Protecting the rights of domestic help employers: are they serious?

Sir,
Are we supposed to feel sorry for the employers of foreign domestic workers, driven to set up an association for the protection of their rights from abuse by their employees?

My eyes almost popped out when I read the story in yesterday’s Cyprus Mail. What? Domestic workers abusing their employers?

Are we really talking about those domestic workers who often leave children behind back home to come and work six days a week, 12 hours a day, for £150 a month in Cypriot homes – and that’s if their employers are treating them well?

So what are the employers’ complaints? That the girls they bring over at terrible cost then leave their employ to work freelance where they can get more money.

How dare they! Do they not realise that they are breaching the contract of their modern day serfdom – leaving their employers in the lurch, forced to make the beds and do the washing up until a replacement can be found. What a breach of their human rights indeed!

Come on, how many of those employers have themselves switched jobs because another was offering more cash, leaving their previous employer in the lurch?

Is it not a basic right to seek a better situation for yourself? It’s about time we realised that the foreign workers we bring over are entitled to the same rights that we expect for ourselves, that they are not an object that we own and can do with as we please.

Katherine Nicolaou, Limassol

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.