Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Deciding to Hire Expat Workers (part 1 of 4)

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Situating Expat Workers (part 2 of 4)

Overview

By chance in the past few weeks I have read several articles about labor and migration on the Arabian Peninsula such as

• Gardner, Andrew and Sharon Nagy. (2008). “Introduction: New Ethnographic Fieldwork Among Migrants, Residents and Citizens in the Arab States of the Gulf.” City and Society 20.1: 1-4.
• Nagy, Sharon. (1998). “‘This Time I Think I’ll Try a Filipina’: Global and Local Influences on Relations Between Foreign Household Workers and Their Employers in Doha, Qatar.” City and Society 10: 83-103.
• Sarmadi, Behzad. (2013). “‘Bachelor’ in the City: Urban Transformation and Matter Out of Place in Dubai.” Journal of Arabian Studies 3: 196-214.

There are lots of numbers, data sets, opinions and ideas in these texts – but no sense of what it’s like to interact with expat workers. There is ethnographic work with and about them, but nothing about the writer’s personal economic exchanges: how to hire, discuss and pay wages, decide work load, etc. This isn’t a fault of the articles which have different objectives, but reading these texts made me reflect on my connections to other expat workers, how I manage them and how they manage me.

This essay will talk about the issue of reciprocity. Previous essays talked about my decision to hire help and situating expat workers. The next essay will talk in more detail about paying the people who have worked for me and the types of adjustments that we both make. [The information about wages and dates are from monthly lists of expenses that I have kept since I moved to Dhofar. 1 Omani Riyal is about $2.40; there are 1000 baisa in one Riyal so the 500 baisa bill is worth about $1.20.]

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(photo by S. B.)

Thought experiment: imagine that you live in a foreign country where most people speak language A, you speak language B and every morning you see a person (X) who speaks language C in your coffee shop. You raise a hand in greeting but never talk and you notice that X, after drinking a cup of coffee, X walks from the coffee shop into a large, nearby building which you have never been inside of. One morning, X leaves a shopping bag in the café by mistake. What would you do? Pick up the bag and head over to the building? You don’t know the local language and you don’t know X’s language. You can describe what X looks like (if, by chance, you find a person who speaks your own language), but you don’t know X’s name, where X works or what X’s job is and it’s a 3-story building which is divided into 4 sections. Each section has 10 to 20 offices, over 200 offices total. Do you venture in to return the bag? Or leave in in the coffee shop expecting X to come back and retrieve it?

One morning I looked up from my desk and saw M, who cleans cars in the parking lot of where I work. He was standing in the doorway with the man who works as a messenger for my department. The messenger pointed to the car-clearer and said, “He says problem with your car, tire.”

I was surprised that M had ventured into my large, 3-story building to find me. He and I don’t share a common language and he had (as far as I knew) no way of knowing where my office was.

When he first started working in the parking lot, he had walked up to me and said, “cleaning” while pointing to my car. “How much?” I asked. “10 Riyal month.” “Ok.” And that was it. The next day I gave him 10 Riyal and for nine years he wiped the sand from the outside of my car and we always raised our hands in greeting if we saw each other in the morning.

I had never had a car-clearer before so I made a list of rules for myself:

• always pay for the month ahead as soon as I get my salary so he can count on money at a certain time
• pay the same 10 Riyal every month even if there are vacation days
• hand over various cleaning supplies (clothes, sponges, tire cleaner) at least once every month
• pay extra if I want the inside of my car cleaned
• empty trash out of the truck bed myself before coming to work
• do not say anything if he doesn’t come during wind/ sand storms or misses a day now and then

Seeing him standing in the office doorway was one of those moments in which I realized I had been working under a whole set of not-shared assumptions. To me: I give money, he cleans my car was the full description of our connection. I would not have imagined that he would have come into the building having no idea where I was to tell me a tire was going flat.

