http://www.menafn.com/qn_news_story_s.asp?StoryId=1093236211
This article is from a while back. It describes the fact that Kuwait is thinking about taking over the overall recruitment process for foreign labour and thereby getting rid of all these individual recruitment agencies. This is because it is at the stage of the recruitment agency that a good deal of corruption takes place. Lack of filtering for age (some girls coming in are as young as 14), law (last I heard it was illegal for Indian citizens to come to Kuwait as maids), and of course ability and mental health.
The recruitment agencies however, are in an uproar about what seems to be their lessening control over the lucrative trade in human life. I am in shock that to them, profit protection is SO important that they would sink so low as to say what they did in the article.
One of their arguments is that Kuwait should not take this step to improving the recruitment process because to remove corruption would be admitting to the international community that that there corruption in the first place. God forbid any country would want to admit to their mistakes, in order to progress to a point where those mistakes are no longer made. Regardless of your political opinion - it would be like George W. Bush continuing to insist there still ARE weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as his justification for the war in Iraq when, to my knowledge, they still haven't found any. hey no, we didn't make a mistake. (Insert country here) NEVER makes mistakes.
The second reason these agencies give is that if recruitment is taken over by one company, how will you let us, the corrupt companies, improve on our own? This is such a childish, petty excuse. Another one of their excuses is that abuse only happens in 5 percent of cases - which doesn't warrant any action.
I'm sorry but where in the hell did this number come from? EVEN if this were true that means that at any given time only twenty five thousand expat workers are being abused. 25, 000 families are being ruined and destroyed and nothing should be done because we have to protect the national reputation? Never mind of course that these figures are obviously only the formally recognised complaints - and we know that the majority of these abuse cases are never even heard of.
Ridiculous bureaucracy, red tape, official nonsense, rhetoric, newspeak...
- don't help the workers, that means people will know we were abusing them
- if you make a positive change by creating this one company, you won't give us - the other companies - the opportunity to to improve.
- 25, 000 abused people doesn't warrant a change
if that's what the article actually said - would you find these people stupid?
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4 comments:
Needed a bit more information on that one, Nabeel; couldn't quite get what you were saying.
Yes, though, numbers do not matter. Whether it was one or one million, bad actions and abuse should be stopped. Saying the opposite means condemning myself to abuse as well since I am, after all, one person yet deserve to be treated well.
Changed the article a bit anon - It was basically a rant not really pointing out much more than the fact that a country actually needs to go through so much annoying nonsense just to get anything done.
It seems a shame that so much human life and death is riding on things like the passing of a motion, votes, paperwork, signatures, responses, appeals etc. - all these 'processes' that I know nothing about but of course give us the tag of a democratic nation.
something is severely wrong with the way us humans deal with things but they are already so firmly in place that almost nothing can be done about them.
Nothing is that firm. Things will change; they always do. Take a look at history and at how far we've come along since the dark ages.
Hopefully, things will continue to change for the better.
nabeel, i LOVE what you're doing here. you've always been proactive about issues that you're passionate about :)
these human rights violations are unacceptable and i've grown up witnessing them just as you have. Whether it's 5%, 2%, 25% - it's just unacceptable for us to turn a blind eye. i want to help in any way that i can from way over here.
you have one more regular reader here!
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