Under-Protected Abroad, Domestic Workers Find Ways to Resist

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Southeast Asian domestic laborers often migrate to wealthier countries where they are excluded from labor protections and left vulnerable to abuse. While COVID-19 has made labor conditions worse, some migrant workers have found their own ways to resist.

In April, nine Vietnamese women huddled into the frame of a smartphone camera to broadcast a plea for help to their government and potential supporters back home. One of the women wore an eye patch to cover an injury, which she alleged was caused by her former employer.

In the video they recorded, the women explained that they were domestic workers stuck at a deportation center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital. They needed help getting back to Vietnam.

“The employers brought us here without returning our belongings, passports or salary,” one of the women, H’Thai Ayun, reads from a letter in the video. 

Amid pandemic-related border closures, some of the women had been stuck in the deportation facility for several months, others for over a year, having escaped employers who, they say, physically and mentally abused them, denied them healthcare and made them work more than 12 hours a day, seven days a week. 

H’Thai Ayun was desperate to get back home. She pleaded with her employer for permission to leave, and when that failed, she refused to speak for seven days straight. After the employer released her to the Saudi Arabian agency that had placed her in that job, she went on hunger strike and demanded to be sent to a deportation facility where she would be able to meet other Vietnamese women. She eventually told the agency: “If you don’t let me go home, I’ll die here.”

Other women in the video had also tried calling their recruitment agents and the Vietnamese embassy seeking help getting home, H’Thai Ayun tells New Naratif. But when those efforts failed, they decided to post their video on Facebook, where it has since been shared more than 100,000 times.

As of November, most of the women are back in Vietnam, after activists from the US-based NGO Boat People SOS saw the video and helped them get on a flight that carried Vietnam’s national football team home following a match against Saudi Arabia. 
Lan*, another Vietnamese domestic worker in Saudi Arabia, was also hoping to get home on that flight, but she couldn’t secure a seat. 

“I’m so sad. Every time there is a flight, they say it’s my time to go home. But in the end, it’s not,” she says. Her two-year employment contract expired in October 2020.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, domestic workers from Southeast Asia who work in wealthier countries in East Asia and the Middle East were
already one of the most under-protected classes of workers.

Often excluded from their host countries’ labor laws and lacking legal recourse, they are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Movement restrictions in place since 2020 to curb the spread of COVID-19 and the resulting economic fallout have heightened these vulnerabilities. 

“Due to this pandemic, live-in migrant domestic workers worked longer hours with increased workloads, had no day off and limited access to [personal protective equipment], and faced some problems such as unpaid salary and physical as well as mental health issues,” says Bariyah, a field organiser
for the International Domestic Workers Federation. 

Still, some migrant workers from Southeast Asia have found their own ways to resist.

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