Tag: domestic workers

“They appear to have done nothing”: Facebook’s Inaction in the Face of Human Trafficking

Facebook is one of the world’s largest virtual communities and plays host to a wide array of services and people from across the world. This is, of course, a for-profit company focused on constant growth and two years ago in a leak from inside the company we learned at what cost they would pursue this growth.

Human trafficking has been an issue in online circles since the invention of the chat room if not before. Facebook has become among the new biggest platforms traffickers use to find victims, especially for domestic work in the Middle East. In the leak, one document appeared that examined the extent to which Facebook and its related products were being used in the practice of human trafficking. This document was called “Domestic Servitude: This Shouldn’t Happen on Facebook and How We Can Fix It.” The document details specific strategies that should be employed to combat this practice on Facebook, but it seemed to fall on deaf ears despite being entirely paid for by the company. What programs were put in place quickly became defunct, many of the suggestions were never implemented at all. The reason for this? Taking an aggressive stance would hurt Facebook’s bottom line. The company was afraid of “alienating buyers,” meaning the buyers of people sold into domestic servitude.

Many women have come across ads on Facebook and Instagram from “employers” boasting of great pay and excellent working conditions. These women would then contact these employers via Facebook Messenger, Instagram’s direct message feature, or even Whats App which is a messaging app owned by the same parent company. Many of these stories describe victims and traffickers meeting, making arrangements, and even reimbursing plane tickets without ever leaving the Facebook ecosystem. The documents leaked from within the company reveal that Facebook has known about this problem for many years and yet has been relatively lethargic when it comes to enacting solutions that they paid researchers and law-enforcement experts to come up with.

Reading UnFree, we have spoken a lot about what happens when the women arrive in the country of their employment, but this piece by the Wall Street Journal is an exploration in to the nefarious ways these women often come to arrive in the countries. The agencies involved in this creation of this un-freedom are the ones to blame, but there is something to be said of Facebook facilitating this knowingly simply because they fear that alienation of traffickers would hurt the company’s bottom line.

https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/the-facebook-files-part-3-this-shouldnt-happen-on-facebook/0ec75bcc-5290-4ca5-8b7c-84bdce7eb11f

Weekly post #1: Nepalese Domestic Workers: How Should Governments Respond to Exploitation/Abuse of Workers and Regulate Labor Standards?

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In 2007, Nepal and UAE signed their first labor agreement. In 2017, a ban was imposed on Nepali domestic workers — who are mostly comprised of women. This ban was imposed to regulate labor standards and environments for domestic workers. However, this ban ended up creating a large economic barrier for domestic workers, leading many to take illegal and dangerous routes to be able to work. For example, some would travel to other countries through a visit visa, and use that limited visa to work. This leads to complications, as they are not being recorded so no labor standards can be set in place/enforced, leading to possible exploitation and abuse. This is the very situation in which arbitrary domination is at it’s most crucial point of impact: if there is a ban that leads to domestic workers to take dangerous/illegal routes to work, which leads them to not be known about/recorded, then they cannot be protected. Even the “best” employer knows this in the back of their mind and may end up taking advantage of this situation (either through neglecting their needs, not paying them, not letting them leave, deporting them suddenly, reporting them to authorities, abusing them, and/or more).

In 2020, Nepalese domestic workers were allowed to resume travelling for domestic work jobs, but the Nepalese government set up pre-conditions. These conditions included laws for protecting the workers, establishing an agreement between Nepal and the destination countries focused on wages and leave, agreements on safety and health for the workers, requiring insurance coverage, and more. While these conditions are all necessary and it is great to see countries at least trying to implement some legal standards to protect domestic workers, as it has been shown throughout Parrenas’ Unfree, simply creating standards is not the same as enforcement and regulation of those standards.

There was major backlash from human rights and activists when Nepal imposed the ban on domestic workers. This backlash ranged from claims of limiting women’s mobility and freedom to general economic issues. As noted in Parrenas’ Unfree, countries like Nepal and the Philippines rely largely on remittances from migrant domestic workers. In addition to this backlash, the UAE has stated that they need Nepal to fully let domestic workers to migrate to their countries, but the UAE has historically shown its lax nature in enforcing any kind of labor standard, letting kafeels basically do whatever they want with their domestic workers.

This leads the government – and the rest of us – to wonder, how can we effectively implement and enforce labor standards, without restricting people’s freedom or hurting a nation’s economy?

News Article
Article about pre-conditions

Written by: Lily Philbrook