Home Surveillance and the Rights of Domestic Workers

[Migrant Rights logo. Image from @MigrantRIghts.] [Migrant Rights logo. Image from @MigrantRIghts.]

Home Surveillance and the Rights of Domestic Workers

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following report was originally published by Migrant Rights on 25 July 2014 under the title "Home Surveillance Marketed Against Domestic Workers` Privacy Rights."]

The alleged link between migrants and crime is a commonly regurgitated misconception in much of the migrant receiving world. In the Gulf States, local media particularly dramatize the ‘danger’ of migrant domestic workers to family privacy and child safety. Authorities further fuel these xenophobic narratives, regularly scapegoating migrants for any and all social problems, including the loss of cultural heritage and language. Saudi discourse particularly demonizes Ethiopian migrants, condemning them as inherently violent criminals with superstitious tendencies. Kuwait recently adopted similarly inciting rhetoric against Ethiopian domestic workers, following the murder of a Kuwaiti woman in March. In the aftermath of any crime allegedly committed by domestic workers, media and authorities are quick to collectively blame migrants; in just one night, Kuwait arrested 13,000+ domestic workers, the majority of whom were Ethiopian, and proceeded to ban Ethiopian domestic workers in reaction to the same murder. Saudi also banned Ethiopian domestic workers in response to an alleged surge of crimes (including sorcery) committed by workers. Hysteria is further flamed by social media and private messaging, with exaggerated anecdotes spreading virally through Facebook and Whatsapp.

The paranoiac narratives on domestic workers not only shape regulations and decrees, but also impact the conditions of their work environment. In both Saudi and Kuwait, media and authorities warn that Ethiopian workers are a particular to threat to children because of “cultural practices” and “religious beliefs” that could lead them to sacrifice children. Parents are encouraged to monitor workers with surveillance cameras in order to protect their children from domestic workers, a practice that has become particularly common in the UAE.

In a Gulf News survey, the majority of Emirati respondents recommended surveillance cameras for homes with young children. Parents claimed monitoring is essential given the “extensive amount of videos about certain inappropriate behavior committed by domestic workers circulated on social media.” The head of family prosecution at Abu Dhabi Public Prosecution, Mohammed Al Danhani, endorsed surveillance, informing the The National that: “Hidden surveillance cameras were a good way of spotting any problems. Most of the cases we received were discovered by surveillance cameras.”

In neither article do respondents or editors reflect on domestic workers’ right to privacy or entertain the idea that it is precisely such unfair working conditions that can induce workers to commit crimes. In an al-Riyadh article last year, Saudi citizens condemned the surveillance of guests, holding that it violates their basic rights to privacy. Though the very limited regulation of domestic work is often justified by the claim that workers are not employees but “guests,” this right does not appear to extend to them.

Other Arabic-language Emirati papers extensively document the use of at-home cameras. An Al-Bayyan report begins: “Due to the increasing number of videos in a society filled with maids, taping attacks on children and others. And due to maids’ violations and the parents’ busy schedules outside home, technology should now be more involved in our social atmosphere, to give us strength and trust.” In the report, Emirati women admitted they installed over 10 cameras in one home, some watching live streams on their cell phones. Most do not inform domestic workers that they are being monitored, using cameras masked as pens or clocks.

Naturally, features on home surveillance predominantly report the offending behavior caught on camera, eclipsing good or normal behavior. A 2010 Kuwaiti feature related only horror stories about domestic workers letting men in, giving food away, and harassing children. Current stories are only publish-worthy if they support these narratives.

Home surveillance of domestic workers is of course not limited to the Gulf States, being a contentious practice throughout the UK and US. But the issue takes another dimension in the Gulf, where domestic workers are regularly confined to the house. The restrictions on their mobility mean that workers are under nearly 24/7 surveillance by employers looking for a reason to punish them. If anything, the excessive monitoring is likely to increase employers’ paranoia and consequently increase the repercussions for domestic workers.

Surveillance is yet another mechanism of control for employers, who are empowered by authorities to encroach the proper bounds of an employment relationship. In the most recent draft of the GCC unified contract, domestic workers are guaranteed a reasonable right to privacy but must also respect the privacy of their employers by "not revealing family secrets" or face significant penalties. It seems unlikely that the two clauses will be enforced equally.

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412