filipina domestic workers in italy
Angela Del Rio
Forced to go abroad to seek the means of supporting themselves and their families, or attracted by promises of good jobs, pay and improved living conditions, thousands and thousands of Filipina women are leaving their country to work in Europe. In Italy there are an estimated 7 ,000 to 8,000 Filipina domestic workers, almost all of them clandestine. Exploited at home before they leave and abroad once they arrive, at the mercy of unscrupulous employment agencies and employers, they are part of the phenomenon of migrant workers in Europe . Most European countries depend to some extent on migrant workers, usually for the lowest and most unpleasant jobs. For years Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, Greeks, Turks and Northern Africans, both men and women, have gone to Northern Europe to find work. In recent years migrant workers have been coming from farther afield. Their position as foreigners makes it difficult for migrant workers to organize and protest against unjust working conditions and laws. Women often face additional discrimination: in many countries, for instance, they are not allowed to bring their children or other members of their families with them while men are allowed to do so. Domestic workers, moreover, are isolated in the homes where they work, making it even more difficult for them to organize.
The Filipinas working in Italy as domestics have begun to organize themselves to fight back against the exploitation they face at home and abroad. In the Philippines, many of them belonged to the petty bourgeoisie which is rapidly becoming impoverished under the repressive martial law regime of Marcos. Many of them have been trained as nurses, teachers, secretaries and medical technicians and are deceived into believing that they will find jobs in these professions in Italy. Once they are here they find the only job open to them is that of household help. Often they are forced to go abroad to find work to support their children and other members of their families because of the enormous unemployment and low wages in the Philippines. Before they even leave the country, these women must pay an incredible number of taxes and fees to government, travel and employment agencies for their documents and papers. Once in Italy, they are again at the mercy of unscrupulous agencies and employers because of their precarious situation as clandestine workers. Not knowing the language of the country, they are usually kept in ignorance of the labour laws which are meant protect them and of their rights as workers, concerning job security, insurance, minimum pay, holidays and time off. It is not unusual to find the Filipina domestics working ten or twelve hours a day, completely uninsured, at less than minimum pay (already much lower than what an Italian woman would get for the same work) with their airfare illegally deducted from their already meager pay by their employer.
Until recently, the only organizations for Filipinas in Italy have been those catering to their spiritual or social life. These have served largely to defuse and control discontent when not actually participating in the exploitation of the workers. In 1978, however, a number of Filipinas decided to organize themselves around the issue of their exploitation as women and as workers, The purpose of their organization, Kababayan, is "to promote, guarantee, defend and safeguard the interests of Filipino workers in Italy" and to "educate themselves and others as to the underlying causes of their exploitation and oppression". One of the first things Kababayan has done is to produce a newsletter in the Philippine national language, Tagalog, as a means for the domestic workers to break out of their isolation and to communicate with each other. The Filipinas are also working on an information booklet in their own language about the Italian labour laws governing domestic work, health insurance, pay, days off, holidays, etc. as well as how to obtain legal documents and permits. Since it is difficult for the Filipinas to meet together often in groups, the newsletter is an important means of consciousness raising.
In November 1978, the government in Manila expressed concern over the plight of the Filipinas in Italy and appealed to women seeking work abroad to do so through the Philippine Department of Labour which would assure them of its protection. A large daily newspaper in Manila reported this appeal and stated in the same article they many Filipinas were forced to prostitute themselves in Italy. The Filipinas in Kababayan reacted very angrily to this article. They see the warning about prostitution as a kind of blackmail to get them under the control of the Philippine government. They know from experience, both at home and abroad, that this socalled protection is simply a legalization of their exploitation. While many of them have had to fight off sexual harassment and the demand for sexual favors throughout the whole process of their obtaining work abroad, they are very angry that the Manila newspapers are distorting their situation using the bugaboo of prostitution. In reaction to this, they have issued the following statement:
We, Filipino workers in Italy, firmly denounce the attempt to give a distorted view, in Italy and especially in the Philippines where our families and friends are living, of our work and activities here. Ours is a life of sacrifice, of renunciation, of exploitation and of constant danger of losing our national and cultural identity. We are not in Italy to prostitute ourselves. We are here in Italy because of the lack of work which has forced us to leave our country. First, together with hundreds of thousands of other men and women, we were forced from the countryside to the city because of the growing poverty of the farmers. But in the city there is no work. The government itself admits to an unemployment of 7% but the International Labour Organization speaks of 25% unemployment in our country and others estimate that there are 11.5 million unemployed people in our country, not to mention the huge numbers of underemployed . Even those who are lucky enough to have work live in misery. While legally the minimum daily wage is equal to US$1.35, in reality many workers earn about 70 cents per day! .All these things have forced us to leave our country.
