They do.:rolleyes:
Not for New York.
And besides, call me a socialist, but there’s something wrong about a government willing to fight tooth and nail for its citizens to be paid less. It’s supposed to be the other way around, isn’t it?
Why is a diplomat more important than a maid?
For the maid, guess she would rather be in India in 65 F weather and sunshine rather than being in cold weather in the US right now.
She is welcome back to her country to be with her people, just got to deal with the pending case in Delhi HC and whatever jailtime which she may get if convicted. But she is welcome.
We are like that only:). Spending time on online forums really enhances your notions on different nationalities, doesn’t it?
And if I may suggest, worrying about treatment of Arab citizens of Israel would be better for Israelis than thinking abt India.
India’s currency value is on the lower side. But there are many countries where GDP per capita and currency values are much lower than India. There is great chance tht even the ambassadors of such countries to USA have a salary less the lowest wage allowed in US.
My (unsolicited) advice would be to deny US visa to such ambassadors. That would further enhance its imaculate track record on protecting human rights.
[Shrug] The Israeli minimum wage is roughly $6.60 per hour. Seems to me that Israeli Arabs are doing at least twice as well as Indian maids.
You are an intelligent man. I am sure you know why.
I’m having a slow day. Explain it to me.
My guess is, many ambassadors to the US (for ex from Niger, congo, uganda, nepal etc) would be getting less than the lowest wage allowed in US.
The US hasn’t rejected their visa …sorry… hasn’t fought for their cause. But they fought for maid’s cause.
If thats the case, Maid > Diplomats for US 
.
Another testament to the immaculate track record of upholding Human rights?
But shouldn’t the maid and the diplomat be equals?
I’ve responded to you on this before, and you completely ignored my response, but I’ll try again. When room and board is taken care of by the employer, there are no mandatory expenses left. At that point, the only things left are optional expenditures. Even if the maid is in New York, she can save 30,000 INR every month. Consider that her family is in India - any costs they bear are at Indian prices. Sure she can’t go for coffees and haircuts in NY, but guess what - she wouldn’t have been doing that had the consul not offered her a job either. This maid gets a FAR better than average outcome compared to any other Indian with similar employment potential. She gets it ONLY because of the agreement that she had with the consul. Demanding that she be paid minimum wages would be the perfect being the enemy of the good. If she had to be paid minimum wages, the maid would have been unaffordable, and left in India, making at most INR 10,000(which is what the American embassy in Delhi pays drivers and cooks according to news reports). INR 30,000 + room and board in NY is more than triple that considering that in India room and board would not be included, and most definitely a decent wage. Maybe not by American standards, but by Indian standards it absolutely is.
If you really want a serious answer - For the same reason that socialism has failed abysmally in the real world(not least in India). Governments are extremely imperfect creatures. We expect them to have our interests at heart, but governments are not omnibenevolent mechanisms that automatically function for the greater good. (Even granting that minimum wages are for the greater good, a point for which there is no empirical evidence). Governments are made up of self interested actors, information mechanisms are imperfect and accountability mechanisms even more so.
Foreign services officers are an influential part of government. They have a large say in how government responds to international events. Nobody really knows whether the maid was actually abused. Everybody knows the consul was arrested and strip searched. Government doesn’t know if public opinion in India will support a maid who is getting paid INR 30k a month + room and board and claiming to be underpaid (hint - it won’t. There is an NYT story that even asks Indian domestic help and gets negative opinions of the maid although they try and present two sides as any NYT story will.) The maid and her family have disappeared themselves to the US, effectively abandoning the other side of the narrative and any claim to public sympathy that they could have achieved on the basis of claims of abuse apart from wage. There were a number of articles in the maid’s support early on in the news media, but it’s difficult to be supportive of someone who isn’t there.
What you don’t seem to understand is that Westerners, in particular Americans, consider leisure - those “optional expenses” - to be a basic human right. The Americans even have a term for it - “the pursuit of happiness.” Living without fun ain’t livin’ at all.
As for “the perfect is the enemy of the good”, I’m sorry, but I strongly disagree with the sentiment. It may sound good in theory, and it may even work in the short term, but it’s a dead end. Unless you constantly strive for “perfect”, you won’t get “good”; you’ll get “all right”, following by “meh”, followed by “oh well, it could be worse”, and end with “at least we’re still alive”, and is that anything to strive for? The difference between successful societies and unsuccessful ones is that successful societies are never satisfied with what they have. That’s what makes them successful.
