- Above photo and article found @: Washington Post
"The floor looks clean in this high-rise apartment, seven stories above Kuwait City traffic. Not a smudge in sight on the picture window. On the other side of the glass, the maid is hanging on by one knuckle, screaming.
"Oh crazy, come here," a woman says casually in Arabic, holding a camera up to the maid.
"Hold on to me! Hold on to me!" the maid yells.
Instead, the woman steps back. The maid's grip finally slips, and she lands in a cloud of dust, many stories below.
The maid- an Ethiopian who had been working in the country for several years, according to the Kuwait Times - survived the fall. The videographer, her employer was arrested last week on a charge of failing to help the worker.
It's still unclear what led to the fall. But it was not the first time a domestic servant had fallen off of a building in Kuwait, an oil-rich country where foreign workers are cheap, plentiful and live largely at the mercy of their employers.
Human Rights Watch has spent years documenting cases of workers abused, exploited, attacked or driven to desperation by a draconian labor system called kafala, in which foreigners surrender rights to get a work visa in the Persian Gulf.
The woman, who reportedly landed on an awning and broke an arm in the fall, is one of more than 600,000 foreigners working in Kuwait, according to a Human Rights Watch estimate.
That's about one servant for each family in a country of about 3 million people, Begum Said..."
Read entire story @: Miami Herald
Related @: End The Kafala System
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What is the Kafala System:
"The word Kalafa (or Kafeel) in Arabic means Sponsorship. The Kafala System is a sponsorship system in which employers will sponsor migrant workers so that they can come into a country and work. Migrant workers come from many southeast Asian countries such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal (for example, it is said that roughly 16,000 Nepali migrant workers go to the Gulf Cooperative Council countries each month)
The Kafala system is a set of rules that governments set up with regards to migrant workers. Each government’s Ministry of Interior is in control of the Kafala system (Migrant-Rights, 2015) (as has been noted, this in and of itself is a problem, since the Kafala is not under the Labor Minister, who, not only works with domestic labor laws closely, but also has the ability to help resolve labor disputes (Migrant Forum Asia, ND) in ways others may not do so) (Furthermore, domestic labour laws tend to not even recognize the rights of the migrant workers under Kafala, since they are an extension of the kafil’s family, and thus, domestic laborers are not under this category of labor laws. Thus, these migrant workers are in a sense “invisible”) (Bajracharya & Sijapati, 2012).
The problem with the Kafala system is the power that it offers sponsors, at the expense of migrant workers. Namely, “The system gives sponsors a set of legal abilities to control workers: without the employer’s permission, workers cannot change jobs, quit jobs, or leave the country. If a worker leaves a job without permission, the employer has the power to cancel his or her residence visa, automatically turning the worker into an illegal resident in the country. Workers whose employers cancel their residency visas often have to leave the country through deportation proceedings, and many have to spend time behind bars” (Migrant-Rights.org, 2015)..."
Read more @: International Relations
_________________________________________________________________________Everyday you hear the screams from Muslims in America about being harassed, hated, their rights being infringed upon, how badly they are treated in America... But what about the stories from Muslim countries, where Muslims treat immigrants worse then Americans EVER have? How often do you hear these stories? The Muslims in America don't want you to hear these stories.
I WANT you to hear these stories, because I have first hand personal experience with the kafala system. The town I have been living in on the streets, has watched the kafala system upon my life for over 4 years. It is an American version of the kafala system, Muslims have implemented in America, on Americans and Americans have no idea what Muslims are truly doing. I DO!
