A welcome move

President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s decision to put a halt to Lankan women being employed as housemaids abroad would be welcomed by all those who have the country’s dignity and standing at heart.

At the meeting with Ministry Secretaries at the regular monthly meeting at Temple Trees, the President directed the Foreign Employment Ministry to take effective steps to end recruitment and employment of Lankan women as housemaids abroad before the end of this year.

He observed that the time had come where Sri Lankan women should be employed in vocations which need professional skills and training such as nursing and in the sphere of patient care which yield higher remunerations.

Instead he noted Lankan women were today forced to serve as serfs to their alien masters with poor pay.

Significantly the President’s directive came as women’s organisations here celebrated International Women’s Day.

While little was focused on the plight of our women despite the usual seminars and workshops it was left to country’s Head of State to make a tangible move towards protecting our women’s dignity and free them from exploitation.

Inherent in the President’s argument is that Sri Lankans today could compete on equal terms with the best in the world in the professions and in almost all spheres of activity that demands skills and craftsmanship and there is no need to sell ourselves cheap to the international labour market.

The recent selection of Sri Lankan engineers and architects to construct villas in Qatar is a clear indication of the present demand of Lankans for specialised jobs overseas and the status they enjoy.

There is no need to labour the point that Lankans today have carved a niche for themselves in many spheres of endeavour and their skills are in high demand even in the advanced countries of the West. The volume of newspaper advertisements offering highly paid jobs in countries such as Australia and Canada drives home this point.

The same could also be said of our womenfolk where only recently an offer was made for 1000 nurses in the State of California. No doubt the Middle East job boom in the mid 70s opened the floodgates for the export of cheap labour from the country mostly unskilled women as housemaids.

The trend caught on and very soon there was a deluge of women particularly from the villages in a mad rush seeking the proverbial pot of gold in the arid deserts.

While the lucky ones made it good, for others it was a sad tale of dashed hopes and humiliation and still others had to come back with only the clothes on their bodies. Worse still some others returned in coffins.

It was open sesame at the time with no criteria or standards required and the job agencies that mushroomed without let or hindrance raked in the skekels duping many unsuspecting village girls most of whom forced to mortgage paddy lands and house and property to earn passage to El dorado.

Most women were paid a pittance as wages in keeping with their menial tasks while being exploited to the hilt. Yet their collective remittances accounted for the country’s second highest foreign exchange earnings for which the Nation should be grateful to these hapless women.

Much water has flown under the bridge since those early days of the Middle East job boom and the country has taken vast strides witnessing progress and advancement on many fronts and with it the emancipation of our people and the country’s workforce in particular.

The open economy and the attended mega development activity exposed our workforce to new frontiers in the technological field and today we are on par with the best in the world in almost any specialised field.

Our womenfolk too by and large were equal to the challenge and developed multi faceted skills along the way as seen in the dominance of women in the professions and allied fields.

Hence the President’s observation on the need to do away with the practice of exporting our women as housemaids.

Obviously the President is keen to ensure the dignity of our women and prevent them from being exploited like pieces of chattel.

The Mahinda Chintanaya has a special chapter for the protection of women’s rights.

The Foreign Employment Ministry should now lose no time in taking measures to groom our women to fit in with the current trends in the overseas job market and establish the background for making our prospective women job seekers take up employment on their own terms and fetch high remunerations based on their professional skills.

There should be an earnest drive to get our women trained in the specialised fields that have a ready demand in the foreign job market.

There should be indepth research carried out in this regard and schemes devised to make our women aware of the lucrative prospects beckoning them so that we could offer the international job market a value added product.

This, while bringing rich dividends to prospective women job seekers on the one hand would also boost the country’s foreign exchange earnings.