With thrust from the government and their husbands, women workers are forced to migrate to foreign countries and send scarce foreign currency into Sri Lanka to help the economy. But far away from home, they are alone, drudgingly working, with no safety net at all.
In bankrupt Sri Lanka, waiting in queue is the most important thing in many people's lives. People wait for seven or eight hours to buy low-cost rations from the state-owned shops, be on road for two days to buy a can of gas, and some spend four or five days in a queue to fill up with five litres of petrol, and hundreds line up for hours to get a passport in order to work abroad.
In the Capital city Colombo, the Department of Immigration and Emigration building is surrounded by thousands of people. It takes fifteen minutes to find the end of the long queue. People waiting for passports rest against the edges of flowerbeds and railings, or spread out a cloth and sit on the ground, moving slowly towards the entrance of the passport office. Most people go in groups, sleep under a nearby bridge at night and take turns to be in the queue. It takes three to four days in queue before they can step into the door of the office.
It's a scene that has been playing out every day for the past few months. At a time when many government agencies are paralysed due to fuel shortages, the Department of Immigration and Emigration has become one of the busiest government offices in Sri Lanka.
Anjana (not her real name), 36, stands near the end of the queue. Her home is 20 kilometres away in Kaduwela district. After travelling in a crowded bus and waiting for nearly 20 hours the day before, she returned empty-handed. Today she is hoping to get a token, after which she would have to wait another three to four days to get her passport done.
Having previously worked as a domestic worker in Kuwait for two and a half years, Anjana returned to Sri Lanka in 2014 to look after her children. For the past eight years she was managing on the income she earned from working in a tea plantation. But the current economic crisis has forced her to decide to go abroad again. “In these eight years, we have never faced the difficulties like now. The cost of living is getting higher r and we can no longer afford the basic needs of food and clothing.” With two children in school and a husband without a steady job, Anjana says she has to earn money to support her family.
Ten years ago, Anjana was earning 50 dinars a month in Kuwait (about US$180 at the time), now she is being told by agents that she can get up to 150 dinars a month (about US$490), which is 170,000 SL rupees. In Sri Lanka, on the other hand, she could only earn a few thousand rupees (about US$15-28) a month working in the tea estate.
Most of the women in the queue are about the same age as Anjana and the majority of them are going to the same region–Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Qatar. Data show that around 200,000 people go abroad to work in Sri Lanka each year, with women accounting for about 40 per cent. Their jobs and destinations are highly homogeneous compared to those of male labour migrants: About 90 per cent of the migrant women work in the domestic sector and over 90 per cent go to the Middle East.
In Middle Eastern countries, they work alongside women workers from Indonesia, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Nepal for large middle-class families, filling the deficit in the local care labour market. In the first five months of 2022, Sri Lanka received US$1.336 billion in foreign currency, equivalent to 62% of its import bill in 2021. To increase foreign exchange reserves, the Sri Lankan government has made several policy changes this year to ease restrictions on women working abroad and as a first step, they issued passports to everyone who intended to leave the country.
Until May 2022, Sri Lanka has issued 288,645 passports, compared to 382,527 passports issued in the whole 2021, according to the Department of Immigration and Emigration. By the beginning of July 2022, 156,179 labourers had already left the country, an increase of more than 50% compared to the 2019 figure.
Standing in the queue for a passport is just the simplest, most trivial step these female domestic workers face on the road to labour migration. Once they board the plane and land in a completely new country, the story just begins.
April 23, 2012. Ten years later, Pamila Devadasan still remembers this day vividly. It was the first time in her life that she left her husband and children and travelled alone to a distant and strange country ‘Saudi Arabia’, thousands of miles away.
Pamila’s home is in a small village of Kilinochchi in northern Sri Lanka, 343 kilometres from the capital Colombo. Kilinochchi was the administrative centre of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a militant group seeking independence for the Tamils in the north of the country. The first 25 years of Pamila’s life were spent in the Sri Lankan civil war which caused more than 100,000 deaths (at least 40,000 of them are Tamil civilians). After the war, international organisations and foreign aid donors provided assistance for the reconstruction of the northern region, and Pamila’s family received 500,000 rupees, which she said was not enough.
