How cell phones can break migrant workers’ enforced isolation
By Malcolm Vernon, consultant with the ILO’s Special Action Programme to Combat Forced Labour Rahel was confined for more than two years in her employer’s home in Beirut, 13 years ago. She explained that for six months her only contact with any person outside her employer’s immediate family was through hand signals across the roofs to another woman. After some time she realised she could converse with some Sudanese kitchen workers in a hotel that backed onto her employer’s house. Through a sealed window she established her first verbal contact beyond that of the “madam’s” family, but she never saw their faces. Now, like many seasoned migrants, Rahel has several cell phones. I met her in the Migrant Community Centre in central Beirut while researching the potential for mobile phones to improve the lives of migrants who come to the Middle East to work as domestic workers or in the garment factories. I wanted to discuss what at first sight seems to be an impossible ...