Free market and migrants

Next Saturday marks the 30th anniversary of the entry of wide ranging market reforms which overnight transformed Sri Lanka.
From a closed economy and a dinosaur-era of bread queues, ration cards and restrictions on trouser lengths, J.R. Jayewardene and his reform-seeking United National Party swept parliamentary polls on the promise of freedom of choice on food and other essentials and freedom to travel overseas.

One of the benefits of the free market was the access to travel which took the migrant worker industry to a new level after small beginnings in the pre-1977 era.

Migrant worker remittances is now the highest foreign exchange earner and one wonders what our Treasury gurus would have done if this labour export was not there.

But before dwelling on JRJ and Ronnie de Mel’s reforms and the success or failure of the free market as the leftists call it, we felt it also prudent to discuss another connected issue that grabbed the headlines this week.

Death row
A young Sri Lankan housemaid is in death row in Saudi Arabia over the death of an infant and her parents were accompanying Deputy Minister Hussain Bhaila to Saudi Arabia to plead for clemency from the father of the child.

Under Saudi laws, the parents of the dead person can pardon the accused though the father had refused a request from the judge to do so. The period of appeal against the death sentence ends on Monday, July 16 a month after she was sentenced and it’s wait-and-see till tomorrow on whether this process or whether Bhaila’s foray into an area where a more skilled negotiator should have been sent, would succeed.

The domestic is said to have accidentally strangled the child. She had gone to the Middle East illegally containing false papers which listed her age as 23 when she was only 17. The crisis illustrates a far bigger and yet unresolved problem in the export of labour -- trafficking of children and sending untrained workers overseas.

According to some estimates, 10 to 25 percent of Muslim females who go abroad are underage but succeed with bogus documents and passports. “All officials involved in this illegal process are culpable … not only the recruiting agent,” argues Suraj Dandeniya, President of the Association of Licensed Foreign Employment Agencies (ALFEA). This week President Mahinda Rajapaksa ordered the cancellation of the agent’s licence.

Many domestics are untrained and ill-equipped to handle a household. In this particular case, there was another problem; the maid broke the law by travelling on an illegal document.

Training is absolutely essential and the lack of training for the maid in death row is clearly reflected in this case. She didn’t know how to burp the infant when choking occurs during bottle feeding which is common. A trained maid for example would have handled this easily.

The issue is also a case of trafficking of children under Sri Lankan laws and the offenders must be punished – not only the agent but the Grama Sevaka (for authorising a false birth certificate), the Registration of Persons Department for issuing a bogus ID card, Immigration officials (issue of a passport on false documentation) and doctors who gave a compulsory medical clearance. The father of the child is also responsible for sending his underage daughter to work abroad. All are equally culpable. Trafficking of children as a labour export is a common occurrence and as seen here wouldn’t have surfaced until the teenager broke the law, for she had worked there for nearly two years as an illegal migrant until moving to a new household.

While not belittling Bhaila’s mercy mission, there is an urgent need for the government to mobilise a team of expert and skilled negotiators to handle sensitive issues like this. Sri Lankan workers face all kinds of problems overseas which our missions overseas are incapable of handling. Migrant workers are a valuable asset but looking after their welfare particularly in crisis management has been a serious flaw of successive governments. In the particular case too, it was pressure from rights groups here and abroad that compelled the government to act with responsibility, nearly three weeks after the maid was sent to death row.

Reforms
On the 30th anniversary of the free market reforms, a poll by this newspaper on whether it worked or not for this country shows that Sri Lanka would have benefitted more by a step-by-step approach just like India and other countries rather than opening the floodgates, as we did.

India’s liberal policies came long after Sri Lanka, in the early 1990s, but it has progressed much faster for many reasons like protecting its industry before opening the floodgates. Protectionism is also rampant in the west; take the United States for example where farmers are heavily subsidized.

Local industry was killed overnight and not given any room to manoeuvre when the market was opened to imports. Not that the industry was giving the consumer its due – products were shoddy and consumers were forced to purchase whatever was available like poor quality shirts, pens that didn’t write or shoes that didn’t last for more than two weeks.

The inward-looking policies of the Sirima Bandaranaike government killed local industry by making it complacent because whatever was produced was sold, in the absence of any competition.

Thus when competition emerged, local products cut a sorry figure. Having said that, JRJ and Ronnie should have given local industry a chance to recover and get its act together which never happened. Yes, some industries succeeded like garments for example and new entrepreneurs emerged after that, but industry continued to struggle and still does to this day. That is a legacy that JRJ and Ronnie, still around as an economic advisor to the government, would have preferred not to leave.