Her husband had taken out loans and spent 1.1 million rupees to build a house. The family was nearly half a million in debt. They relied on the husband’s daily wage job. He earned 700 rupees a day and only got work ten days a month. The earnings barely covered the family’s daily expenses. They could not afford to send their children to school, let alone pay off the high debts. Under heavy financial burden, her husband’s drinking problem worsened. “Every time he heard the sound of a motorbike outside, my husband would think it’s the moneylender who has come to collect the money, and hide inside the house as he was scared to face them,” Pamila told me.
In order to pay off her debts and keep her two sons in school, she decided to find an agent to help her work abroad. As one of the main exporters of domestic workers, Sri Lanka's network of labour agents extends to almost each and every village, and in some villages, almost every household has someone working abroad.
Pamila’s husband did not agree at first for her to go abroad, but it was the only way forward in front of him. Because of the high demand for female domestic workers, when women go abroad for work, the agent pays an advance on top of their monthly salary, but men instead have to pay the agent upfront for their services. When Pamila left Sri Lanka, her husband received an advance payment of 120,000 rupees.
Pamila’s employer is from Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, and she knew almost nothing about her job before she set foot in her employer’s home. With a family of eight, including a newborn baby, Pamila was the only domestic worker and did all the cooking, cleaning and childcare. From the moment she opens her eyes in the morning, she starts working and does not rest until almost midnight.
For women workers like Pamila who have never left home and have no work experience, leaving Sri Lanka is like opening a mystery box. They had only briefly learned Arabic in their pre-trip agency training. They could not read the labour contracts, and they knew nothing about the cities outside their homes. “The contract was in Arabic and Sinhala (one of the official languages) of Sri Lanka, and we couldn't read a word of it as we only knew Tamil, and we just signed it.” She took out the contract and showed it to me; in fact, it was written in Arabic and English as opposed to Sinhala as she mentioned.
According to her contract, Pamila’s monthly salary was 900 rials, or approximately 30,000 Sri Lankan rupees, which the employer was to deposit into her husband's bank account every month. But the second month she arrived, her employer said he would no longer pay her monthly salary, but would pay her a lump sum at the end of her two-year contract. “I have to feed my family and pay off debts to build a house, so I can't wait,” she said. Pamila refused the lumpsum plan and contacted the agent to change her employer. The new employer turned out to be a 95-year-old woman who was a diabetic patient.
Pamila says although the work was not too heavy, she had to eat the bland and tasteless diabetic meal that she prepared for the old lady. She had no time to cook separately for herself. But at times when she felt hungry, she had to wait for her employer to sleep and then secretly make herself a little food and eat it sitting in the toilet.
“I struggled for food like a beggar. If my employer asked me, I would say I was just using the toilet,” Pamila said. She said she had not told anyone about it at the time, including her own husband. “It was my choice to build a house, have children and leave the country, and
I had to keep working in order to make a good living for them.” She said she chose to keep quiet for fear that complaining would cost her job.
She endured this for two and a half years, without a single day off in between. Pamila bathed and fed the old lady every day, checked her blood pressure, administered insulin and gave her medication, and had to endure her verbal abuses for no reason from time to time, in addition to the fear that she would be arrested by the police if she administered the wrong medication. Every year during Ramadan, when her employer entertained guests at night, Pamila had no time to sleep and was loaded with work.
But that was the only moment that she found comfort. Guests at the party brought their own domestic workers from India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Kenya… As a worker in the host’s house, Pamila had to do almost all the work in the kitchen, and the other women workers gather in the kitchen and talk as they did their chores.
“If the party was in my house then I would be busy working in the kitchen and listening to other workers. If I met someone at their house next time, I had the opportunity to talk and relax like the other domestic workers.”Pamila said. Like her, the women workers all lived in isolation every day, and it is only at these parties that they have the chance to talk to each other and share the hardships and difficulties of their work. The only language they had in common was basic Arabic.
Every time her employer said they would be having a party, Pamila felt secretly delighted. She told me, “Even though it was a lot of work, it was very satisfying to be able to talk to the other women workers for ten minutes.” Many of the women workers don't have their own mobile phones, they don't get to see each other at all except at parties, and when the party is over, they don’t know if they’ll see each other again the next time.
At the end of her two-year contract, Pamila sought to go home, but her employer, the old lady’s children, held on to her passport and demanded that she look after the lady until she died. She insisted on leaving and left after paying for the return ticket with her own money. On the day she left, the foundations of the family's house had just been laid back in Kilinochchi, and with the Rs 680,000 she had earned, the house was finally built.