I also don’t think you appreciate how America’s nature as an immigrant country colors the way it thinks. You can’t say “She may not make as much as an American, but she’s Indian, and she’s making a lot for India,” because there are 300,000 Indians living in New York City, and all of them make at least minimum wage (and many also send money to their families in India). Why should *those *Indians make as much as other Americans, and *that *Indian make less?
Meh. When people in the west, particularly Americans, actually start caring that the majority of people in the world don’t have basic human rights, let alone luxuries, then they can talk. In particular, when they, and you, recognise that this maid’s only other viable option was not ‘luxuries’, but a significantly worse situation, then we can talk.
You’re talking about something else altogether now. Continuously striving for perfect and wanting perfect or nothing are very different thing. I’m all for, let’s take good for now, but lets try for perfect tomorrow. What you seem to want for this woman is the latter - perfect now or nothing. You’re saying good is worse than nothing. THAT’s what puzzles me.
This woman is not a ‘traditional’ immigrant. She does not have an unrestricted Indian passport. She has not applied and received an American visa on the strength of her own application. She received both passport and visa only on the basis of her agreement with the consul officer. She has effectively cut the line of Indians who want to immigrate to and work in the US. I’m willing to bet good money that the US would never have given her a visa had she applied independently. Unskilled immigration to the US from India is very strictly controlled. There is a reason why Indians are the richest ethnic group in the US. That reason is that people who would only qualify to work as maids are typically not allowed in.
For another, those other Indian immigrants are probably paying for their own room and board.
Do you even realize how elitist you’re coming across?
Get this straight -
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The US should not have given immunity to Devyani . Thats a comprise on “striving for the best”.
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The maids for Indian diplomats and for probably more than 50% of all countries will STILL get paid less than the minimum wage for US. The ONLY change will be - the maids who were diplomats’ employees will now become their respective govt.'s employees. But salaries will not change.
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The lowest allowable wage in the US law has zero bearing on the decision of maids’ salaries. The wages will be decided as per what other countries feel is appropriate.
Yeah! Fuck those peasants!
keep riding the moral high horse.
I worked with a number of Indian graduate students and postdocs when I was in graduate school. I think it’s safe to assume that we made the same amount of money of about $20-22k a year, although the postdocs may have made more. In my experience, they would all find roommates, live as cheaply as possible, and send a good chunk of money back to India. I remember even seeing a website that was left open once, something like remittoindia.com.
Now, I thought that US law had some sort of provision for employer-provided room and board in lieu of some wages. It is the kind of thing I would want to run by a lawyer first before either extending or taking such an arrangement and I wonder how badly the maid must have been paid (or how much overtime she worked). My take on this whole thing is basically that it doesn’t matter what the maid did. I don’t care what Indian law may say, she’s in the US and US law controls. What I do care about is what the diplomat (and she did not have diplomatic immunity to her person as the whole thing started) did.
Another thing Alessan is that I think the cries of “how badly the diplomat was paid” and “how could she afford to pay under US labor law” and the like are not very effective on most Americans. After all, most of us are living on somewhere well below $100k a year and very few have any sort of live-in help. Some people might have a company like Merry Maids come in once a week to clean or hire a carpet cleaner occasionally or something like that. But to be told that it was so expensive for the diplomat to live in NYC when there are 8 million people living there, many of whom don’t make more than NYC minimum wage, is not persuasive.
As far as I can tell, India threw a temper tantrum over the application of US labor law and of lying to the US government. Yellow journalism in India didn’t help. But the whole thing is over now and maybe incoming foreign service workers will be more careful in how they treat hired help in the future.
I like how you keep seeming to imply that the relationship between rich Indians and poor Indians is the same as the relationship between Jews and Arabs. The poor are your enemy, huh?
For me, India gave the US too much time to give immunity to the officer. We were thinking an apology should also come. 4 weeks is too much. We could have immediately thrown 1 consulate officer into jail and subjected to custodial harassment. But we eventually ended up just expelling 1 officer.