Deep in the shadow economy, illegal workers live with abuse, torture

KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 3 — Late last year, 21-year-old Cambodian domestic worker Nita (not her real name) was raped by her employer. It happened in her room in a single-storey house in one of Klang’s most remote districts, where her screams reached no one.

The assault left her deeply traumatised but Nita was too afraid to ask for help. She is an illegal alien in a foreign land who, like many before her, paid a hefty fee to unscrupulous hiring agents promising stable employment in the thriving city of Kuala Lumpur.

So Nita continued to work for her rapist and his family for a long tortuous year, doing laborious work for long hours and often fed with little food. On her rest days, she was prohibited from leaving the house.

“She was only allowed to eat vegetables as she watched the family members eat healthy meals,” said Irene Xavier, a labour activist with Sahabat Wanita, a Selangor-based migrant workers rights group who helped the Cambodian escape.

Fearing she would be violated again, Nita often trembled in her sleep. She hoped the nightmare would end but that dreaded moment came again when her rapist, drunk, asked her for sex and when she declined, Nita was made to strip naked and dance before him.

She wept and complied.

Nita’s story provides a window into the dire conditions of illegal workers in the informal economy, where harrowing stories of abuse by employers are rife and employment mirrors that of colonialism’s slave-labourers. They happen because rights and social protection are close to non-existent.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) defines the informal economy as “activities that are, in law or practice, not covered or insufficiently covered by formal arrangements”, which refers to working people largely excluded from regulations and protections in the standard employment system.

As a result, these labourers are left out from policy considerations because their employment often goes unregistered or are omitted from national statistics, placing them outside the reach of social protection or labour laws.

And because their employment status is ambiguous, it further reduces what limited protection they have under the law, more so for the thousands of migrant workers who came here without legal papers.

“Most of these cases go unreported because they can’t go to the police or to anyone as they are scared they would be detained,” Xavier said.
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