Not everyone is as lucky as Pamila. It took her neighbour Niroshini Vadivelu months to escape her employer's home.
In June 2012, Niroshini was sent to the coastal city of Dammam in eastern Saudi Arabia to work as a domestic worker in a family of ten. Soon had she arrived at her employer’s home, another female worker in the house began to cry to Niroshini about her hardships. She was also from Sri Lanka and despite her contract ending in two years, her employer never agreed to her leaving and she continued to work for four years bearing the difficulties.
The same fate befell Niroshini. The hostess took away Niroshini’s passport and other documents and asked her to cut her long hair, on the grounds that it would be inconvenient to work with and that it attracts lice. Starvation was common, the employers often ordered food from outside, leaving the women workers without food. There were twelve rooms in the employer’s house, Niroshini and another woman were responsible for cleaning all the rooms, doing the laundry, and helping the cook, amid they not getting paid for months.
Niroshini had been trying to escape, but how can she run away when she had no passport, no mobile phone, not a penny in her hand and not even a pair of shoes? “Every time I had
to cry and beg her (the hostess) to give me the mobile phone to speak to my family for five minutes. They would still stand beside me and listen to our conversations,” Niroshini said.
The other woman worker in the same room helped her a lot, she says Niroshini secretly wrote down her employer’s name, phone number and address and waited for her chance. One day she finally mustered the courage to run out of the door, barefoot, with the clothes left behind by a former worker. “I was shivering and scared to death.” Afraid of being seen, Niroshini says she hid behind a garbage truck while running ont the streets. An Indian Tamil called on the road and helped her contact the police. It was at the police station that Niroshini met the male owner of the house for the first time, who, she realised, seemed absolutely ignorant to the abuses she was experiencing from the hostess. The male owner retained her and said he would put Niroshini in another house.
Niroshini refused as she just wanted to go home. After waiting for a few days, her employer finally completed her paperwork. As she sat in a bus to the airport with other migrant workers waiting to return home, Niroshini was sure that she could really go home. “I was crying to the person next to me.” She told me.
Many women migrant workers have faced a similar fate. Franklin works for the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (Jaffna) and deals with human trafficking cases of labour migrants. He told me that in cities such as Qatar, there are Sri Lankan women workers who have been brought to work by agents and who have fled their employers’ homes and are living on the streets, begging for a living. But they are still reluctant to come forward with complaints because they don’t want to be drawn into lengthy and complicated judicial procedures, and some even end up in the hands of traffickers.
Niroshini has three children. Her husband, a former member of the LTTE, had his left arm paralysed during the war and his right leg implanted with steel nails which left him disabled. “He used to ride his bicycle with one leg and collect firewood and sell it in neighbouring villages to earn some money.” Niroshini began to sob, crying that her family was so poor at the time that she wanted to go abroad to earn money. At the time, her sister Nesamalar Periyathambi had been working as a domestic worker in Saudi Arabia for several years.
In 2006, without a livelihood, desperate to flee the country during the war, Nesamalar went to work as a domestic worker in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. Her husband was killed in action as a member of the LTTE in 2004 and two of her three sons were hit by stray bullets and bombshell in the years that followed, leaving them with lifelong disabilities.
A few months after arriving in Riyadh, Nesamalar lost contact with her family as her mother moved between refugee camps with her three sons with the war raging. They lost even their bank account details and the money in it during the war. In early 2009, Nesamalar, sitting in Riyadh, saw on television news her brother holding her wounded son. “I was sure that was my family.” After which she decided to return to Sri Lanka to find them.
But as soon as she landed, she was arrested for having been involved with the LTTE and Nesamalar spent 21 days in jail, eventually being released on bail by the agent who had sent her abroad. After her release from prison, Nesamalar frantically searched for her family in nearby refugee camps, searching all seven camps in Vavuniya. She spent all her savings but returned empty-handed. People in the village said that her family had all died in the war.
Left with no hope and choice, Nesamalar returned to Riyadh. But six months later, she unexpectedly received word from her village that her family had been found, and they have been living in a refugee camp in the neighbouring county of Mullaitivu.
