❊ Foreign Domestic Workers At Beirut’s Airport

There’s some good news coming from Beirut’s International Airport:

Staff at Beirut Rafik Hariri International Airport will attend workshops, held by the nongovernmental organization Caritas, on migrant rights, how best to deal with migrant workers when they arrive in Lebanon and how to get them the relevant help if they appear to need it.

Dima Haddad, project manager at Caritas Migrants Center, said staff will be instructed on how to notice certain behavior. “Airport staff will receive training on how to detect vulnerable people, anyone who might have been trafficked, for example,” Haddad said

It makes sense, when you want to approach the problem of widespread foreign labor abuse, to start from the entry point: The airport. But I’m not convinced that our fine Surete Generale staff over at RHIA need “training” to detect vulnerable people. This is not where the real airport problem is.

The problem is in the entire process of “delivering” domestic workers to their employers. There is a room at the airport where the workers are packed for hours, waiting for their name to be called so that they could be handed, alongside their passports, to their employers. The new measures in place apparently make those rooms (“areas”) more “humane”, where workers (most of whom are illiterate) are handed reading material in the form of booklets about their rights and duties and their host country.

But why does such an area exist at all? Can you imagine, for instance, if a Lebanese company hired a French marketing executive (also technically a migrant worker) and had to pick her up from an enclosed airport space where she is treated like livestock? Why aren’t domestic workers treated simply like anyone who is coming to work in Lebanon?

Foreign domestic workers can be issued work visas through regular channels and background checks from our embassies in their countries. They could come through the regular airport counters, where the employment agency (or their new employers) could be waiting for them at the reception hall, perhaps with a fancy board with their names written on it. No dignities hurt.

Is that too radical a thought to entertain?