Growing concern for women immigrants working in the UK as domestic workers

United Kingdom, 7th August: Women moving to the UK to work as domestic workers are often low paid and over-worked, revealing the 
modern-day slavery so much prevalent in the nations including the UK.

This has been reported by an article featured in the UK national daily ‘The Guardian’.

It has been revealed that such women immigrants with most of them hailing from African and other poor nations are subject to mental as well as physical abuse by their employers in the UK.

Women belonging to poor families immigrate to the UK to work as domestic helpers and child-carers. It is being seen in several cases that they end up working in deplorable conditions and are low paid while working for long hours.

Several of the victims of slavery in the UK by their employers admit that despite working for the required time, they are often paid less than the agreed wages. Not only this, if, at any point of time, the immigrant domestic helper asks for a day off, she is told to move away from the house there and then.

Such immigrant women also reported of facing difficulties in sending their hard-earned money back home. Even their UK passports are kept by their employers in the UK so that these domestic helps cannot report the matter to the police since they don’t have any proof to show before the police that they are working in the UK legally.

The whole scenario has evoked response from the ‘Anti Slavery UK’, a charity organization in the UK that has come forward to campaign for getting help from International Labor Organization to give due recognition to the work of immigrant women working in the UK as domestic helps.

Presently, Kalayaan, a charity based in London, is the sole organization in the UK that helps the immigrants working as domestic helpers in the UK. In the year 2009, a total of 356 cases of abuse of such workers by their employers in the UK were received by Kalayaan.

Meanwhile, the charity organization admits that the problem is wide-spread since many immigrant workers often do not report the matter either to the police or to the charity. Out of the cases filed by Kalayaan, nearly 57 percent said they had no room or place of their own while about 17 percent said they were subjected to physical abuse by their employers.