The 26-year-long civil war tore Nesamalar’s family broken. Her father, elder brother and husband died in the war, her younger brother and two sons were left with lifelong disabilities and she was left with neither any money nor assets at the end of the war. To support her three sons, her only option was still to work abroad, and she continued to work as a domestic worker in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait until 2016 when the village gave her a plot of land. After this, she decided never to leave the country again.
“When I left Riyadh, my employer told me that I could go back anytime if I wanted to,” Nesamalar said, “I suffered so much that I’d rather die in Sri Lanka than go back.”
What happened to Pamila and the Nesamalar family is a microcosm of more than three million Sri Lankan Tamils. Nearly a million Sri Lankan Tamils emigrated during the 26-year civil war, with some 100,000 in neighbouring India alone. They mostly lived in refugee camps. Currently, the Tamil population in Sri Lanka stands at around 2.3 million, with 70% living in the northern and eastern regions.
Migration, refugee camps and displacement are common memories for almost all Tamils. Originally born in Kalmunai in eastern Sri Lanka, Nesamalar’s family moved 400 kilometres away to Jaffna with the outbreak of war and spent a decade moving from camp to camp until the war ended.
The war has completely destroyed the livelihoods of the Sri Lankan Tamils.
For Tamil women like Nesamalar, staying in Sri Lanka meant a lifetime of struggle to make ends meet. According to a report released by the United Nations in 2015, Sri Lanka’s Northern Province has 58,000 female-headed households, mainly because male family members have either died or become incapacitated by war. Women in these households are expected to support and take care of their families. Like Nesamalar, they had very few options.
“The post-war reconstruction was a bit of a failure. It has focused on infrastructure rather than the rural economy,” Ahilan Kadirgamar, a Sri Lankan political economist and senior lecturer at University of Jaffna said. The government had failed to provide support for agriculture and the fisheries, and many women were also unable to enter factories because of their caring responsibilities. They really had few opportunities to earn a decent income. The government tried to provide livelihood opportunities for women who have lost male family members by distributing animals for them to breed. But these projects have not been successful. “It has to be done on a community scale. Giving just one woman a cow or a few chickens is not going to work,” Kadirgamar said. He added that there are also private institutions that offer microloans. But instead of generating an income stream, they expose some people to exploitation by loan sharks.
“I’ve worked with the fishing and agricultural cooperatives. What we're trying to do is to find ways to develop livelihoods so that women can have more flexible hours to work and get some income by working from home. But the government hasn’t really set up a scheme like that, so it's been a huge problem.” Kadirgamar said.
Kadirgamar was also part of the Sri Lankan Tamil community that migrated overseas. His father, a historian, also taught at the University of Jaffna before the civil war broke out in Sri Lanka. The family later moved to Tokyo, Japan, whereKadirgamar studied and became an engineer. However, in later years, he decided to turn to economics and anthropology to participate in the post-war reconstruction of Sri Lanka and moved to Jaffna ever since.
When Kadirgamar was a child, a total of 25 relatives lived in the adjoining neighbourhood. During the colonial period, Jaffna was one of the largest ports in Asia, where trade and commerce flourished and the people were so wealthy that until the 1980s it remained the second largest city after the Greater Colombo area. But the war saw a rapid loss of both middle class and wealth, and today the poverty rate in Sri Lanka's Tamil ghettos is far higher than other regions. Even relatively affluent Jaffna has a poverty rate of 25%, well above the national average of 14.3%, and as high as 44.5% in Mullaitivu, where the final battle ended.
“Forty years have passed since and there must have been at least a hundred families in my cluster. But today only I and my cousin live in Jaffna,” Kadirgamar said to me.
In colonial Ceylon, the conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese was not serious. However, in independent Sri Lanka, as an ethnic and religious minority, the Tamils were subjected to continuous discrimination and oppression by the two main political parties, the SLPP and the UNP, which adhered to “Sinhala-Buddhist supremacy.”
The Ceylon Citizenship Act, passed by the UNP government in 1948, denied citizenship to over 700,000 Indian Tamils who had been sent to Sri Lanka from Tamil Nadu, India, by the British colonialists in the 19th century, almost all of whom were bonded labourers on tea plantations, representing 11% of the Sri Lankan population at the time. In 1956, the SLPP-led government also enacted the Official Language Act (also known as the “Sinhala Only Act”), which made Sinhala the sole official language of Sri Lanka, excluding not only Tamil but also restricting English as an intermediary language. The Act particularly restricted Tamil representation in government departments, sparking massive protests by Tamils and fuelling tensions between Sinhalese and Tamils.
