Slavery in the Capitol's Shadow
Protecting rights abroad, ignoring them here
Minimum wage, health insurance, room and board--When Dora Mortey was recruited as a domestic servant for a professional family in Washington, D.C., she gratefully anticipated a life she could only imagine in her native Ghana. It wasn't long, however, before Mortey concluded that her American dream was nothing but that. In a lawsuit filed against her employer in August, Mortey says she was paid just $100 a month and forced to work 15 hours a day, seven days a week. She was told, she says, that if she went outside she could be kidnapped or raped. She says her employer called her "The Creature."
Mortey was no illegal immigrant working off a debt to a ruthless snakehead, a criminal who holds immigrants as virtual prisoners while they pay off their passage. Instead, Mortey came to America legally, under a visa program that lets foreign employees of international organizations bring in domestic help. Her complaint is distinguished by a harsh irony: Her employer, who has denied the charges, was an engineer with the World Bank, an organization whose central mission is to alleviate poverty.
Cheap labor. Each year, foreign nationals at embassies and international organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations bring over about 4,000 workers to clean their homes and care for their children. For the most part, the organizations say, these workers are treated well. But Mortey's case adds to a growing number of lawsuits charging that domestic helpers are being exploited by the very people entrusted with fighting labor abuses around the globe. Joy Zarembka of the Campaign for Migrant Domestic Workers Rights says her group has documented scores of cases over the past few years. Now, the Justice Department has set up a task force to investigate the problem, and Congress is expected to take up the matter next year. Says Zarembka: "Modern-day slavery is happening right here in the shadow of the nation's capitol."
Bringing over domestic help is a longstanding perk for employees of the World Bank, which promotes development in the Third World. Typically well educated and well paid, senior World Bank employees want domestics who share their nationality and language. But such workers offer more than the ability to blend in with their host families culturally; even when paid a legal wage, they offer huge savings over what an American worker, or even an illegal immigrant, would command.
To be sure, some complaints of abuse amount to wage disputes. And many problems stem from miscommunication or cultural misunderstandings. Compensation is relative: An illegal wage in America may be a fortune in a worker's impoverished homeland, and luxury housing here may replace a one-room shanty there. Nevertheless, employers of these foreign workers must abide by all the labor laws of this country. And in too many instances, critics say, they are breaking them.
Olgica Petrovic is a Yugoslavian nurse who claims that her host couple, both senior employees of the World Bank in Washington, D.C., rarely allowed her outside, telling her she would be deported. Although she earned the minimum wage of $220 per week caring for the wife's ailing mother, Petrovic says she worked seven days a week with just four hours off on an occasional weekend. Meanwhile, she was housed in the posh Watergate condominums pending renovation of the family's $700,000 home.
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