Let them eat pesticide

May 11, 2011 by Dan Moshenberg 4 Comments

There are hunger strikes and there are hunger strikes.

For the past 37 days, six pro-democracy Iranian asylum seekers have been on a hunger strike outside the central headquarters of the United Kingdom Border Agency, in Croydon, in the south of London. Some had sewn their lips shut. Sewing one’s lips is minor compared to the torture all six had suffered in Iranian prisons. They had the medical evidence to prove the torture, and yet were initially denied asylum. Finally, today, after 37 days on hunger strike, the six refugees – Ahmad Sadeghi Pour, Morteza Bayat, Keyvan Bahari, Kiarash Bahari, Mahyrar Meyari and Mehran Meyari – were assured their cases would be reopened and they would at least be able to apply once again. They ended the hunger strikes, and proclaimed the struggle continues.

Sometimes, hunger strikes save lives and secure at least the glimmering hope of something like justice.

Then there are the hunger strikes that are fatal and ferocious drone strikes, assaults on the body, community, and land. Globally, over 900 million people go hungry every day. That’s down from one billion the year before, but the prospects for the next year are gloomy. Food prices are on the rise everywhere. In fact, food prices are at a twenty-year high. In Asia and among Pacific island nations, food prices are skyrocketing and food `shortages’ loom large. For example, in the Philippines, thanks in large part to marketization and speculation, rice is suddenly both scarce and overly expensive. Egypt is running out of food, as is the entire Middle East and North Africa.

But it’s not all bad news. Glencore, for example, is “a leading commodities producer and marketer.” Glencore is doing fine. Along with tons of mineral, literally, Glencore controls 10 percent of the world’s wheat, and 25% of the world’s barley, sunflower, and rape seed. Glencore takes, the world slakes. And then dies … again, literally.

Across the United States, two million men, women and children work on farms, picking by hand fresh fruits and vegetables. The US government estimates that every year 10,000 to 20,000 of those workers suffer acute pesticide poisoning.

In India, over the last sixteen years, 250,000 farmers have committed suicide. That’s one farmer every 30 minutes. And this number only includes the farmers who are acknowledged as such by the national government. Those who can’t hold title, they’re not included. Women farmers, Dalit farmers, Adivasi farmers: they don’t count in life, they don’t count in death. What killed these farmers? Indebtedness. Market liberalization. The invisible hand of the market, that hand which polished shining India, provided farmers with loans they could never pay but had to assume, with dwindling access to water, with impossible competitive demands. And so the farmers die.

And they leave behind notes, addressed to the Prime Minister, to the President, to all the lofty people who are nestled in the invisible hand that killed them.

And they leave loved ones behind. Widows. Children. Women like Nanda Bhandare, a farmer, a widow since 2008. When her husband killed himself, she had to pull her two young children out of school to work the farm. The money, if there was any, has gone to pay off the predators. The land, a small parcel, no longer provides sufficient harvest in the current economies to feed even a family of three. Who will be next to drink the pesticide in that household?

There are hunger strikes and there are hunger strikes. For every hunger strike that saves a life, even temporarily, such as that of the six Iranians in England, there are literally 900 million deadly hunger strikes. The planet is aflame with hunger strikes. Farmers are poisoned and are dying, women and children in particular are starving, and the response of the global market, and of the nation-States it supports and controls, is as it has always been. Let them eat pesticide.

(Photo Credit: http://indiatoday.intoday.in)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: agriculture, asylum, Dan Moshenberg, Egypt, farmers, food, food prices, Haunts, hunger, hunger strikes, India, Iran, Nanda Bhandare, pesticide, Philippines, prison, suicide, United Kingdom, United States, women farmers

Protection stalks transnational women workers

April 13, 2011 by Dan Moshenberg Leave a Comment

For many transnational women workers, life in the global economy is hard. They often deal with separation and alienation, abuse, isolation, and more, and worse. For some, the monetary rewards make it worthwhile. For others, the periods of autonomy, however partial, and the developing mastery of strange and foreign cultures is a kind of reward. For others still, over the years, they develop bonds, ties, community, intimacy. And for many, after all is said and done, they did what they felt they had to do, and really there’s nothing to be said, as far as they’re concerned.

That the contemporary world is a hard place for transnational women workers may be worth repeating, but it’s not news, and it’s not new. The `birth’ of the global economy, of world-systems of development and trade, with its reliance on women’s cheap and available labor, produced new species of vulnerability, precariousness, exploitation, hardship; and women workers have developed new strategies of survival with dignity and of struggle. We know this already.

The contemporary world is not only a hard place for transnational women workers. It’s an unforgiving place. Ask those whose names must be withheld. Ask them about `protection.’

There’s a woman from Moldova whose name must be withheld. At 14 she was abducted, forced into prostitution, and shipped from Moldova to Italy, Turkey, Hungary, Romania, Israel and the United Kingdom. For seven years, she was regularly beaten, raped, threatened with death. According to various reports, she was treated as a slave.

In 2003, she was arrested in a brothel in England. No one bothered to listen to, or to ask for, her story. No one asked if she needed, wanted or could use `protection’, and none was offered. Instead, she served three months in Holloway prison, and then was summarily turned over to the UK Border Agency. At Oakington detention centre, she was shot through the Detained Fast-Track system, and then ejected. It was all very efficient. Seek protection in this world, and ye shall find deportation.

The woman was shipped back to Moldova. The men who had kidnapped her in the first place knew she was coming, found her, savagely beat her, and forced her back into prostitution. Four years later, in 2007, she was again arrested in England and sent to Yarl’s Wood. There, someone from the Eaves Housing Poppy Project identified her as a refugee, and helped her to make a successful asylum claim. At last, someone saw her, identified her, as a woman, as a human being.