The conflict kept escalating, leading to numerous large-scale attacks and massacres on both sides, and eventually igniting a civil war in 1983. The Rajapaksa brothers, who continued to rule Sri Lanka for over a decade and only recently stepped down, built their political reputation and established their political dynasty by defeating the LTTE and ending the civil war.
Thirteen years after the end of the war, Tamils are still living under the shadow of militarism. Kadirgamar said that while militarisation in the north waned when Rajapaksa briefly stepped down in 2015, it intensified again since 2019 after the Rajapaksas reclaimed the government following the terrorist attack.
Mullaitivu, where the final battle ended, is about 110 kilometres from Jaffna. Every ten minutes on the road to Mullaitivu there is an army post, a scene rarely seen in other parts of Sri Lanka. While broken walls and abandoned houses can still be seen everywhere in Mullaitivu, the Sri Lankan army has built many victory monuments in the place.
But the war for Tamils meant the death, disappearance and destitution of loved ones. “Even on war anniversaries, when people wished to light lamps in memory of their dead relatives, the army celebrated their victory and denied them their rights,” Singarasa Pirathas, regional coordinator of the National Fisheries Solidarity Movement, a Sri Lankan NGO, told me.
The land and culture of the local Tamil people are also being erased by the army. “They are destroying Tamil historical sites and replacing them with Buddhist temples,” Pirathas says. Many locals have had to seek out snakeheads to smuggle themselves into other countries in order to survive. In the process, some got cheated by agents and lost all their savings. Pirathas has been targeted by police for helping villagers fight over their land that was forcibly taken by the army. They have put up a lookout notice against him throughout the town.
Nesamalar's home rests near a military base. Entering the village from the main road, you pass a heavily guarded camp and a military hospital. The village, where all the villagers
were resettled as a result of the war, used to be a forest. They made their home by enclosing a plot of land with wood, barbed wire and metal plates.
The war changed not only the economic and political ecology, but also the family and cultural traditions of the local Tamil population. Tamil Hindus have traditionally maintained a strict caste hierarchy and arranged marriage system. But in Kilinochchi, there are many nuclear families in the village formed through love, such as Nesamalar and her sister Niroshini.
“Instead of keeping the girls at home, I thought it would be better to marry them off to men they loved and let them take care of my daughters,” Nagamma Muthulingam, Nesamalar's mother, told me. But the truth is, daughters are the breadwinners in these families. Like other women workers, when they go abroad to work, the responsibility of caring for the family shifts to their own mothers.
Maheswari Subaruban, 45, who also lives in a village in Kilinochchi, worked as a domestic worker in Kuwait since 2012 and returned to Sri Lanka only last September. With her husband doing a daily wage job in the construction and farming sectors, no home to live in and three sons to educate, she decided to work abroad to earn money. Maheswari asked her mother and aunt to look after her husband and sons. After the death of her aunt, it was difficult for her elderly mother to take on the heavy workload of the family and hence Maheswari returned home last year at the request of her husband.
Her first job was cleaning and looking after babies. Six months later, when her employer’s family had another child, Maheswari took over from the seventh day of the baby’s birth. “From 6 am to 10 pm I had to look after them all the time. I also had to feed the baby,” says Maheswari, “I’m the mother of those children all through the day, except for bedtime at night and a one-hour nap at noon.”
Although she worked without any break, Maheswari felt lucky to have met good employers who would patiently teach her Arabic and never delayed paying her wages. Even during the Covid-19 pandemic, she was well taken care of by her employer, provided with protective materials and got her the COVID-19 vaccine in Kuwait. But being separated from her family for long periods of time was a big problem for the children and for her. “I used to call the children before bedtime, and it would be two or three o'clock in the wee hours in Sri Lanka. My children would be half asleep answering the phone and it would appear as if just I am talking to myself on the other side of the line.” Maheswari says her husband didn't speak to her much for almost a year because he was upset that she had left home.
She understood the loneliness her husband was experiencing, but Maheswari felt that she had to save money for her son’s future. With the money she earned, the family built the house, in “Kuwait style,” she says with a smile, indicating the very small size of the house representing her living in Kuwait. “If my son is going to get married in the future, I can’t have my daughter-in-law live in such a small house,” Maheswari said. While she wishes to go to Kuwait again, her husband would not agree. Because, after his aunt died, there was no one to cook for him anymore.
