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Brussels, September 7 1998 (ICFTU OnLine): When Masruroh, a 24-year old Indonesian woman, responded to the advertisement placed by a Jakarta employment agency, little did she suspect that she was taking a first step on a path leading to hell. The offer seemed attractive: for $150 a month, she would be employed in the private home of a consular attaché of the Saudi Arabian embassy in France. Unaware of French wage standards, Masruroh realized that she had fallen into a trap when she discovered her living and working conditions. At 7 o’clock in the morning, she started working for the diplomat’s family: preparing meals, doing the laundry, watching over two children, cleaning the five-bedroom, three-bathroom flat and so on. Her work did not end until midnight, sometimes even later, when her employers stayed on into the morning in the living room where she slept on the floor. All she received was a slice of bread in the morning and in the evening and a bowl of rice at noon. Kept confined, regularly beaten, and insulted by the diplomat’s wife, she escaped on May 12, four weeks after arriving in Paris, via the balcony of her ninth-floor prison, finding refuge with a neighbour, who happened to be a solicitor.

The Committee Against Modern Slavery (CCEM), which was set up in Paris in 1994, has recorded 135 such cases in the last two years. Masruroh’s employer, who is protected by diplomatic immunity, could not be taken to court. The Committee therefore relied on its most effective weapon, the threat of making the affair public, to obtain financial compensation from the consular attaché. He promised to pay his victim $4,000 and buy her return ticket. So far, he has paid only $300, and Masruroh, disgusted, has gone back to Indonesia. In fact, it is difficult for the victim who flees to land a new job anywhere in France: such work depends on the Office of Privileges and Immunities (at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) issuing a special card; usually workers who switch employers lose their authorization to live and work on French territory.

Since French television broadcast a report on the desperate situation of some foreign domestic workers, the telephone at the Committee Against Modern Slavery has not stopped ringing. Neighbours, social workers and members of the victim’s community now know where to report abuses which they suspect are going on or find out about. "When the person being exploited has not yet escaped, we try to free her", explains Philippe Boudin, the Committee’s general secretary. "We first establish contact to find out if they are in agreement, and then we arrange a time. Everything has to happen very quickly. She has to pack her things in a garbage bag to avoid attracting her employer’s attention when she goes to the door. We are waiting on the other side, usually with a TV camera that enables us to put pressure on the employer if he is unpleasant or violent. Sometimes the police are called in, particularly when some part of the operation takes place out in the street. We had one case of an Ethiopian woman to whom a Frenchman had promised marriage and a good life in France. When she got here, she had to work in confinement for 16 months, in Bordeaux then in a grocer’s shop in the Paris region, all for no wage. When we freed her, the police watched us intervene from a distance but did not take down the identity of the perpetrators, who are now on the run".

It takes a great deal of courage for someone who has been the victim of such exploitation to break the bonds that tie her to her employer, in spite of herself. In a country where they know nobody and usually cannot speak the language, employers have replaced the chains normally used to confine slaves with the confiscation of identity papers and constant warnings to their domestic workers that they will be thrown in prison if they leave the house without a passport. Under circumstances such as these, it takes a particularly serious act (such as rape, a very violent beating or death threats) to convince the slave to flee. It is then that a difficult re-education process begins in freedom, emancipating them from the psychological submission and feelings of guilt which have the victim in their grasp.

The Committee Against Modern Slavery places them in the care of a "guardian", someone who will act as their intermediary, handling questions to do with papers and housing. Initiating legal proceedings is a further threshold to be crossed, especially bearing in mind the uncertainty surrounding the court’s decision. "If the employer is a member of the administrative and technical staff of an embassy or diplomatic mission, we run up against diplomatic immunity, at least under criminal law", Philippe Boudin says. "But Trade Unions Without Borders’ experience in Switzerland shows us that cases against diplomats can be won in civil proceedings as well as before industrial tribunals. If the perpetrators are not protected by diplomatic immunity, the Committee goes after them in court and everything then depends on the good will of the public prosecutor’s office: if it decides to open a judicial investigation, the case will then follow its own course. Otherwise, the victim can file a complaint and claim for damages in their capacity as a private individual, but that entails paying a deposit, meaning that they have to deposit a sum of money (about $800). For an association like ours, that is a heavy burden, even if we should be able to recover this money when the case is resolved".

Courts’ verdicts can prove very surprising. For example, in a case involving a Congolese couple who had exploited a fellow national for eight years, subjecting her to multiple rape, torture and deprivation of food, it was impossible to provide proof of ill treatment, and the judge, who ruled that the abuse of household staff is not a criminal offence, but an infraction (a less serious violation of the law), dismissed the case.

Most of the domestic workers unearthed by the CCEM come from four geographic areas: Madagascar, Asia (Sri Lanka and Indonesia), West Africa and East Africa (Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia). "Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world", Philippe Boudin notes. "The average salary of a civil servant is around $20, while a young maid seven or eight years old is paid $2 a month. Travelling around the island it is easy to spot the domestic workers, who wear rags and often sleep outside the houses. When a Madagascan or a Westerner who has lived in Madagascar comes to live in France, he goes and finds a poor family and offers to take one of its daughters in exchange for $15 that he pays the family each month. In France, they work 18 hours a day and are regularly mistreated, being forced to eat only the employer’s leftovers, to sleep on the floor, in toilets or the garage, be insulted and beaten, and so on. Sometimes they realize they are being exploited, but know that if they flee their family will lose the $15 a month that enables it to survive".

