International Women's Day - APMM
Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants (APMM)
Statement on International Women's Day
08 March 2015
Uphold the Rights of Women Migrant Workers!
Fight for Decent Wage! Stop Forced Migration!
“Women hold up half the sky” as the saying goes, and in the world of temporary labor migration, this is an almost literal truth. Women make up 48% of the total estimated 232 million migrant workers worldwide, according to OECD statistics, and they work in the most precarious jobs in developed countries. They are also more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation than their male counterparts, but often do not get the policy and statutory protection they sorely need.
Receiving-country governments often take a myopic and superficial approach in addressing violations of woman migrant workers' rights, such as in the abuse case of Erwiana Sulistyaningsih in Hong Kong. Even as Erwiana has won her court case against her former employer, the Hong Kong government adamantly refuses to consider reforming its discriminatory policies on foreign domestic workers, preferring to treat the matter entirely as one of law enforcement. It does not recognize such policies as the two-week rule and mandatory live-in arrangement and empowerment of placement agencies as creating a fertile breeding ground for abuse of women migrant workers.
Women migrant workers in the Middle East are in a even worse fix, subjected to virtual bondage by the kafala (sponsorship) system and running up against a feudal-patriarchal culture that sees women as inferior to men. Abuse cases such as sexual molestation and rape abound, and access to justice and redress is very limited. The victim is may even be treated as the culprit under the Sharia Law, and the death penalty is applied liberally even to such cases as killing in self-defense and adultery.
In Singapore, women migrant workers are employed under conditions that are comparable to the kafala system, wherein the Singapore government requires bonds to be placed by employers for their migrant workers to ensure that the employers are penalized for the misdemeanors of their employees. This causes employers to tightly control the movement and activities of their migrant workers, and has even led to the half-hearted implementation of the new law on 1-day paid leave per week under effect since 2013. As of April 2014, only 37% of foreign domestic workers (FDWs) in Singapore enjoy this right, according to the government's Ministry of Manpower (MoM).
On a larger scale, majority of receiving countries in the Asia Pacific region and even globally have not ratified nor adopted the principles of the ILO Domestic Workers' Convention (C189). This shows that while governments such as Hong Kong and Singapore may showcase their adherence to women's rights by signing the UN Convention to Eliminate of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), they draw the line at adopting international statutes that will oblige them to reform their discriminatory policies against women migrant workers.
But the largest discriminatory policy of all is the promotion of labor-export program that operate under the neoliberal ideology of “migration for development”, which consigns women workers and peasants in underdeveloped countries to labor in slave-like conditions abroad. The so-called “genderization” of migration refers to the fact that neoliberal globalization has not only perpetuated, but has even systematized, gender stereotyping in the labor market by channelling women toilers to jobs such as domestic work, caregiving, information and communications technology, garments and entertainment. Women currently under the neoliberal model of “development” are no nearer to liberation than they were under preceding periods of global capitalism.
This International Women's Day, the Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants (APMM) unites with all women migrant workers all over the world in calling on migration-flow governments to attune their policies towards the protection and promotion of women migrant workers' rights. Even more importantly, we demand that the labor-export policy of sending-country governments be scrapped, in favor of development programs that will lead to the elimination of structural poverty, social injustices, rampant corruption, militarism, foreign intervention, state repression and all other push factors of forced labor migration. #
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General E-mail: ap...@apmigrants.org
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"We dream of a society where families are not broken up by the urgent need for survival. We dream and will actively work for a homeland where there is opportunity for everyone to live a decent and humane life."