Preparing for her son's future does not seem to be the most important thing to her husband. “He earns enough money to make ends meet, but it’s not enough," Maheswari tells me that she is happy that she contributes to the family, but also wishes her husband would take on more responsibility.
“As soon as he agrees, I'll pick up my passport and go back.” She said.
In 2013, the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment introduced a policy requiring female workers to complete a ‘family background check’ before migrating, and not to leave the country to work abroad if their children were under five years of age. This clause was introduced to mitigate the potential impact on their families when they move abroad. In addition, the government introduced a separate age limit for female migrant workers, claiming it was intended to protect female workers and the “left-behind children”. However, this has pushed some women workers into the black market, wherein they forged documents and worked abroad. Kenath Rajeevkaran of the Kilinochchi Migrant Workers Association told me. He said forging of documents is common among migrant workers, with some Hindus and Buddhists even taking a Muslim identity to make it easier to get employment in the Middle East.
Ka Mei Lau, Migrants United and Act for Human Rights Programme Officer at the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD), argues that these rules imposing bans were gender-based discrimination and that it placed women as weak and
their rights must be restricted for their own protection, but they often fail to protect women workers. “The travel bans are not only stopping women migrants travelling abroad to seek livelihood, but also forces them to travel in a dangerous way or become the victim of human trafficking.” She said.
That said, the “left-behind children” is indeed the biggest concern of many women workers. They feel that the absence of motherhood causes great psychological problems for the children, and that even if they go home, the children will still hold a grudge against their mothers’ absence, and think of them as just a “money-making machine”.
"This truly reflected how the system and policy treated them,” says Lau, adding that many countries do not provide adequate support to women migrant workers. “Providing sufficient education, medical service, and child care support in the home country, and to allow children to have good quality of care holistically, is the responsibility of the society, and not just that of the mother,” Lau said.
It wasn't just the friction with the children that needed mending. When she returned home, Pamila says, her husband was upset when people in the village would gossip in front of him that his wife is a “foreign return”, implying that she had done something shady to earn money abroad. “That’s when I told him what I was going through and cried the whole day,” She said. Pamila had worked hard to earn the money, but her husband only listened to the gossip and was completely unaware of the suffering she had endured.
Since returning from the Middle East, Nesamalar has been making a living doing farm work and daily-wage jobs. There were several garment factories around the village, but she was over the age limit of 35 and went unhired even after giving interviews thrice. In March 2019, she heard that the Kilinochchi Migrant Labour Association needed part-time social workers and ever since she started working for the association, liaising with other migrant women workers in the village and getting paid a few thousand rupees a month.
At the conference organised by the association, many women workers shared publicly for the first time the hardships of their jobs in the Middle East. Many had experienced abuse in the houses they worked and for some, it cost their lives. “One of my distant relatives was abused by her employer with an iron rod and they hit nails on her leg. She died a week after returning to Sri Lanka,” Nesamalar said.
There are currently 17 women workers in the village who are members of the association, and Nesamalar has spread safety information, educated them about labour rights and the law, organised plays for women workers to reflect on labour difficulties, and also done some investigative work. With the collapse of the Sri Lankan economy, about half of the women workers are considering going abroad to work again.
A deadly economic crisis, triggered by a shortage of foreign currency, has engulfed the island nation of Sri Lanka in the past few months. In early July, then Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe publicly declared that Sri Lanka was in a “state of bankruptcy”.
The deadly crisis did not come out of nowhere but had been in the works for a long time: In late 2021, Sri Lanka was downgraded by Moody's Investors Service in successive sovereign credit ratings due to a severe shortage of foreign exchange reserves. The Covid-19 global pandemic, which has lasted for nearly three years, has not only hit Sri Lanka's main foreign exchange earnings, but has also exposed its long-standing growth concerns.
Indian writer, independent scholar Rohini Hensman concludes that the neo-liberalisation policies of the 1980s initiated a highly indebted economic model for Sri Lanka, with foreign debt increasing rapidly under the Rajapaksa brothers, ‘much of it incurred by the family’s vanity projects and endless siphoning of money out of the country.’ Former President Gotabhaya Rajapaksa’s tax cuts, and fertiliser import ban were the final straw that broke the camel’s back, causing Sri Lanka's foreign exchange to dry up and crippling the economy.
