Comment: Coming to terms with rights – Gulf Digital News

Comment: Coming to terms with rights – Gulf Digital News

One of the first lessons I learnt at an ILO-sponsored workshop on reporting labour issues, is to be politically aware of framing my stories. Calling someone who works in your home a ‘maid’ is incorrect. The terminology should recognise the nature of her/his work and the correct term is ‘domestic worker’.

By reducing the scope of a domestic worker’s full day of ceaseless duty to a word that is more gender-specific than work-descriptive, we take the first step towards brushing off the rights of the person and not seeing their aspirations as worthy.

We devalue their work and pay less salary, we don’t give them days off or overtime money or the emotional support and physical comfort that a workplace demands.

There are fewer occasions these days, but readers will remember the time when we often heard about ‘runaway’ maids or workers. That word smacked of slave history and put the onus of the illegal behaviour on the worker rather than on the work conditions or the employer who is morally bound to ensure the best workplace. Of course, Bahrain has come a long way from the early 80s when worker rights were just being processed. Even after the more enlightened 2000s, there