Prague, Oct 5 (CTK) – Migrant women who work in households, hotels and massage parlors in the Czech Republic are threatened with exploitation at work, the La Strada organisation, which helps victims of human trafficking, said on Wednesday.
It presented results of its two-year project to increase the awareness of migrant women working at not easily accessible places of their rights, on which it cooperated with German and Austrian partners.
La Strada says one of the major problems of these women, who come mainly from the Philippines, Thailand and Ukraine, is isolation, especially if they live with their employers. It is difficult to inform them about their rights, the NGO adds.
This is why La Strada demands that the Czech Republic adopt the convention concerning decent work for household aides of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), La Strada director Marketa Hronkova told CTK.
The most threatened group are household aides who live with the family. The situation of the women who come to households for work, mostly Ukrainians, and do not lose contact with society is a bit better.
Hronkova points out that a contract must be signed on household aid, the workers should pay taxes and insurance of the wage and the contracted working hours must be kept as well. However, it is often not the case, she added.
Within the project, La Strada si trying to find methods how to contact migrant women. It would like to use “culture mediators” for the Philippine and Thai communities, Hronkova said.
Field workers provide information on aid for the women, while they at the same time try not to threaten their working position, even though these women often work for a very low wage under inconvenient conditions.
They often do not perceive that they are actually being exploited, Hronkova said.
There are no official statistical data about the number of people working in households in the Czech Republic. La Strada estimates it at thousands.
The latest report on suppressing illegal employment worked out for the government and the statistics on foreigners employment show that the number of foreign employees in the Czech Republic has more than tripled in the past 15 years.
In 2001, some 104,000 were employed there, while last year it was over 323,000.
After Slovaks, Ukrainians are the second biggest group of foreigners on the Czech labour market.