In the midst of the deadly economic crisis, women workers like Nesamalar and Niroshini are undoubtedly among the most vulnerable groups.
Because she is a little younger than Nesamalar, Niroshini works in a garment factory in town, and her two daughters are also in the same industry. She works ten hours a day, standing at her sewing machine all the time, except for a total of 45 minutes for meals and tea breaks. With only Sunday offs, she currently earns a monthly salary of Rs 23,000.
Although the family has three people working, life is still stretched to the limit. With a monthly loan of Rs 12,000 to pay back, and her eldest daughter separated from her husband and with a son to take care, the family has not saved a single penny. “My daughter struggles with the same poverty line as I do and life is still the same,” Niroshini said. But she is happy with her job at the garment factory compared to her job in Saudi Arabia, and even during the COVID-19 lockdowns, the factory paid a basic salary.
The textile and garment industry, too, is one of Sri Lanka's most important foreign exchange earning industries. It employs over a million people directly or indirectly and generates 44% of Sri Lanka's total exports, which are expected to reach US$6 billion by the end of 2022. In addition to migrant women workers who returned from overseas joining the textile industry like Niroshini, tens of thousands of young women workers also leave their homes to work in large garment factories in Colombo or the South of the country.
These factories employ female workers at low prices and export their products to developed countries in Europe and the US.
Whether in Sri Lanka or the Middle East, the labour of women workers is sold at cheap prices to the beneficiaries of globalisation.
To ease the foreign exchange crisis, the Sri Lankan government has lifted the age limit for migrant women workers and removed the requirement for them to provide a “family background report”. But it also means that more women workers will be forced to embark on this uncharted and dangerous path, and as the number of migrant workers explodes, the protection the government can offer them will be unaccessible, leaving them potentially more vulnerable.
Nishantha Warnasooriya, the National Project Coordinator for the International Labour Organization Sri Lanka, said that because women female domestic workers had returned to Sri Lanka from Middle Eastern countries during the Covid-19 pandemic, there was now a great demand for domestic workers, which made it easier for women migrant workers to find work, so, many of them would choose to work in the Middle East during the current crisis.
However, in an emergency when the embassies have very limited staff, it may be difficult for migrant workers to contact them, and their first point of contact will still have to be their
family members, who will then contact the embassies through an agency or foreign employment office in their home country for assistance.
In addition, the governments of migrant-receiving countries, like the Middle Eastern countries, should also take more responsibility for labour protection. “Currently, Sri Lanka has signed 23 bilateral agreements with 16 countries (18 of which are active) and also promotes the establishment and implementation of mechanisms for the protection of migrant labour rights through various mechanisms of dialogue, including international and regional,” Warnasooriya said that Sri Lanka's bilateral agreements are now more effective than before, but the problem is that as more Sri Lankan workers wish to work abroad, the market’s co-demand is increasingly tilted towards the receiving countries of migrants, and in this way, Sri Lanka is also losing bargaining leverage. He says the implementation of specific policies also needs to be continuously pushed by all parties. And secondly, he says the ILO’s updated comprehensive migrants returnees policy, which is awaiting approval, is kept pending due to the political turmoil.
“Migration system and policy should be built based on human rights and gender equality,” said Lau, adding that besides removing various travel restrictions, the government should also provide enough information to enable women workers to make informed choices about migration. Lau said, in the long run, the government should also address and eliminate the structural factors that force women workers to work abroad, such as the lack of decent work opportunities at home.
Nesamalar's three sons are all in their twenties, but the family still lives on her sole income. With the money she has earned over the years, she has built a house with three small rooms, and painted the walls blue but still is unable to afford glass windows and hence has covered them with cardboard. The only furniture in the room is a three-storey cabinet with the pictures of her husband and sons, and the only picture of herself at the bottom, taken on one of her birthdays when her husband was still alive.
The youngest son still has the bullet in his brain from his wartime injury, which is too difficult to remove, and although he is currently able to take care of himself, Nesamalar keeps a close eye on him, fearing that he will come under the influence of some of the village’s young men who she says are addicted to alcohol and drugs. “The war is over but there is still not much development here, the young people are doing nothing.” She said.
I asked her what was the hope that still keeps her going at the moment, and Nesamalar whispered, “I believe in God.”
