good post.
taking moral highgrounds and accusing slavery is non sensical.
Is it your position that the contract she came to the US under put her under any sort of obligation while here to continue working for the consular official?
If that’s not your position, then I haven’t been addressing your position. If it is, then I have.
To start with, the American minimum wage was indeed an alternative because that’s what she was supposed to be paid. That’s the law, but she was paid about a tenth of that. And while she was probably paid more money than she would have been paid in India, she also had to deal with the cost of living in New York City instead of the cost of living in India. I expect that’s more than enough to cancel out the difference.
It places her under the same set of obligations that any of us have when we make agreements with someone else.
Someone comes to me and tells me that they’ll give me a job that makes me much better off than I am now. Without their help I cannot be in that position, but they ask me to make a commitment that I will work for them for at least a year. Six months after I start working for them, I realise that I can be EVEN better off if I renege on my commitment to them. I hope that I would honour the commitment I made, and I think it would make me the worse person if I broke it first. Absent any other facts - mistreatment etc that would have violated the agreement from the employers side first, yes I do think the woman working as a maid should have honoured her end of the agreement. From a moral standpoint i.e
You’re suggesting that rich people get to break the law because they can offer poor people something more than they would’ve normally had, which means the poor trade away their legal rights. This is pretty much an argument for indentured servitude.
You’ve omitted the part where your employer breaks the law by paying you far less than the wage you’re legally entitled to receive (and lies about it).
Supposed to be paid has nothing to do with it. She simply would have become unaffordable and wouldn’t have been brought over. (This may have resulted in American services being used instead - daycare etc., so that’s certainly an argument for the illegality of the consular officers actions). So it’s this or nothing. She was better off with this than with nothing.
And the whole point of room and board is that she doesn’t have to deal with cost of living in NYC. How does it cancel out the difference?
What you’re legally entitled to receive in a position which you are not in has no relevance to you. What workers in the US are legally entitled to receive in the US is entirely and absolutely irrelevant to any worker who is not in the US. The illegality of the employers actions with respect to the country whose laws they are breaking is not in dispute by me. It is the morality of their actions with respect to the person who is now strictly better off than they would have been without the employer.
In 2010, the Indian ambassador to the United States was frisked as she went through airport security. The Indian government strongly condemned this routine security procedure.
If the average person does not wish to be subjected to routine security checks, they are not allowed on an airplane. So, one could say that the Indian ambassador was better off being frisked and allowed to fly, rather than not being frisked and having to drive or take a train from Mississippi to Washington, DC. From an ethical – NOT a legal perspective – would you maintain that the ambassador was better off being frisked?
Maybe not in your country but in the US failure to pay your employees is, in fact, a serious crime. I have a former employer who is currently risking arrest for failure to pay me far less than is owed to the maid in this case. Perhaps you were unaware that employers stealing from employees is considered worthy of jail time in the US.
It is no more and no less than any US citizen is treated to if arrested for a crime.
If an American commits a criminal act in India please, do, treat them as you would any other criminal in your country.
bldysabba, you’re arguing that it’s moral for powerful people to exploit the vulnerable as long as the vulnerable receive a tiny benefit. That’s kind of immoral on its face, and in the long term the arrangement only benefits the powerful to larger and larger degrees and makes it easier to exploit people with few resources.
I have absolutely no view of my own on any of this. It involves all sorts of questions about how ambassadors are usually treated, why that situation exists, what reciprocal measures countries take with respect to each others ambassadors etc. When I tried to get an informed opinion on this, the only incident that comes up is the one you speak of, and one of the cites I reached suggested that the security staff’s frisking a diplomat was not warranted.
That’s true as long as they’re not in the US. The instant they begin work in the US, their legal entitlements become relevant. How is this complicated?
If I go to Nevada and hire someone to be a prostitute and bring the person to North Carolina, I can still be arrested for solicitation. Once we’re in NC, it’s NC’s employment law that matters, not Nevada’s. And if the prostitute decides not to work for me, he or she is under no obligation to continue doing so.
Was the maid working in New York City? Is New York City still part of the United States? Yes? and Yes? Then she is, indeed, a worker in the US and her employer is legally obligated to pay the minimum wage where she works. There is NO exception in the law for people of other nations who are working in the US.
This is, in part, because of our on-going problem with the exploitation of illegal immigrants. The maid in question probably doesn’t know it, but she could drag her employer into court in the US, even as a non-citizen, and be awarded multiple times the amount of the back pay owed to her under US law. Although she might be deported back to India just after, but hey, she’d have a buttload of money to take with her. (No, I don’t think that makes any of this OK, it’s a mess, but I am extremely offended at the notion that it’s OK to pay less than the legal minimum simple because someone is not a citizen. That’s not the law here.)
That link further goes on to cite some other people from your government who state that the search was warranted. If this is standard procedure for diplomats, communicated by the US beforehand, and followed widely by the international community, then I have absolutely no problem with it.
I still hope an apology comes from the US. there is still a lack of proper understanding and evaluation of the issue on their part. otherwise tit for tat behavior opion is always there for india but hope it doesnt have to come to that.
They don’t owe anyone an apology. India owes the US an apology for sending criminals over as consular workers.
You’re not bothering to understand any of my arguments. I am not claiming an exception to the law. I’m claiming that the sense of moral outrage in this thread that this poor woman was being treated as a slave and cruelly exploited is ridiculous and misplaced. The poor woman in question was much better off than she would have been if she hadn’t been thus ‘cruelly exploited’. You forget that she would never have been in NYC in the first place without the consul officer bringing her there, under an agreement that made her better off by far than continuing to stay in India.
Is that agreement illegal under US law? Sure. So did the consul officer commit a crime in the US? Sure. Especially when she lied about the agreement. But did her actions, incogruent as they were with US minimum wage laws, leave the woman she employed much better off than she would have been in India, even if all this had not come to light? Also yes.
In effect, I’m saying that the US prosecuting the consul officer for lying on the application documents and dodging minimum wage laws is justified (although how they went about her arrest etc is stupid given the context). But at the same time, given the facts we have, people in this thread rushing to judge the consul officer for ‘exploiting’ her maid and treating her badly or as a slave are wrong. It is simply not that black and white, although I can see how as an American you would want it to be.
I would be more sympathetic to your position if she had not (allegedly) lied on the visa application. If she was taking a principled stand on the proper treatment of the lower classes or had even been absent-minded, that would be one thing. But she was told what the US required of her; she promised that she would do it; she recieved a visa based on that promise; and she did not do it. That’s a crime. It’s also a rather poor character trait for someone representing your country overseas. Think of it this way, this woman is being subjected to the “same set of obligations that any of us have when we make agreements with someone else.”