Tunnel vision

In 2001, a Pakistani woman was publicly gang-raped and later forced to walk the streets of her village unclothed, exposed to the rest of the villagers.  This atrocity was perpetrated by individuals who claim to be faithful Muslims and who begin their sermons with the mention of God and our prophet Mohammad, PBUH.  The first question that jumped to mind was how a group of people could approve of such a horrendous crime.  You would assume that your social network would guide you back in track when deviating from a righteous path.  However, the reality is that it is easier to commit an immoral act collectively where the responsibility is diluted in the masses and the appearance of diminished individual accountability often prevails.

In Kuwait, expatriates make up almost two thirds of the entire population and constitute most of the nation’s labor force.  In terms of demographics, this naturally places a large percentage within a working age group.  This composition has been stable for decades now and it can only make you wonder why we continue to lack laborers and whether our numbers will ever suffice.  Our leaders have attempted to create incentives, such as the fifty dinar allowance for each newborn child, to increase the growth rate of our population, which ultimately translated into an overall younger Kuwaiti population.  To accommodate these people and prepare them to cover the workforce, the services in place today undoubtedly need expansion.  This means increasing the number of educational institutions, health care facilities, and improving our housing infrastructures.

Currently, the efforts in place are certainly not in sync with the population’s growth.  This makes you wonder whether our government ever anticipated this or worked on long-term planning.  Families are being tricked into having more children while lacking the services needed to meet their needs.  Subsequently, instead of increasing the human capital, because of low quality services, you are maintaining an equivalent number of individuals who can effectively participate in the labor force with the rest acting as a burden on the society.

By keeping this in mind, you will understand that even in the very distant future, the country will continue to need expatriates to run it.  It therefore makes sense to increase incentives to recruit qualified employees in various fields and make their stay more worth their while.  Surprisingly, Kuwait has instead increased disincentives.  For example, the health insurance fiasco was a complete failure as expatriates continued to be required to pay various fees to public health care facilities whilst insurance companies withheld reimbursements from the government; poor workplace conditions, social segregation, and weak salaries and benefits are additional hindrances in the socioeconomic progress of our nation.  Let us not omit the often quite overt discrimination deeply ingrained in our society.

The situation is even worse when it comes to house maids, drivers, and employees of cleaning services who are flown in, treated like livestock, and abandoned to undeserving employers.  Their pay, a meager handful of Kuwaiti dinars, serves more their families overseas than themselves, often forcing them to neglect their own basic needs.  Indeed, a single clinic visit, where they receive less than standard care, can easily cost them 10% of their monthly income.  What this translates into is that we are restricting health access to those who need it most, the workers of low socioeconomic status who lack the social networks that provide them with much-needed social support.

We, as a Kuwaiti people, seem not to be blemished by such inequalities.  In fact, we seem to encourage these behaviors and defend our rights to focus on the “real” priorities in our lives, the luxuries that surround us and await their soon-to-be vain owners.

This leads us to two distinct arguments, a moral one, which I have highlighted at the beginning of this article, and a practical one based on mutual interest.

Health, our own and that of our families, is not solely based on individual health statuses but rather more on that of the people around us.  At a macroscopic level, the more we encounter segregation in communities, the less investment we observe in infrastructure affecting us as individuals, in emergency situations, for example, and impacting our children’s well-being in the long run.  At the microscopic level, the health of your home employees will both directly and indirectly affect your household’s overall health.  For example, if your employee develops an infectious disease due to a baseline poor health and challenged immunity from chronic anemia, poor nutrition, and to the unmeasured physical demands inflicted upon him or her, a vicious cycle sets in whereby the care of the children in the household will be jeopardized, including their nutrition and, subsequently, ill health effects may emerge.

The more the inequalities, the more distrust and envy and less cooperation we inevitably witness.  The recent increase in crime rates and deviant behavior of the working class should be regarded as an expected consequence of this inequality.

This leaves us with two solutions:  If we are not ready to respect the contributions of the foreign nationals in our labor force, then we should try to function without them and accept the consequences.  Rapidly, we will recognize our dependence. 

It is a wonderful thing to have a tunnel vision when you’re staring at a beautiful pond.  However, if you try to step back and look at the big picture, you may eventually end up seeing the toxic waste being dumped into this little paradise.

Even if I went to bed at 3:30 a.m., I had to get up by 5:30 a.m… I had continuous work until 1:00 a.m., sometimes 3:00 a.m…. Once I told the employer, “I am a human like you and I need an hour to rest.” She told me, “You have come to work; you are like my shoes, and you have to work tirelessly.” The conditions were getting worse. I told the employer that I wanted to leave but she would not take me to the agency…. [Her husband] would say, “You want to go, you want to go?” and he would pull my hair and beat me with his hands. He went to the kitchen and took a knife and told me he would kill me, cut me up into little pieces, and put the little pieces of me in the cupboard… By this time they owed me four months’ salary…. There are more and more innocent women going abroad, and planning to go. It is up to the women to care of themselves. The [Sri Lankan] government gets a good profit from us; they must take care of us. They must do more to protect us.

Kumari Indunil, age 23, a former domestic worker in Kuwait (Excerpt from the November 2007 Human Rights Watch report entitled “Exported & Exposed: Abuses against Sri Lankan Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates”)