Leah Snyder
Analysis Post #2
Vietnamese Domestic workers
A woman in Vietnam is living with her 7 year old daughter in an abandoned house after working for a family in Saudi Arabia and finally returning back. According to Vietnamese Labour Ministry, there are currently 20,000 Vietnamese workers and nearly 7,000 are working as domestic workers for saudi families. They were fed a slice of lamb and a plate of plain rice once a day, “We didn’t ask for much, just no starvation, no beatings, and three meals a day. If we had that, we would not have begged for rescue,” the woman says. Some who have escaped recounted slavelike working and living conditions. Trinh Thi Linh, a vietnamese woman, was told she would be making a $388 a month salary and was very excited. Like many other woman have reported, Trinh Thi Linh says how she arrived to the airport, she was thrown into a room with more than a hundred others. She was finally brought to a family and has requested to be moved to a new family. Lihn went on a hunger strike for three days to get moved to a different family, but the second family she got moved to was even worse. They made her scrub their feet and give them massages. At one point, the saudi family member had thrown her leftover food away instead of giving it to her. “It becomes very difficult for the workers to prove that they are maltreated, overworked, beaten or even sexually assaulted. The execution of the law after all still favours the Saudi employers.” The domestic work environment limits external communication, what happens inside the home stays inside the home. Domestic workers have to get permission to leave by their sponsors. The sponsorship prohibits them from leaving the country and changing jobs without their approval. Workers who try to escape their abusive employer are punished with imprisonment, deportation and fines. There was one husband who was interviewed about his wife who was working in Riyadh. He says she is being beaten and starved. He earned the money he needed to give them for her to be able to quit, but by the time he collected it all, they asked for double it. He says that they took his wife’s phone away and only lets her have it when they feel like giving it to her, usually every two to three weeks. There is a viral video of her explaining how she and many others are being treated, and she says in the article “Many women I know here just want the same thing – they just want to leave. But they are afraid, threatened, and don’t even dare to speak out.” This article really made me understand how very poorly people are being treated and how some, and most, don’t have a voice. They can’t do anything to stop this from happening to them.