Our prostitution is the prostitution of those who sell their own labor, their own time and often their own freedom for 135 dollars a month (the minimum for domestic workers in Italy) where an Italian would ask three or four times that amount. We hope that the Italian workers will try to understand our situation better as well as that of other migrant workers in Italy and that the unions and workers organizations will help us to get out of this precarious situation of clandestine work and to fight, together with Italian workers and other migrants, to improve our working conditions.
We wonder why the Philippine embassy here in Rome has told the government in Manila that prostitution is one of the biggest dangers facing Filipinas who come to Italy. The same kind of information was reported in Manila on the occasion of the visit of Imelda Marcos, wife of the Philippine dictator. Why?
We see this type of information as a kind of blackmail with a very clear objective. The bugaboo of the danger of prostitution is only a tool in the hands of the Philippine government to legalize and give its blessing to our exploitation beginning in Manila, which is swarming with employment agencies,the largest of which is governmental, and ending in the ten, twelve, fourteen and sometimes sixteen hours of work a day here in Italy, going through the various employment agencies in Italy and Europe and not excluding compatriots who have also official tasks here in Italy.
Resources
The November 1978 issue of Sparerib has an excellent article on women migrant workers in the United Kingdom, entitled "Home not so Sweet Home" outlining some of the discriminatory legislation and situations facing women seeking work in Britain. It also gives some case studies of women workers and how they are ripped off by employment agencies and some attempts at organizing migrant workers in the U.K. The author of the article, Rachel Langton, finds that the demands made by groups of migrant workers, although they affect female migrant workers, nowhere emphasize the particular situation of women. She concludes that there is a "need for the women's liberation movement to support the attempts of migrant women to organize, and to refer to migrant domestic workers in its demands for a recognition of housework as work, and for improved childcare facilities". Sparerib is available from: 27 Clerkenwell Close, London EC 1, U.K.
WEST GERMANY
FOREIGN NURSES
Korean nurses working in West Germany, who are being threatened with deportation by the government's refusal to renew their residence permits, have drawn up an appeal calling for signatures to oppose the measure. An earlier petition in Berlin was partially successful in enabling Korean women with unrestricted residence permits who had lived for 5 years in Berlin to remain, however the majority of Korean women living and working in West Germany cannot fulfill these conditions. As a result of the present measure, over 16,000 nurses from non-European countries will have to leave West Germany by 1979. It is a well-known fact that the economies of the wealthy European states depend to a vast extent on the cheap labour supplied by the millions of migrant workers who have left their own countries to escape poverty. As the petition states--only the supply of overseas nurses has ensured the care of patients in numerous hospitals, clinics and sanitoria. In Britain, work permits are being denied to large sections of the working population who come from overseas to do our dirty work for us, with the assurance that by so doing jobs are being provided for unemployed British workers. The truth is rather more unsavory. Here, as in Germany, cut backs in the health services are achieved using racist tactics disguised as national benevolence. (see Women's Report vol. 5 n. 3, page 4) . Nurses forced to return home to S. Korea, India and the Philippines face unemployment due to the absence of organized health services and a job situation which compelled them to seek work abroad in the first place. In opposing the government measures the women are demanding the following: 1) the granting of residence permits to enable them to claim unemployment benefits, 2) residence permits with no stipulated time limits and 3) the right to continue working in West Germany. (Courage October 1977)
Taken from:
Women's Report, Volume 6, Issue 1, Dec. 1977/Jan. 1978
Box 48, Rising Free
182 Upper St.
London NI, UK
FINDING A VOICE: ASIAN WOMEN IN BRITAIN, Amrit Wilson Virago Publishing Co., Ltd.; 1978 5 Ward our St., London W IV 3H E, UK
Chapter 111 : "Work Outside the Home; 'Next time I won't cry, I'll make you cry"'
"Asian women are the worst off of all British workers. They are at the bottom of the heap. They come unprepared, easy victims to unscrupulous employers. They don't know the language so their choice of jobs is limited to the worst and least skilled; they don't know their rights so they can be intimidated, they don't have much information about other, better off workers so they can be paid poverty-line wages. They are black so they need not be treated even like women, but more like animals. And if they ever ask for help against their employers, their chances of getting it are usually ... known to be small. Neither their husbands and families, nor white trade unionists nor middle-class Asians are keen to help them".
This chapter of Wilson's incredibly well-prepared and readable book deals specifically with the plight of Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani women in Britain who work in factories and sweat shops. Asian women are extensively quoted as they recount their experiences with discriminatory employers and wages, atrocious working conditions, and unionizing and strike attempts at a number of plants (for example, Grunswick Photo-processing, Imperial Typewriters and Spiralynx) :
"Prabhaben, a woman in her thirties, described to me the conditions at the laundry where she works ... Of about 50 employees, 40 are Asian women. 'You ask about discrimination? There is a colour bar, that is for certain. First the pay ; Indians get less. Oh yes, the whites get more. We get £28 a week whether we are sitting at a machine all day or operating heavy presses. The white women get £32. Upstairs where the machines are it is terribly hot. It is very difficult to work there . Almost all the workers upstairs are women, there are only two men and they are pensioners. The women's salary is very low. The pay in laundries is very poor, they can't afford to pay more, that is what they say . In many ways I am better off than the others, I work downstairs. Upstairs the women suffer, they really suffer. They are paid low salaries and everything is worse for them, they have to face the insults of supervisors. These supervisors are all English women ...' At Prabhaben's laundry there is no union. That is the norm in the small workplaces which employ Asian women. Conditions in these places are often not only uncomfortable but unsafe. The factory inspectorate has never heard of their existence ... "
Tying these quotes together into a coherent whole is Wilson 's analysis and commentary:
"What makes.. . adjustment even more difficult are the immense problems of everyday life in Britain--how to get to work, how to sign your name and so on. But once these hurdles are overcome, women soon stop harking back to their village background and comparing everything with it. The next stage is when they begin to think of themselves as workers in Britain and compare their lives with those of other workers, black and white. More and more women from a peasant background are now reaching this stage--a fact which can't be ignored by employers. The 'docile'. easily exploited workforce is gradually becoming more defiant and angry. As a personnel manager in a Bradford mill put it, 'Asian ladies are so well behaved. They have no complaints, they complete their training period very accurately and they are really good. We are very happy to have them. But lately these ladies in the Spinning department, they seem to be rather odd. They can be rude. It concerns me because it is unusual for an Asian lady to be rude, to answer back, to be a chatter box' .... No one, least of all Asian women workers themselves, would claim that they are highly militant or strong. What they have been in the past, in the face of their grim working lives, is resilient. They have refused to despair, accepting quite stoically what they have been given. Now this stoicism is changing ... "
And these changes are evidenced by comments from the Asian women themselves:
"The Imperial Typewriters strike was seen by many people as a defeat. The strikers returned to work having won few concessions. But for the women involved it was also a kind of victory . One of them, Shardha Behn, described her feelings in an interview just after the strike (Race Today, Sept. 1974) : 'The first day I got back to work, my foreman asked me what I had gained in the last twelve weeks. He was making fun of me I know. But I told him that I had lost a lot of money but gained a lot of things. I told him I had learnt how to fight against him for a start. I told him he couldn't push me around any more like a football from one job to another . I told him I now knew many things I didn't know before. In the past when I used to get less money in my wage packet I used to start crying at once. I didn't know what else to do. I told the foreman, ' Next time I won't cry, I'll make you cry' ".
Let's hope that there are women like Amrit Wilson around to document what goes on when those "next times' come about.