Report: Foreign House Help Abused
By Katherine Roth, Associated Press Writer
Originally published by The Associated Press, June 13, 2001
NEW YORK (AP) — Many foreign workers granted special visas to be household employees in the United States endure long hours, low pay and abusive employers because the government does little to protect them, a human rights group found.
Thousands of workers, most of them women, come to this country every year to work for diplomats, foreign business people and U.S. citizens, Human Rights Watch said in a report to be released Thursday.
"Often these employers come from a powerful, elite class, and they are abusing the rights of some of the most powerless,'' said Carol Pier, author of the report from the New York-based human rights group. "This is a serious human rights abuse in the United States, but it has remained largely hidden from public view.''
Pier said more than 4,000 domestic workers are in this country on special visas at any given time. The workers' visas are linked to their employers, and leaving their jobs can cause them to lose their immigration status and be deported, the report said.
In about 10 percent of the cases reviewed by the group, employers were accused of luring workers to the United States with false promises and then holding them in servitude.
The group said workers were rarely allowed outside, were not allowed to speak to strangers, and in some cases were physically or sexually abused. In the cases reviewed, the average hourly wage was $2.14, sometimes even before deductions for room and board.
The report details the case of a woman who received $100 a month to work for a diplomat and said the money was sent directly to her husband in Bangladesh. She said she worked seven days a week, for an average of 14 hours a day, and was rarely allowed to leave her employer's apartment.
The report blamed the special visa program for much of the problem, saying no government agency is responsible for monitoring the visa programs.
The INS is not required to provide court hearings for workers before they are deported, and live-in domestics are not covered by federal laws governing overtime pay, workplace health and safety, the right to organize and sexual harassment, the group said.
Sue Hensley, a spokeswoman for the Department of Labor, said Wednesday she had just received the report and had not yet read it. But she acknowledged the difficulty of protecting the workers.
"The Department of Labor exists to protect the worker and we enforce the law at every opportunity,'' Hensley said. "But there is no simple solution.''