Unlike the Madagascans, the victims from West Africa (Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Togo and Mali, to name but a few countries) usually receive no wage at all. They have been wrenched away from their families by the promise of an education in a French school, but they never even get as far as seeing its front gates.

Plunging people into slavery is often ‘justified’ by ethnic and racial considerations, and many employers will treat their worker differently depending on whether it is a man or a woman, a Muslim or someone of another faith. For example, in a recent case involving a diplomat from the United Arab Emirates who had been posted to Paris, a non-Muslim Sri Lankan employee was paid close to five times less (700 francs a month) than a Muslim Indian employee, even though the latter had a much lighter workload. Employers often have trouble understanding that what is tolerated in their home country, such as the unbridled exploitation of a domestic worker, is no longer accepted in most countries. If his victim lodges a complaint, he will use every means possible to dissuade her from taking it further. The risks run by the victim if she has to return to her country are easily imagined. People of Madagascan origin or from Côte d’Ivoire often receive telephone death threats, including at their host family, when they decide to lodge a complaint. One of them has an eight-year-old daughter in Madagascar. The CCEM has asked the Madagascan police and the French embassy to keep a watchful eye on the child, who has been taken to a safe place, but her mother still trembles at the thought that her employers might take revenge on her. The chairwoman of the Committee, Dominique Torres, has also received death threats by phone.

Geneva, the United Nations’ second most important nerve centre after New York, is not immune from instances of slavery either. "The situation is all the more serious in that the perpetrators are employers who have been posted to Switzerland to work for the World Health Organization (WHO) and other UN agencies, including in one case the ILO, or diplomatic missions accredited to them", says Luis Cid, president of Trade Unions Without Borders (SSF), an affiliate of the Swiss Trade Union Confederation (USS). "We are defending some 3,000 workers in Geneva: chauffeurs, secretaries and servants employed by diplomats. The most frequent form of abuse is non-payment by the employer of an insurance policy covering the worker against accident or illness. Medical costs in Switzerland are extremely high, much higher than the miserable wages paid by some senior officials".

Trade Unions Without Borders is currently involved in a number of cases, most of which entail demanding financial compensation following the non-payment of wages or a level of remuneration well below the standards set in Switzerland. Although cases are normally won in court, the enforcement of judgements leaves much to be desired. Several cases were presented to the 54th meeting of the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva last March. One involved an Asian employed as a servant by an advisor to his country’s mission to the World Trade Organization. He has received no salary for nearly two-and-a-half years, except for the equivalent of $1,700 paid directly to his father back in his home country. He hardly received any food while working days which started at six o’clock in the morning and ended at two o’clock the next morning, had no days off and was banned from leaving the residence. Another case involved the African servant of a female American official at the ILO who was paid just $200 a month. Once these two cases - and several others besides - had been taken up by the authorities, judgements were reached in favour of the workers in question, and their employers were sentenced to pay arrears and damages ranging from $14,000 to $70,000. Some of these court decisions go back nearly five years, but apart from the payment of barely a third of the sum required in one case and of $140 in another, not a single judgement has been enforced. This is all the more discouraging for the victims concerned in that they will have had to await the outcome of the trial for many months, living without resources in a very expensive country. They only manage thanks to the financial support they receive from Trade Unions Without Borders.

The wrath which fires Luis Cid to defend the cases brought to him is earning him the hatred of the very affluent, right-thinking circles of senior UN diplomats. While no-one doubts his sincerity, few of the big shots in Geneva agree to negotiate directly with trade union activists. They prefer to turn to "professional conciliators" belonging to a service set up by the Geneva canton to serve as an intermediary in disputes between diplomats and their domestic staff. Luis Cid does not conceal his contempt for this system: "It comprises three mediators but most of the time they are of little help. In one case involving a Mauritanian chauffeur who was exploited by a diplomat from the same country, the conciliators offered him $700 and a return ticket to Nouakchott, whereas his employer owes him months of wages and overtime".

In Paris, Geneva or London, where the non-government organization Anti-Slavery International is very active, human rights activists must also learn how to identify the profiteers who come to them with the sole aim of making easy money. Some workers arrive in a country with the goal of being hired under exploitative conditions and then six months later taking their case to an organization that will support them in a court case where they might hit the jackpot. "There are times when we refuse cases because there is no criterion of slavery", Philippe Boudin stresses. "The cases we accept fulfil several conditions, including: the confiscation of identity papers, confinement, abnormal working hours (there was one case of a servant who was working 19 hours a day - and even 22 hours when she was in Saudi Arabia), lack of pay or payment of a wage which is so low that it precludes economic independence, inhuman accommodation, lack of meals, the forced severing of family ties (letters are not passed on to the victim and the victim’s letters are not posted), and cultural isolation".

Consequently, 150 years after the so-called "abolition" of slavery, emancipation remains a dream for 200 million people. Today’s slaves have been switched from ships to planes, and their chains have been replaced by the confiscation of their identity papers. But the distress suffered by the victim has not changed.