Typical victim of a domestic servitude:   men of middle age and up.  

The process:   Usually they hire people promising them a certain amount of payment for 2-3 months of work, then delay the date of the payment offering another job and promising to make all the payments together. Later, one day, under some plausible pretext   they   get them on a car, drive somewhat farther away and simply push them out of the car leaving them somewhere on the road .   One finds himself all alone on the road without any belongings, money and sometimes even without documents. He doesn’t precisely know the name of his “master”,  exact location of the farm and, even in case of the police involvement,  he is not in a situation to testify truthfully and bring the case to an action. Somehow managing to return home he is ashamed of telling how he has been cheated.           

But this is the most “harmless” case.  There are cases when upon accomplishment of the three months period, when it is necessary to extend the visa of worker, they take their worker’s passport supposedly for extension.   When the farming season comes to an end the “master” as a very “honest” and “law-abiding” person goes to the police and informs them that at certain address lives an irregular migrant. The police arrests the migrant and expels him from the country.    They say, that it is much better for the “master” to bribe the police for the service it renders related to the deportation of the hired migrant, than to pay the migrant his earned money.             

In Greece they apply much more skillful techniques at the olive farms. They offer payment not for the total volume of work, but for 1-2 or 3 months of work throughout which the workers should gather olives.   They provide the workers with shelter and food, the cost of which is kept back from the money they earn. But usually the harvesting season is accompanied by rains, and it is not possible to gather olives when it rains. The time passes on, people keep on living in shelters gathering olives within the intervals between the rains. On the pay day almost all the money earned is to be paid back to the “master” for shelter and food.  

The biggest mistake of irregular migrants is in not quitting the job and claiming the payment when the “master” delays the pay day, but in continuing to stay and work cherishing hopes to be paid. Thus they work the whole season and eventually do not receive their earned money.    

Usually the migrants are recruited by groups to work at the construction sites.  They promise to provide the migrants with shelter and food, also agree on the types of work to be accomplished.   But later it turned out that the offered work is rather diverse and definitely not specialized, sometimes it’s a very hard work lasting for 10-12 hours a day, the housing conditions are bad, food is very limited and poor, medical service is absent at all and there is no money to buy medicine. In some cases even the migrants’ passports are not taken away from them, as there is no opportunity for them to escape due to the absence of roads and remote location of the site.  

 Even if you manage to escape, everybody around knows at whose construction site you have been working.  Thus you will be successfully caught and returned back. The earned money usually holds the “group leader /master”.   Upon accomplishment of the work on the pay day he keeps back the cost of housing and food, fines for some misdeeds (being late for work,   not fulfilling responsibilities timely, being ill, etc.) and,  in the end the migrant is left with a few coins on hand.    

  Women live stories  

The women in general leave Georgia to work as housemaids or look after the elderly and children. They usually leave for Greece.  

Most of them are of middle age and up.  

They get to Greece as tourists (almost half of the flow) or illegally in the baggage compartment of the bus and sometimes even they enter the country from Turkish or Bulgarian border walking across the mountains (almost one third of the flow).  

Firstly, they start to look for a job realizing that without knowledge of the native language they will not succeed.   Then they start learning the language trying to find a job of a nurse for babies, where the knowledge of language is not important for the first period. Living in families they catch up the language easier. They suffer serious psychological hardships having to stay in an alien family 24 hours a day in an unusual environment, in some cases even not having a separate room, and besides nursing the baby, sometimes even having to run the household.  

Overcoming the language barrier within 3-6 months of the stay in a foreign country the women start to seek for new job opportunities like looking after the elderly, running the household, working as charladies at enterprises.   Simultaneously they try to get some kind of   a document , often it is the “red card” of an asylum seeker, which allows them to freely move around the town and not to captured and put into the prison or be deported.     

Deportation is the worst option in their situation, as most of them put in pawn or sell their houses, borrow money under percentage with the intention to cover the travel costs with that money, then find job, earn money and later return the debts. Sometimes they leave their children and the whole family in a rented house planning to send them money for procurement of a new house instead of the one sold…         

Typical situation of a domestic servitude with relation to women  

Women work as housemaids, nurse children or look after the elderly. If they live in the house where they serve, it means that they work not less than 24 hours. “We are slaves!”- said a woman who worked in a family in Greece. “We are the property of the “master”, they treat us as they wish”.  

Looking after the elderly is a hard work, both physically and psychologically.  

During the interviews with women they confess, that most of them are unable to stand such workload, they start to sustain psychological problems. There were cases when people collect money to send back home the women with psychological stresses.  

A case in Cyprus: A woman arrived to Cyprus to work in a family by contract. Right on the first day the housewife asked for her passport as a guarantee:   “What if you steel something and run away ?;  You can’t go anywhere without passport”.  

