to worry if their children’s education is being compromised by the number of non-English speaking pupils in the classroom. Yet features on racism tend to focus almost exclusively on the lower end of the social spectrum. Reporters don their safari gear and head off to the Wild West of Dublin to interview community representatives who are reduced to defending the reputation of their locality while politely pleading for better public services. Newspaper features or radio conversations from a posh postal address discussing how the servants of the establishment are faring are considerably rarer. Neither do we hear much about how foreigners treat their own.
For example, another case highlighted by MRCI was that of Indian man, Surinder Singh, who was awarded €200,000 by the Labour Court after he worked 16-hour days, seven days a week, for six years for €100 a month.
When his case was quoted in this paper and on the MRCI website, there was no mention that the employer was also Indian, even though his name was published in the reports of the Labour Court proceedings. I thought it was a curious if presumably unconscious omission. The result of this one-dimensional focus is to convince us, however implicitly, that only poor, white people treat foreigners badly even though poor, white people are the ones obliged to confront the social challenges of immigration on a daily basis. Meanwhile the middle class directly benefit from the availability of cheap labour aided and abetted, as usual, by a legal and regulatory system that operates on their behalf.