This week, four years later, the United Kingdom Home Office finally agreed to a `groundbreaking’ settlement with the woman, paying her a `substantial’ amount for having so efficiently sent her back into a place where she was destined to encounter extraordinary violence against her person.

Today, the woman remains anonymous, her name is withheld, because the men who kidnapped, tortured, and exploited her are still out there, and her life and the lives of her family members are in danger.

There is a woman from the Philippines whose name likewise must be withheld. She is a domestic worker in Dubai. She is 42 years old, the mother of one. She has worked as a maid for three years. She has worked in one household, where the conditions have been intolerable. And yet, for three years, she tolerated the intolerable. Finally, in January, she gave her boss a one-month notice, after three years of mental abuse, 16-hour work days, 7 days a week. Her boss refused to accept her resignation. He told her she must stay.

He said he controlled her. Her visa depended on her employer. He placed a visa ban on her, and informed the Dubai Naturalisation and Residency Department. The Department concurred. In Dubai, as in all the United Arab Emirates, a visa ban means one must leave and one can never return.

The employment agency that had placed her offered to replace her with a new maid. The employer refused.

Having exhausted every possible legal means, the woman fled. She sought refuge at the Philippines Overseas Labour Office. They offered to help her fight, to help her stay and find another job, to help her get the visa ban lifted.

But they could not offer the woman protection. In Dubai, every month, over fifty domestic workers appeal to their various embassies for help, for protection. This was just one more case.

The woman was arrested and taken to Al Wasl immigration holding prison, where she now awaits imminent deportation. “All I want to do is work hard for a good family. Now I have to go back with nothing. I can’t stand to tell my family in the Philippines, they rely on me for financial support.”

These stories of abuse are altogether unexceptional. They are absolutely ordinary stories of ordinary violence committed by ordinary employers, States, everyone against ordinary transnational women workers, women whose names must be withheld. They are part of the everyday, of the parable of protection that is global, intimate, and everywhere. In the global economy, protection stalks transnational women workers.

(Photo Credit: scholarlymartyr.wordpress.com)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Dan Moshenberg, domestic worker, Dubai, Eaves Housing Poppy Project, Fast Track Asylum System, Haunts, Holloway Prison, migrant women, Moldova, Oakington, Philippines, protection, transnational women workers, UKBA, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United Kingdom Home Office, vis ban, women migrants, women workers, Yarl's Wood

The ordinary household: Dirty little secret

July 19, 2010 by Chandini Patel 8 Comments

I have a dirty little secret. Well, perhaps it’s not so little. And maybe, it’s not that dirty. But it’s something I like to keep secret. You see, my parents, for as long as I have been alive, have employed domestic workers. I don’t want to self-flagellate in public, but this fact of my life is something that I have come to look upon with a mixture of shame, confusion, righteous indignation and an understanding of the practical realities of the global economy.

I suppose if you’re going to understand where I’m coming from, you’ve got to know where it is I’m actually coming from. I am a citizen of a bustling South East Asian metropolis, where it’s common for members of the upper classes to employ domestic workers. There are over 250,000 registered domestic workers in this tiny yet imposing concrete-glass-steel city of 7 million. For families accustomed to the luxuries that life in this city has afforded them, a live-in maid is just another luxury accessory. In my tight knit South Asian community, our affluence has allowed us to enjoy these luxuries, and so from the time I was literally a baby to today we have always employed domestic workers.

This practice was not something I questioned; living in my upper middle class bubble everyone I knew either in my community or at school had hired help. Our school gates would be crowded at the end of the day with a sea of women’s faces, noisy chatter and swarms of fans fighting off the heat and humidity that is so common to this city. Our kitchens and homes would be busy, busy, busy with deft hands, sweaty brows and tired muscles from all their hard work. At dinner parties, we would laugh, drink and eat while our maids worked to keep us well fed.

It was normal. And I never thought anything of it.

And then my bubble burst.

It was time for me to grow up, to move away and to experience life. I moved half way around the world to the UK, where things were very different to how I had grown up, despite my home city’s British heritage. College would open my eyes to so many new things, but most importantly, it opened my eyes to all the ways my privileged experience made me different. Often when I mentioned to friends or acquaintances how life back home necessarily included year-round air conditioning, ridiculous amounts of shopping and live-in domestic workers, I received looks ranging from incredulousness to derision.

Apparently, not everyone was accustomed to employing domestic workers to carry out the daily chores of cooking, cleaning and care taking in the home.

That experience at college simply taught me that the practice of employing domestic workers was not universal. It wasn’t until I got to graduate school, however, that I really began to question the practice altogether. I had taken a class on global and domestic labour that more than opened my eyes.

It blew my mind.

I had never thought about how domestic workers’ working and living conditions are exploitative; that certain countries like the Philippines are heavily reliant on remittances from overseas domestic workers to keep their economy afloat; or that the women (and it’s almost always women) that leave their families and young children behind are profoundly affected by this distance. Of course, I knew that Maria* and Anna*, our live-in domestic workers, had children back home, whom they saw once every two years but until now I had never thought of this situation as anything other than business as usual.

It wasn’t until after I had taken this class that I realised that the women whom my parents have employed over the years, were people. I don’t mean to say that I didn’t think of them as human beings. Of course I did. But it never occurred to me that their individual stories came together to tell a much, much larger tale – a tale of loss, community, discovery, negotiation, acceptance and, most importantly, survival.

The women who have worked in our home over the years have undoubtedly had an impact on my life, intertwining their stories with mine. I realise this now, and as I share my story with you, I hope to share pieces of theirs too.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Chandini Patel, class, domestic workers, household, Philippines, South East Asia, The ordinary household, women