Saudi women can work as housemaids
Ghazi Al Ghosaibi, Saudi Arabia’s Labour Minister, decried the influence on guardians on Saudi Arabian society during a meeting with the Human Rights Commission, saying they hindered society’s progress. His comments came as a response over a controversy sparked by the Ministry of Social Affairs, which is considering hiring Saudi women as housemaids. The minister went on to criticize the elements in society who reject the notion of women choosing that profession.
“I see that any job, whatever it may be, is an agreement between an employer and the employee. It is a matter of accepting and refusing. If there is a woman whose circumstances force her to work in a kitchen for a few hours and she accepts the payment, then I cannot come and say, ‘How could Saudi women take such jobs?’ Our mothers and grandmothers used to do such jobs. And they still do in the Bedouin culture,” he said.
“The ministry or any other concerned authority has no business if a woman is satisfied with her payment. And I have no right to say that a Saudi woman should not be dubbed a ‘housemaid’,” Al Gosaibi said. He
I am happy to see this position accepted by the Saudi Ministry of Labour. In fact this might help stop people from associating housemaid with “cheap” slaves and people might begin to respect and appreciate these positions. If you condemn this, then you would have to condemn the other housemaids from South Asia as well, namely Sri Lanka, which Saudi Arabia has more than 600,000 of.
These are wise words the minister spoke. There’s more then one colleague who could learn from him. Lesson: “Common sense and its practical use in politics”.
Now if only he would address the other problem: why are there widespread issues concerning “cheap labour” in Saudi Arabia? At least 19,000 maids run away each year due to abuse and severe working conditions. The government, and the ministry of labor especially, has done absolutely nothing to appease the situation. In fact you see him resort to saying something like, “people can simply hire cheap labor” - hmm! South Asian workers have suffered under too many racist policies, where such wise words apply to citizens only, when in fact migrant/expat workers in Saudi lack a significant amount of rights… and their labour is far too “cheap” for them to even afford a decent living. Time to change that.
At least you can see him willing to open the floor to controversial discussions though where overwhelmingly conservative and shallow claims are shot down, like women not being able to choose “unacceptable” professions like house keeping even when they are perfectly legitimate and in fact respectable.
this happened to become a law in Iran several years ago, and I think it may be a good starting point to improve women’s conditions: “if your wife is to do the household, pay her as you would have to pay an ordinary housemaid.”
I think this is a positive step on the long road to promoting women’s rights in Saudi and the whole of the Middle East. The minister is acknowledging a woman’s right to choose her line of work, even if that choice is at odds with conservative thinking. If we extrapolate from this, we can envision the happy day when women will have a right to choose all sorts of things: who she wishes to marry, how she should partner with her husband, what career path to follow, what to do with her body, who she wishes to pray with, what business plan she wishes for her business, what party she should decide to lead, and how she is to lead her country.
And the choice a Saudi woman makes will determine the path her country will follow, and the destiny of the Middle East as a whole. So a lot is at stake, in allowing a woman to make a choice, even the honorable choice to make her living by “cleaning up,” around the house.