ECONOMYNEXT – Sri Lanka’s Foreign Ministry said the approved salary agreed with the domestic worker of the former Deputy High Commissioner of Canberra was paid to her, after an Australian court ruled that she was underpaid according to law.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs wishes to state that it is the standard practice that diplomats are facilitated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to take domestic assistants to assist their official representational duties,” the statement said.
“The domestic assistant in question served a full three-year term, and on the eve of the employer’s originally intended departure from Australia, absconded the residence of the employer.
“The allowance approved by the Ministry as the salary of the employee has been paid to her. The Ministry is satisfied that the said salary was paid to the domestic assistant by the employer as mutually agreed.”
In the 3-years, the domestic assistant was paid 11,212 Australian dollars and she was owed 374,000 dollars in wages and 169,000 in interest, court had ruled. The money was directly paid to the woman’s bank account in Sri Lanka.
In 2015, when she was hired, the Australian dollar was about 104 rupees and is now around 200 rupees. At 2025 exchange rates, the amount paid is around 1.1 million rupees and at current rates the amount is around 2.2 million rupees.
Court was told that the minimum wage for a 38 hour week in Australia was 656.9 hours, which works out to about 2,627 Australian dollars a month.
The amount works out to 273,270 rupees in 2015 Sri Lanka rupees and 525,000 rupees now.
The rupee had depreciated from 104 to the Australian dollar in 2015 to around 200 now as the central bank prints money to target the average weighted call money rate (flexible inflation targeting) and busts the currency (flexible exchange rate), destroying domestic real wages, and making life difficult for less affluent wage earners in particular.
Court proceedings reported in Australian media said the maid was owed 374,000 dollars and 169,000 dollars as interest.
Wages of 385,212 Australian dollars works out to about 10,700 dollars a month on the basis of a 36 month contract, or about 1.1 million rupees a month at the 2015 exchange rate of 104 rupees.
The unpaid wages of 374,000 dollars works out to 38.8 million rupees at the 2015 exchange rate and about 74 million rupees now.
Apart from the salary issue media reports said working conditions were also bad.
David Hillard, the pro bono lawyer who appeared for the domestic assistant said she worked more hours that was allowed by Australian law.
“But I think it also reflects on perhaps the nature of … the diplomatic world in that I suspect that perhaps Ms Arunatilaka and the Sri Lankan government have not viewed what she’s done as something that’s particularly extraordinary,” Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.
“That this perhaps is just par for the course in terms of how domestic workers are treated in the residences of senior diplomats.”
The report said in addition to long hours, she was not given off days in three years, except for two days off when she burned her hand while working. She was also not allowed to go around on her own except for short walks.
Her passport was taken by the diplomat as soon as she arrived in Australia.
“There needs to be some way of checking in that people have access to their passport,” Hillard was quoted as saying.
“If you’re in a foreign country and your passport is removed, and the only place that you can apply to get your passport replaced is through the local diplomat, then you’re effectively going to be very vulnerable for these sorts of slave-like arrangements, and so we have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Similar problems were seen in relation to Indian and Pakistan workers, the report said. There is no information on the wages paid by the government to a diplomat.
Taking the passport is an issue facing Sri Lanka domestic workers in the Middle East. Many Sri Lankan women leave the country to work as housemaids in the Middle East and elsewhere. Real wages in Sri Lanka are low low due to the central bank destroying the rupee. (Colombo/Aug17/2024)