“A common Sinhala proverb states: ‘A woman’s understanding reaches only the length of the kitchen spoon’s handle’” – Michele Ruth Gamburd
It is a familiar scene at the Bandaranaike International Airport; a young family with at least one, usually two children in tow, the tearful, long goodbye; bags packed and wry smiles at the departures section.
Since the economic collapse, the frequency of Sri Lankans leaving for employment in a foreign country has accelerated dramatically; a majority of these are women who must leave behind their young children in order to earn a living as domestic workers under difficult and often abusive conditions.
According to a local publication, “Sri Lanka saw 311,269 people leaving the country in 2022, the highest in history. Previously, the country’s annual peak was 300,413 in 2014. It was more than double of the migrated population of 121,795 in the previous year”; 2023 saw a slight reduction to around 298,000.
If you visit the X page of former Minister of Foreign Employment Manusha Nanayakkara, you will find posts that seem to celebrate the numbers leaving abroad and the increase in funds sent back to Sri Lanka, a vital source of foreign exchange earnings. As recently as 7 July, Nanayakkara posted that 2024 remittances had risen 11.4%, surpassing $ 3.1 billion.
Dowries for daughters
Michele Ruth Gamburd is a Professor of Anthropology at Portland State University and is a significant scholar of Sri Lanka’s labour migration and its impacts on families, communities, and society.
She has several articles on the subject in addition to having written the seminal book ‘The Kitchen Spoon’s Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka’s Migrant Housemaids’ (2000). Her works are a fascinating glimpse of the social dynamics that are created by labour migration.
Writing in a 2010 article, Gamburd notes: “Migrant women consistently assert that families cannot make ends meet on their husbands’ salaries and say that migration to the Middle East is their only available economic alternative. Family motives for migration usually include getting out of debt, buying land, and building a house. Women also state that they would like to support their family’s daily consumption needs, educate their children, and provide dowries for themselves or their daughters.”
Prior to 1977, foreign migration of Sri Lankan labour was restricted to a small number of skilled workers; whatever migration that did occur was internal to the country, from rural to urban. As part of President J.R. Jayewardene’s economic liberalisation programme in 1977, Sri Lanka began to promote labour migration as a means of alleviating unemployment as well as to bring in much-needed foreign currency. This policy reaction to economic challenges from that period was perhaps not meant to become as entrenched and institutionalised as it has become.
Long-term, consistent, and mass-scale labour migration has detrimental impacts, including on domestic job creation, accelerating brain drain, not to mention the social costs from prolonged absence of mothers, interrupting a child’s development, causing emotional distress, and disrupting family structures.
This is before we even touch upon the abuse suffered by a large majority of migrant workers, usually women, who are often “pressured by family members to migrate in order to meet financial obligations such as dowries, education expenses, and medical bills… the decision to migrate is not solely a personal one but is influenced by the expectations and demands of extended family networks”.
The rest is politics
For the past two-and-a-half years, I have had the privilege of writing a bi-monthly essay under this column that is titled ‘The Morning After’ (a title I borrowed from a seminal essay by the late American-Palestinian scholar Edward Said). The column usually covers aspects of history, economics, finance, geopolitics, and international affairs but at its heart, this is a column about politics, policy, and how these intertwine to generate the outcomes we see in our communities.
Given that Sri Lanka is only a matter of weeks away from perhaps the most consequential election in our lifetimes, it is only right, given this column’s political tilt, that we focus our attention on the 2024 Presidential Election to be held on 21 September.
Some 45 years on from economic liberalisation, Sri Lankan policy remains mired in incentivising the outward flow of migrant workers, in spite of well-documented adverse impacts on Sri Lankan society. The labour migration crisis is, unfortunately, just one of many aspects of policy that need urgent reevaluation; the upcoming election provides us with an opportunity to start afresh, with new ideas and perspectives.
This particular piece comes in the wake of a significant resignation, that of the widely respected Member of Parliament (MP) Thalatha Atukorale, who represented the people of the Ratnapura District. The MP made an impassioned speech on the floor whilst announcing her resignation, taking aim at Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) and Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa.
Her complaints were wide-ranging but seemed to originate from the 2020 split in the United National Party (UNP), which she charged was on account of Premadasa’s presidential ambition and a personality clash, rather than ideological differences.
This is a mischaracterisation of the reason behind the split in the UNP; the 2018 landslide victory at the Local Government Elections by the brand-new Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), revelations of security and intelligence failures in the lead-up to the Easter Sunday attacks in 2019, administrative inertia, the bond scam, and so on, all coincided to strip away any remaining credibility from Ranil Wickremesinghe and the UNP.
Unwilling to accept his unpopularity, Wickremesinghe was clinging to both the premiership and the party leadership. It was in this context that the majority of the UNP’s elected parliamentary group decided to leave the party.
