Saudi Arabia is involved in the unlawful buying and selling of domestic workers, who are trafficked to the highest bidders in the kingdom.
According to an investigation by the UK-based newspaper, the Times, domestic workers are being illegally trafficked and sold to the highest bidders through Saudi Arabia’s largest online marketplace, Haraj.sa.
Those maids are subsequently auctioned off to the highest bidder. Every day, dozens of migrant worker postings are published on the marketplace for wealthy individuals to buy or rent.
Haraj.sa recorded over 2.5 million visits in 2021, which is more than Amazon or AliExpress in the UK. Despite being slammed by the UN’s Special Rapporteurs in 2020 for supporting modern slavery, the app is still available on the Apple and Google Play stores.
According to the Times, all sellers withhold their workers’ passports, and some even physically punish them if the workers speak up or protest.
The Kafala system, in which a Saudi national is legally accountable for the employee and should draft their contracts and visa conditions, allows foreign workers to live and work in Saudi Arabia, which has the third-largest migrant population in the world, as per the report by The Times.
The 2030 Saudi Vision strategic framework, which was allegedly going to offer greater freedoms, including allowing workers to open bank accounts, change jobs, and leave the country without permission, was announced by the Saudi government in 2021. However, the report argued that the “new freedoms” have only been given to “those working in private sectors,” such as oil and gas.
Non-Stop Work Hours
The report revealed that several human traffickers admitted to employing “physical punishment” to punish their victims if they “talked back,” and they demanded that the maids work nonstop for as little as $6 per day.
She will work day and night and does not need rest, boasts Noura, a housewife in Riyadh. Gesturing to the cowering Ugandan maid next to her, who is 23 according to Noura, she adds: “If she does something wrong, you just send her to her room and do not let her out.”
Noura, who clutches gold Gucci sunglasses as she bargains for a price of £3,500 (about Shs15.6m) for the maid, is eager for a quick deal when she talks to an undercover Times reporter. “I can take her to your home tonight,” she says. “If you are still unsure, no problem, you can rent her instead . . . But tell me now, because by tomorrow someone else will buy her.”
Noura advertised the domestic worker on Haraj.sa, Saudi Arabia’s largest online marketplace, through which the Times investigation shows that hundreds of domestic workers are being illegally trafficked and sold to the highest bidders.
When asked the reason for selling her maid, Noura said: “She is a good cleaner and cook, but she cannot look after my baby. My grandmother is sick so I need the money quickly.”
Others on the site said they were auctioning their maids for profit because they were “unfamiliar with children”, “unable to speak Arabic [or English]”, “unhygienic”, “stubborn” or because their “old [worker] has come back”.
Ethnic Background Importance
The prices vary by ethnic background. Filipino maids sell fastest and for the highest prices, and Ugandan maids are labelled by some Haraj users as “the most stubborn” and “unclean” and selling for the least amount.
The hundreds of listings uncovered by The Times were often removed only a few days after being posted, because of the high demand for experienced workers. Noura told the undercover reporter the next evening that she had sold her maid to a higher, “more serious” bidder in the Saudi city of Abha.
The Labour Laws Awareness Initiative, a Kenyan-based helpline for domestic workers in the Middle East, said it received reports of Saudi sponsors illegally selling or renting their domestic workers without official permission “every single day”, as well as hundreds of calls each month from workers reporting abuse from their sponsors.
Valery Shebna, 30, a Kenyan maid, used the helpline for assistance to leave Saudi Arabia without her sponsors’ permission and returned to Nairobi this year. She said the family she lived with for two years in Riyadh beat her every day, refused to let her return home and withheld food as a form of discipline. “I came back emotionally scarred, and without my money, my passport documents, my education certificates. All of that was kept by the couple — my bosses. They didn’t want me to leave.”
Rights Concerns Raised
Equidem, a global human rights organisation which has a specialist team uncovering abuses experienced by domestic workers in Saudi Arabia, said the problem of trafficking maids in the kingdom had existed for decades but had recently become “akin to a humanitarian and moral crisis because of technology”.
Mustafa Qadri, its executive director, said: “Our grave fear, based on this Times investigation and our workers on the ground, is that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of such cases of online human trafficking, modern slavery, gender-based harm to workers in Saudi Arabia under the radar every day. That’s a really phenomenal scale — out of control.”
Qadri accused tech giants of “facilitating the exploitation of these workers through the technology supply chain”.