I gave him a tip; but he would not have known I would do that as I had never given tips before so I don’t think the motivation was money. This was years ago and he has since left that work, so I can’t ask him exactly why he made the effort of wandering around the building to try to find me. But that image of him standing in the office doorway stays with me and makes me think of the quote “gifts differing according to grace.”  It was a great kindness for him to find and tell me. I could sort out the tire then, mid-morning when all the shops were open, rather than being surprised when I tried to drive home at the time when shops were closed.

Until I read several articles on expat workers, I hadn’t reflected that I had several similar examples in which I assumed the boundaries were: I pay, they do their specific work, while the person who was working for me saw our connection quite differently.

A second example was a cleaner at work. B was bustling and cheerful. We greeted each other by waving when me met, usually when I was working in the late afternoon, and I would hand over 1 Omani Riyal every week. After he had worked in my department for over a year, one day he walked into my office with three potted plants and set them on the windowsill.

I love plants and had a great garden at home, but never had thought to bring plants to my office. I was happy to have them but also bewildered. Where had they come from? How had he gotten them? And how had he managed to bring them to the university? They were three, large healthy climbing plants (I don’t know the names) in attractive, new pots with matching saucers. I know other people gave him tips so I didn’t think it was for the money and, in any case, he could not have been certain that I wanted them. He wanted plants in my office – so he put them there.

He also gave plants to Steve Cass, whose office was next to mine, but as far as I could tell, to no one else. And he watered and trimmed the plants for as long as he worked in our building.

When I moved out of the house with a garden and into an apartment, with my landlord’s approval, I broke the water pipe and installed a sink on the roof. I then hired P, a gardener, to sweep the roof and water my collection of potted plants.

We don’t have a language in common, so when he first started to work for me, a friend of his came to help translate. I explained what I wanted done; I also said that anything on the small table to the right of the front door should not be touched, but anything I was getting rid of, I put to the left side of the door. If he saw anything he liked, he could take it (such as cushions, towels, bowls, folding tables, etc.) Then I made another series of rules for myself:

• pay P as soon as I get my paycheck
• don’t try to figure out when/ how often he works – judge by how well the plants are doing
• water myself after big windstorms
• leave packets of small bottles of water in the upstairs storeroom for him so he doesn’t have to drink from the hose

He had worked for me for 14 months when Covid hit. The roof access is from the stairwell so we were never in the same space at the same time, and he continued to work although my routine changed dramatically. I now taught from home and in the first months (spring 2020) I only left the house once a week to get groceries.

My apartment is the only one on the small landing, so I had gotten used to setting trash bags on the left side of the door at night, then bringing them to the dumpster in the morning. But since I was no longer walking down the stairs every day, sometimes there would be a bag or two for a few days. One day when I opened the door to take everything to the dumpster, I was amazed to find that the trash was gone. There was no one else who used the stairwell and the other stuff on the landing (small table and plants) was still there. Who would open the door to the hosh (courtyard), open the door to the house, walk up the stairs and take my trash bags

Bizarre. This bothered me for many days, as it happened twice more and I could not figure out what was going on until I realized P had taken it upon himself to toss the trash. I had never asked him to, didn’t expect him to; he made the decision himself that taking out the trash was his responsibility.

M, B and P all went out of their way for me, spending their time and energy to make my life better in ways I did not ask for or expect. When each of these examples happened I was surprised, the root of which was assuming that our relationship was money-based and the generosity was one-way. For M and P, I gave salary, they gave their labor and as extra I gave tips and supplies (cleaning clothes to M and water for P). B’s salary was paid for but I gave tips. I perceived them as not having further agency in that they would do their assigned work and only that. But their actions showed that they viewed themselves as having the ability and choice to decide what to do.

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Expat Workers and Issues of Payment (part 4 of 4)

Ethnography: Conversations about Men/ Masculinity, part 1

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Changes within Cultures

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Claiming Knowledge and Shifting Perceptions