Sri Lanka tests Libya labor market
By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO - Sri Lanka's dependence on its one million citizens who work abroad
can be gauged from officials who count the dollars that come in to sustain the
country's economy.
"Last year, Sri Lankan workers remitted US$3.3 billion, up from $2.9 billion in
2008, and this was despite the global financial crisis," LK Ruhunuge,
additional general manager at the state-owned Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign
Employment (SLBFE), told IPS.
"Even though the employment market in the United Arab Emirates has shrunk
[owing to the financial crisis], we are lucky because demand in Saudi Arabia
has increased."
Rights groups are less upbeat over this development. As the
government monitors the growing remittances from Sri Lankans working overseas,
rights advocates say it continues to ignore persistent abuses endured by its
citizens abroad, especially in the Middle East.
Remittances account for more than 35% of Sri Lanka's foreign exchange needs.
With an unemployment rate hovering between 5% and 6% in the last five years,
the government has been compelled to encourage work migration despite the risks
to which its exposes its citizens.
Each year, more than 200,000 Sri Lankans go overseas to work, most of them
heading for the Middle East. Official statistics show that 53% are women, the
majority of them unskilled.
Rights advocates say female domestic workers are the most victimized among Sri
Lanka's overseas laborers, suffering abuses ranging from non-payment of wages
to rape. They say most of such abuses occur in Middle Eastern countries, where
facilities for domestic workers are also poor or practically non-existent.
The government argues that private employment agents are to blame, primarily
for "irregular" recruitment where workers are at the mercy of their employer
due to a lack of a proper work contract. It has also said that fewer than 10%
of the Sri Lankan workforce overseas has filed complaints.
Recently, however, the government appeared to heed the activists' complaints by
saying it was considering a ban on the deployment of workers particularly to
the Middle East. It also announced the start of a pilot project in Libya, with
the support of the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
Sunil Sirisena, secretary to the Ministry of Foreign Employment Promotion and
Welfare, said the government had selected about 500 people to work for a
Brazilian company building an international airport in the Libyan capital,
Tripoli.
Shantha Kulasekara, migration management head of the IOM in Sri Lanka, said the
project aims to ensure quality and prepared labor overseas, and Libya was
selected because it is a "non-traditional labor-receiving country".
"We are helping the government to provide quality labor, and if Libya is
satisfied there would be many more jobs," Kulasekera said. If this scheme
works, women need not go abroad as domestics for jobs that fetch around $150
per month because their husbands can earn more than three times that amount.
Wages for unskilled workers at the Tripoli project are 58,000 rupees (US$500)
per month, while skilled workers could receive up to 100,000 rupees with food,
medical services and accommodation provided by the company.
The Brazilian firm has agreed to hire a Sri Lankan cook and a Sri Lankan
coordinator to liaise between the workers and employer. Earlier this month, a
company representative was in Colombo to personally supervise the selection of
skilled and unskilled workers for the project.
Sirisena said that if the partnership works, the government would consider
extending the approach to Israel, Cyprus, Italy, and France. "Trying to enforce
it in the Middle East is difficult because salaries are not as high as these
countries and facilities [there] are poor."
The government has said that it can only do so much about the absence of
safeguards in labor-receiving countries. It has also said that the
foreign-employment bureau has measures in place to protect Sri Lankan workers'
rights abroad, including compulsory registration of outbound workers with the
agency, as well as the stipulation of minimum wages in contracts.
Lakshan Dias, chairman of the Colombo-based South Asian Network for Refugees,
IDPs (internally displaced people) and Migrants (SANRIM), said migration of
workers cannot be stopped, but it is incumbent upon the sending country to
protect the rights of its workers.
Dias, a lawyer who worked for many years in a Hong Kong-based migrant support
group, said the government should not rely on the number of complaints it
receives from workers themselves to help craft its policies. "The complaint
process is cumbersome and complicated. I have seen many times where workers at
airports have problems and they don't complain."
He cited instances where Sri Lanka workers, many coming from impoverished rural
villages, slept inside or near toilets or kitchens or sometimes on top of a
deep freezer but did not complain because these facilities were better than
what they endured back home.
"Nevertheless these are not acceptable facilities," said Dias. "Only countries
like Hong Kong have decent conditions for workers where a separate room for the
domestic [worker] is compulsory."
He said some countries, such as Jordan and Kuwait, have improved significantly
in terms of worker facilities and conditions. Yet while they have bilateral
agreements with Sri Lanka, the "marked improvement in the conditions for
workers" is "mainly because protective regulations in these countries have
improved on their own".
If the government finds it difficult to ensure that Sri Lankan workers have
their rights in other countries, Dias said, it could try to transform welfare
societies set up by overseas workers into groups with Sri Lankan government
backing that can protect migrant laborers.
"The Philippines offers the best example in such organizations," he said. "At
present, these Sri Lankan societies are organizing entertainment events and
other welfare, but the government can fund them to turn them into a group that
could mediate on behalf of the workers."
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