When the boats come home.

“Never surrender your passport to someone to keep!” is advice which is often given to expatriates on arriving in the Gulf. In practice this is harder than it sounds. I know one British employee who was told that if he did not hand his passport over his job contract would be terminated there and then. He reluctantly handed it over and then had the frustrating fight to get it back when he went on his holidays.

Talking through this issue with a Kuwaiti friend, he shrugged and said that it is to be expected that employers keep passports. Even though they know it is against the law! This is a fact. It is against the law for employers to confiscate and keep passports. Passports in truth belong to the governments who issue them and so anyone who needs their passports back should advise their embassy.

It is a puzzle though where this practice comes from. Why is it normative for employers to break the law in this matter so consistently? As a phenomenon it is not unique to Kuwait, it occurs all over the Gulf. One whisper of an answer was suggested to me though the reading of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book ‘Outliers’. He points to how attitudes and behaviours are preserved in specific cultures and passed on from generation to generation. In his provocative book he explores how this works using the institute of slavery as one example.

So what historical institution emerged in the Gulf which allowed the widespread practice of withholding passports against the employees’ will?

Authors Paul Dresch and James Piscatori in their book “Monarchies and Nations” point to the pearling industry. Pearling has a shared history in all the Gulf states and we can see in this historical institution the patterns and attitudes which shape today’s employers in the Gulf. Dresch and Piscatori wrote that the pearling industry was “built on debt bondage and indentured labour, where historically a diver in debt needed his captain’s release to work for another or face arrest for absconding. The labour market was regulated by freezing the labourer in his relationship to one employer. . . This system of private policing most probably deterred criminal behaviour among expatriates, but it also facilitated criminality among sponsors.” They then go on to explain how sponsors continue this tradition by holding passports.

History is a powerful shaper.. Today the pearling industry has virtually disappeared due to the Japanese innovation of cultured pearls. Yet the old attitudes prevail. The problem is that these attitudes now contravene the modern laws of Kuwait and international law. The boats have come home to a new world where the rules have changed. A law passed in 2007 says that passports can not be held by employers against the employees will. This law needs to be more widely known and enforced.

The scriptures advise “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. . . .For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong.” (Romans 13.1-3.)

Maid Abuse (Again!)

“CAN we help?” is a question a lot of people ask when they hear news of another unfortunate soul who has slipped between the cracks of society. Here is a story of what happened when some friends of mine did try to help. They reached out to a Nepali lady who was injured after jumping out of a third floor window in order to escape her abusive employers. This maid had surgery on her pelvis and spine, was five months pregnant and to add insult to injury was serving a sentence in deportation jail on an absconding charge. (Why don’t they arrest the abusive employers?)
The authorities finally agreed to let my friends buy an airline ticket to allow her to go home. But when it came to processing the paperwork, the officials claimed to have lost the Nepali girl’s passport (it was found in the same drawer where it was originally deposited). Finally on the day that the ticket would have expired, out of desperation, the friends turned up the jail ready to take her themselves to the airport. The deportation staff reluctantly escorted the Nepali maid to the airport, and made sure that their annoyance was expressed by denying the poor girl use of a wheel chair and insisted that she walked the whole way through the airport and immigration in order to punish her. The abuse of this girl continued right up to the moment she boarded the plane.
She was the lucky one! She got out. Others receiving help are still stuck at the deportation centre. Tickets have been bought to allow them to go home, but they have expired because someone, somewhere will not process their paperwork. Hundreds of dinars from those who wish to help have been wasted. Prisoners are losing their minds because they have been stranded in the deportation centre for months. The tragedy is that often their tickets have been bought and paid for by people who have shown acts of charity – but bureaucratic apathy has reduced these efforts of kindness to nought. The tickets expire and dreams of going home are reduced to despair.
Please note, we are not talking about convicted criminals here. We are talking about people who chose to leave their employers under dire circumstances and who want to go home. Can you help? Of course you can. But you need to be committed and determined to see it through. Helping people in Kuwait is not for the faint hearted, but there will be reward and God sees what we do. “The King will reply ‘Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me”. (Matthew 25:40)