The issue of domestic workers

A judge appointed to the United Nations has been charged in the UK with ‘conspiring to facilitate the commission of a breach of UK immigration law, facilitating travel with a view to exploitation, forcing someone to work and conspiracy to intimidate a witness’. The judge in question happens to be a Ugandan judge of the High Court who is in the UK doing a PhD.

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The story is that she made an arrangement with the Ugandan Deputy High Commissioner to the UK to obtain a visa for her own domestic worker to travel to Britian to work for her while she was studying. However, things started to unravel when the woman decided she no longer wished to work for Justice Mugambe, and the police became involved. The allegations include depriving the victim of her freedom and threatening to return her to Uganda.

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This case not only touches on immigration, which is a political hot potato in the UK, but comes perilously close to modern day slavery in which unscrupulous people obtain visas for workers but then hold them against their will with no pay. One can easily see how the Judge got into this situation since she was in Britain to study but needed help with the home. In Uganda nannies and domestic workers are taken for granted, but it is a very different story in western countries where it is expensive to pay domestic workers. What we take for granted in Uganda is regarded as a luxury in Britain which only the rich can afford. Presumably the judge thought she had found a way around the problem by arranging for her house help to come to the UK through the Ugandan Embassy, but then it all went sideways.

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The case highlights issues around the employment of domestic workers - which the middle classes in Uganda take for granted. In the western world domestic workers have been replaced by appliances, but someone still has to operate them. One may have a dishwasher, a washing machine and a dryer, but someone still has to pack and unpack the dishes, put the clothes in the washing machine, transfer them to the drier and iron them, while in Uganda it is easy to find a person to wash and iron your clothes for a few thousand shillings. Childminding is now one of the biggest expenses for working mums in western societies, but in Uganda we can hire a nanny for a pittance. I have some Ugandan friends who emigrated to the States and discovered that the amount of work they needed to do just to maintain everyday life for their family was practically a full time job.

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If I told friends back home that I have a driver, a gardener, a guard and a cook they would think I have an ostentatious lifestyle because only the ultra rich in Ireland could afford such workers. However, the cost of this labour here is relatively cheap and creates employment, so we don’t think much about it. Every compound has a guard and most of us have some sort of domestic help.

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It is interesting that the colonialists had retinues of servants which reflected the system of feudalism between the upper and lower classes in the British Empire, but when the colonialists left, the practice persisted, though without the sense of master and servant. Today it is not just the elite who have domestic help, it is politicians, senior public servants (such as Justice Mugambe), and those in the middle-income bracket. The practice also trickles down to lower levels. As someone remarked, ‘Today even the house girls have house girls.’

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In western countries the emergence of a broad middle class has become possible because of a flood of cheap electronic goods and household appliances. But there is now a relative shortage of labour to carry out the more menial tasks, resulting in the disappearance of jobs such as drivers, gardeners and chefs working for private individuals, but the opposite is true in Africa where the cost of such workers is relatively cheap. The situation is now completely reversed between Africa and western countries, with Africans seeing it as normal to have domestic help, while it is a luxury in developed countries. It is understandable that the Ugandan judge who had domestic help in Uganda wanted the same thing in the UK, but she now stands accused of ‘taking advantage of her status in a most egregious way’. Perhaps in Uganda we are all doing that.