Rights of female migrant workers through STOE

Dec 18 marks the International Day for Migrant Workers.

Throughout human history, migration has been a courageous expression of the individual’s will to overcome adversity and to live a better life. Today, women constitute almost half of the international migrant labour force.

The International Day for Migrant Workers is acknowledged not only to celebrate the contribution of women and men who go to distant lands, away from their family and loved ones for long periods of time, but also a day of reckoning of how best we, as a nation, can protect and promote the rights of those workers.

The domestic workers (DWs) are vulnerable to having their rights violated as they remain outside the ambit of the labour law of most receiving countries. The nature of their employment places them in isolation from the rest of the community.

The UN Women has developed a Standard Terms of Employment (STOE) following an extensive consultative process of various stakeholders in different parts of Asia. The STOE is a handy tool for the sending states to ensure protection of female DWs and is crucial to migrant DWs who are excluded from the labour laws of both sending and receiving countries.

UN Women rightly highlights that through their status as migrant and as women they are “doubly vulnerable”. The agency further argues that as domestic work takes place in informal and private settings the importance of formalisation cannot be overemphasised.

The STOE contains 20 articles that elaborate the rights and duties with regard to minimum employment conditions, legal protections and the wellbeing of workers. It addresses a wide range of issues. Included among them are accommodation, wages, holidays and rest periods, medical and accident insurance, travel expenses, maternity protection and termination of employment.

It is in this context that Bangladesh should earnestly consider the issue of safety and dignity of its female migrant workers and thus negotiate the terms from a position of strength. Every effort must be made to ensure the agreements to be incorporated for workers.

Source: http://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/human-rights/ensuring-dignity-female-migrant-workers-1331320