These companies are directly recruiting maids from countries like the Philippines, Indonesia and Kenya, among others, retaining them under their sponsorship and supplying them to households to work on an hourly basis in the daytime.
Cooking, ironing, cleaning, washing clothes, tending to children and even walking the family dog are some of the jobs the women employees of these companies do in households that seek their services.
A welcome development is that bachelor executives or expatriates in upper income brackets living single and needing cooking, cleaning and washing services in their homes can also hire these maids.
A Spanish executive bachelor, for instance, has a company assign a maid to his accommodation for four hours a day in a week and he pays QR100 for the service.
Maid service companies, as they are called, provide free food, uniforms and accommodation to the women in their employ and provide them transport as well, in that they ferry them to and from households where they are assigned to work.
The monthly pay of these maids ranges from QR1,200 to QR1,500, and most of them make some extra money by way of tips given by many families.
The companies charge the households they service anywhere from QR25 to QR40 an hour, and the majority of them insist that a maid must be engaged for a minimum of four hours a day.
Some companies even charge QR100 an hour, claiming they have highly trained maids working with them. The companies insist they have a valid licence to operate and what they are doing is legal.
They equate themselves with cleaning companies that provide janitorial services to business premises and large households, mostly on long-term contracts. But maid service companies are not known to strike long-term deals for part-time household work with large families.
Qatari families still prefer full-time live-in maids supplied by manpower agencies, which, according to lawyer Mohsin Thiyab Al Suwaidi, are legally barred from supplying maids to households for part-time work.
“An agency can recruit a maid and supply her to a household for a fee,” said Al Suwaidi. Asked about maid service companies, he hinted they might have a valid licence for that purpose, else they could not operate.
He said an unwelcome new trend in the country was that of manpower agencies recruiting maids and sending them to countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Lebanon, where hiring costs are exorbitant.
“This is tantamount to human trafficking,” said the lawyer. He said Qatari families were suffering because most maids provided by the agencies run away within the legally stipulated probation period of three months.
“These maids go back to the agencies, which assign them to other households, so the family that has paid the recruitment fee through the nose loses the money,” said the lawyer, calling for the maid recruitment process to be streamlined.
THE PENINSULA