The woman did all the work around the house, she was kept under lock, she even didn’t have the right to step out, she was not even given one day off a week. When she told them that she didn’t want to work in their house and wanted to work in another place, the owners cheated her telling her, that if she had come by their invitation and signed the contract with them she had no right to change her workplace. They were not paying her salary, saying: “You will receive the whole amount in the end!”. The woman could not leave them as her passport was taken by the housewife, but even if she had it, she could not leave, as she had no money to cover her travel costs.     

The woman was a professor of economics in one of the Georgian institutes. She has sick parents, handicapped brother, her own family including two grown-up sons and her husband. None of them managed to find job in Georgia. She works in Greece as a charlady in a bank and housemaid in two families.  

Non-typical story of E.K.  

Preliminary information:     

In the period of the collapse of the Soviet Union in Georgia lived Russians who were born in Russia and were potential citizens of Russia, but who under one or other circumstances have found themselves on the territories of different countries.   Either they didn’t want to return or had no place to go in Russia.    When the validity of the Soviet passports expired being in the stage of an extreme poverty, sometimes even without place to live and without valid documents identifying their person they found themselves living in high mountainous regions located too far from big towns.   The Russian consulates are unapproachable for them, they are nonsocial and are not in a position to organize their life.     They are lucky, if they manage to get a job, then at least they will have a shelter and food.   They do all the work around the house and in the field, also look after the livestock.   They don’t receive any money for their work. But they don’t want to leave the place.   They have just one problem - no documents. Even, if they like to go, they couldn’t leave the country.     

E.K. came to Georgia at the age of 17 when his mother decided to get married to the citizen of Georgia. She put her Moscow apartment at lawn and the money invested in some “deal”, which went to pieces very soon. Consequently the apartment was lost. E.K. worked as casual laborer on the farms and hardly earned for survival. Something happened between his mother and the stepfather at his absence (he was working on the farm) and his mother with sister urgently left for Moscow. After a few days when E. returned to Tbilisi he also decided to return back home to join his mother and sister. Right in that period were introduced new visa regulations.   Тhere were long queues for obtaining visa at the Consulate and there was no chance to get through.   It took E. some time to understand that he had to stay near the Consulate the whole night and get registered early in the morning. The time was passing. He lived in the street not far from the Consulate. Still the queues were too long. However E. was not able to adjust himself to such an undertaking.  

Once he met someone and shared with him his problems. The man told him that he lived and worked in a place high up in the mountains not far from the border with Russia and that he could help him to cross the border there when the conflict with Abkhazia would be resolved.   By then he offered E. to work on his farm.   He didn’t say anything about payment, though E. thought that, as usual, we would be paid just some pennies. E. also knew that people living in the villages had no money, and usually they always delayed the payments.  

E.’s new friend took E. him to his village located in Upper Abkhazia on a helicopter. This is a region which the roads of which are closed from autumn to late spring and there is no way to get out from there because of snow. On the second day after the arrival, his passport was taken under the pretext of being safe.  

There was much work to be done. E. look after took more than 20 cows, help in stocking hay, planting in corn, harvesting, laying-in of fodder for winter, etc. They worked from sunrise till sunset. His masters worked together with him. They feed him, gave him cigarettes. Beat him, when he drank too much vodka and disturbed them.  

E. asked them to let him go, but the master was ignoring his request, as if not hearing it. He had E.’s passport without which he was sure E. could not escape.   However E. tried to run away for 5 times, but each time he was being found and returned back. Eventually in summer of 2007 E. succeeded to run away. He reached Tbilisi in two weeks paving his way through mountains and paths. He had no money and was all in rugs.         

The Russian Consulate in Tbilisi sent an official inquiry to FMS, Moscow also applied to the Head of Migration Services of Moscow for approval of E.’s data. It took too long to receive the reply. And all this time he had to live somewhere.  

In the Consulate E. got acquainted with a guy, who accommodated him giving a shelter, until he was waiting for the answer from Moscow.  

The Consular of Russia in Georgia sent   E. to the Georgian NGO “People’s Harmonious Development Society”, that is to us. After the interview, when it became obvious that he was a victim of trafficking we applied to the Anti-trafficking fund of Georgia and the Office of IOM in Russia. E. was recognized as a victim of trafficking, he didn’t receive any material compensation, refused to cooperate with low-enforcement bodies, and didn’t testify against the people who kept him in slavery for 4 years.  

We assisted him in speeding up the person’s identification procedures applying with request for support to the IOM, Russia. The IOM, Russia also facilitated his return back to Russia and further his social rehabilitation in Moscow. At present, E. lives and works in Moscow and is doing rather well.