“I lived in a closet”

Far below the Living Wage, the statutory National Minimum Wage is set at a paltry £6.41. But some workers don’t even earn that much. In part four of our Living Wage series, UniteLive explores the dark underbelly of domestic servitude.

Amira Harrak* has never had it easy. Born in Morocco, she received formal education only until she was seven years old, after which she went to work in a garment factory to support her family. She earned ÂŁ4 a week and worked over ten hours a day.

Searching for a better life, Harrak went abroad to Dubai to work as a domestic servant. She eventually came to the UK, where she encountered work conditions that were hardly any better than in her home country. In fact, they were often much worse.

“I didn’t know about any of the rights I had, nothing about the minimum wage or hours of work – nothing,” Harrak explains. “On my first job in the UK, the minimum wage then was £5.73. My first employer paid me only £150 a week.

“After five months, she forced me to work on my two days off and insisted she wouldn’t pay me more. She made me clean her mother’s house across the street. I was on-call when visitors came on the weekends and couldn’t sleep until they left, after midnight. And I didn’t get one extra penny, not even a thank you.”

Eventually, Harrak became very ill. Her employer did not relent once: she continued forcing her to work. When Harrak eventually went to a doctor, he diagnosed her with exhaustion and said that she must leave her employer’s home and rest for a few days. When she told her employer she would stay at a friend’s house to recover, she screamed at her for not working hard enough.

“I couldn’t take it anymore, so I quit. When I told her, the woman threw all my belongings in a bin bag and showed me the door. I had nowhere to go.”

Harrak went through a series of abusive employers, dotted with periods of being out of work. The worst employers she could remember treated her no better than a slave.

“When I first arrived, they showed me my room. It was a closet,” she recalls. “And I wasn’t even given the entire closet. There was a printer and a washing machine in there, too.  Sometimes, I would try to sleep after working for 13 or 14 hours straight, and someone would come into my room and ask for something they had just printed.”

“One time, one of my employer’s sons took off his shoe and demanded I clean the sole. There was nothing on the bottom of his shoes; he just did it to make me feel bad,” Harrak says. “I got called so many names: dog, cow, donkey, things like that.”

After seven years of horrific working conditions in London, Harrak has finally found a good employer. She still doesn’t quite earn the London Living Wage, however.

Harrak believes that the fight for fair pay and conditions begins with education. With the help of Unite, Justice for Domestic Workers, and migrant worker charities like Kalayaan, she has been empowered to learn about her rights and motivate others in her place to do the same.

“We just want employers to respect the law,” she says. “But the bosses won’t do that on their own. That means we domestic workers have to learn the law ourselves and demand that they follow it.”

*Name changed to protect identity