As any economist with any resemblance of a brain can confirm (i.e. those outside of the U.S. government not rationalizing running up trillion dollar debts), an economic boom appears to be a desirable thing. Pockets bulge. Exports leave the affected nation as quickly as if they had been shot out of a cannon. Foreign investment grows exponentially. What they rarely tell you is that the boom can also be the sound of a backfire. Take Jordan, for example. Those freshly paved roads and newly erected highrises look grand, lending legitimacy to a city mired in irrelevancy for so long. Of course, mixed in the tar and asphalt is a human ingredient – blood.
Jordan’s sweatshops are already well documented. Fueled by various free trade agreements with the United States and other western nations, Jordan is constantly under pressure to produce, labor laws and human decency be damned. 16 hour days seven days a week are not uncommon for imported labor coming from places like Bangladesh and China. Upon arrival in Jordan, their passports are confiscated, effectively removing any possibility of leaving the country. Their reward for their bone-crunching labor? A 50$ wage…per month. If they even see that.
I will leave it at that paragraph detailing the abuses liberally dished out by the sweatshops. An equally devious problem has been the most recent scandalous issue revolving around domestic help. According to the Jordan Times, 35,000 domestic servants come from Singapore, 25,000 from Sri Lanka, and 15,000 from the Philippines. Odd, when you consider that you never see many foreigners around here that even look remotely Far East Asian. There’s a good reason for that. With Jordanian families tending to cherish privacy, they are never allowed out of the house.
Mind you, these are also not your run-of-the-mill bottom dwellers who can’t read or write their own names. Case in point was the story of a 23-year-old Filipino lady with a teaching degree. She was hired to tend to the children and keep house of an upper middle class Jordanian family. She was not allowed outside. People who know Filipinos are aware of the fact that they are deeply religious and would rather be crucified than miss a Sunday mass. That certainly didn’t bother the family she was working for. According to the family, she fell from a second-floor balcony in a ‘suicide attempt’. Volunteers from the church and other humanitarian organizations know fully well how to translate a claim like that: the lady was pushed from the balcony. She was paralyzed from the neck down and eventually succumbed to her wounds back home, while the local family responsible is delaying criminal court proceedings to this day and is unlikely to be convicted.
Abuse is as common as sand twisters around here. There have been plenty of suicides (the phony one mentioned in the previous paragraph aside), rape, and people seeking protection from the church or their embassy. The Phillipine Embassy claims that this has been a costly problem for them, as up to a hundred refugees were being housed in the Embassy basement. The church opened up a shelter for them, assisted heavily by private funds. According to the most recent estimate I have received, there are 230 refugees shacked up there, all of them domestic workers on the run from their employers. I don’t even know what the workers from Sri Lanka and Indonesia do. Maybe I don’t want to know.
You would think Jordanians would know better than that. It is then hard to have sympathy with a country whose population is two thirds ethnic Palestinian. You would think, like Israel, that they would know a thing or two about oppression. Meet murder and abuse, capitalism’s ugly twin cousins. No country is immune from them. I am hoping that is not what the Jordanian Dream is about, if there is such a thing. That dream, at least for most immigrant workers, has become a dead-end nightmare.
Jordan’s sweatshops are already well documented. Fueled by various free trade agreements with the United States and other western nations, Jordan is constantly under pressure to produce, labor laws and human decency be damned. 16 hour days seven days a week are not uncommon for imported labor coming from places like Bangladesh and China. Upon arrival in Jordan, their passports are confiscated, effectively removing any possibility of leaving the country. Their reward for their bone-crunching labor? A 50$ wage…per month. If they even see that.
I will leave it at that paragraph detailing the abuses liberally dished out by the sweatshops. An equally devious problem has been the most recent scandalous issue revolving around domestic help. According to the Jordan Times, 35,000 domestic servants come from Singapore, 25,000 from Sri Lanka, and 15,000 from the Philippines. Odd, when you consider that you never see many foreigners around here that even look remotely Far East Asian. There’s a good reason for that. With Jordanian families tending to cherish privacy, they are never allowed out of the house.
Mind you, these are also not your run-of-the-mill bottom dwellers who can’t read or write their own names. Case in point was the story of a 23-year-old Filipino lady with a teaching degree. She was hired to tend to the children and keep house of an upper middle class Jordanian family. She was not allowed outside. People who know Filipinos are aware of the fact that they are deeply religious and would rather be crucified than miss a Sunday mass. That certainly didn’t bother the family she was working for. According to the family, she fell from a second-floor balcony in a ‘suicide attempt’. Volunteers from the church and other humanitarian organizations know fully well how to translate a claim like that: the lady was pushed from the balcony. She was paralyzed from the neck down and eventually succumbed to her wounds back home, while the local family responsible is delaying criminal court proceedings to this day and is unlikely to be convicted.
Abuse is as common as sand twisters around here. There have been plenty of suicides (the phony one mentioned in the previous paragraph aside), rape, and people seeking protection from the church or their embassy. The Phillipine Embassy claims that this has been a costly problem for them, as up to a hundred refugees were being housed in the Embassy basement. The church opened up a shelter for them, assisted heavily by private funds. According to the most recent estimate I have received, there are 230 refugees shacked up there, all of them domestic workers on the run from their employers. I don’t even know what the workers from Sri Lanka and Indonesia do. Maybe I don’t want to know.
You would think Jordanians would know better than that. It is then hard to have sympathy with a country whose population is two thirds ethnic Palestinian. You would think, like Israel, that they would know a thing or two about oppression. Meet murder and abuse, capitalism’s ugly twin cousins. No country is immune from them. I am hoping that is not what the Jordanian Dream is about, if there is such a thing. That dream, at least for most immigrant workers, has become a dead-end nightmare.