For those like Atukorale, remaining in the UNP meant risking their own seats and going against their constituents. The evidence for this claim is the election result: the UNP failed to win a single seat in Parliament at the district level, while the SJB won over 50 seats in total, successfully capturing the UNP base.
The fact is, had Wickremesinghe been a success in his last stint as Prime Minister, there would not have been a leadership challenge. Had the UNP-led Government been genuinely popular with a base of voters, there would not have been the need for a split in the party.
The enemy at the gates
Atukorale’s insistence that Premadasa and Wickremesinghe must cast aside their differences and join forces to defeat the existential threat apparently posed by the National People’s Power (NPP)/Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) also requires scrutiny. The comparison of this election’s ‘Leftist’ formation with the violent JVP reveals a perspective that is perhaps more in tune with her home district’s experience with the JVP of the 1970s and ’80s. The Communist Party of Sri Lanka (CPSL) and the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) also enjoyed great influence in Ratnapura in the 1950s and ’60s.
The problem with this framing is that the NPP/JVP, the current incarnation of mainstream Leftism in Sri Lankan politics, is precisely that – a mainstream formation; not a fringe organisation.
In fact, through its charismatic Leader MP Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD) and a host of young faces, the NPP has successfully rebranded the JVP’s Marxist-Leninist roots into a Centre-Left progressive force, with its main framing being that it represents a new way of doing politics, in juxtaposition to traditional liberal parties like the UNP and SJB, and the now discredited, nationalist SLPP.
Any rapprochement between the SJB and the UNP, especially one that includes President Wickremesinghe, would only reinforce this narrative. A coalescence of the UNP with its breakaway faction, what might be perceived as a reunification of the Sri Lankan Centre-Right, doing so to counter a specific threat of a Leftist formation, would be a vindication of the NPP/JVP line of argument.
Relief and reform
Further, a partnership between the UNP and SJB would not be a reunification of the Centre-Right because of the ideological differences between Premadasa and Wickremesinghe and between the SJB and UNP.
Premadasa has stressed countless times that neither he nor the SJB subscribe to neoliberalism and extreme, free market ideologies. This is why MP Dr. Harsha de Silva regularly refers to the model of a social market economy and why MP Eran Wickramaratne refers to the SJB as being more than just a liberal party but one based on social democratic principles.
It is perhaps this departure from the UNP’s ‘free market’ discourse that led Shiral Lakthilaka to refer to the SJB as following a “welfarist” approach to policy during a recent television programme, which while being inaccurate, still reveals the existence of ideological differences.
The Blueprint 2.0, released last year by the SJB as an intermediate economic policy manifesto, made reference to social justice being central to the tenets of its policy. This is an acknowledgment of the highly unequal outcomes produced by Sri Lanka’s economic growth and the disparities laid bare by the latest United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report on Sri Lanka’s income inequality; the island nation is now one of the top five most unequal societies in the Southeast Asian region.
The SJB has focused on providing relief for Sri Lankans desperately trapped between a high cost of living, poor job prospects, and rising personal debt.
Wickremesinghe’s Government failed to meet even the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) low minimal requirement for social assistance spending of 0.7% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). ‘Aswesuma,’ though an improvement on ‘Samurdhi,’ has been plagued by some of the same targeting issues. The tax system depends heavily on indirect taxes which place the burden on lower income deciles. There is no top marginal income tax rate, no form of wealth taxes, and no significant investments in or reform of the Inland Revenue Department.
The citizen’s frontline
The SJB breakaway from the UNP’s Centre-Right, Thatcherite ideology in some ways is a reflection of former President Ranasinghe Premadasa’s efforts to broad-base the UNP of the early 1970s. Several Sri Lankan writers from Kusal Perera to D.B.S. Jeyaraj and Jayadeva Uyangoda have discussed this transformation of the UNP through the efforts of President Premadasa.
Jeyaraj, writing on R. Premadasa’s 97th birth anniversary in 2021, notes the context of Dudley Senanayake’s passing in 1973 as a turning point for the UNP, stating that Jayewardene was keen to take advantage of public sympathy to drive home an electoral advantage. The UNP needed to become broad-based and JR realised that the UNP leadership had shifted away from the popular centre of Sri Lankan politics.
“JR, the master tactician, wanted to channel this shift in public mood constructively and turn the UNP into a winner at the next elections. For this, he needed to reorganise and refurbish the party… aware of his limitations… realised that Premadasa, the man of the masses, was necessary for this task. So he summoned Premadasa for a one-on-one meeting…”
Ranasinghe Premadasa carried the baton and not only reorganised the party but also reimagined its policy priorities; this is very much the task at hand for Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa and the SJB.
Perera, writing in August 2019, noted the social-centred ethos of Ranasinghe Premadasa who, from a young age, engaged in activism to uplift Sri Lanka’s urban poor: “While leading his charitable organisation Sucharitha Movement that kept him closely linked to the urban poor, Ranasinghe Premadasa in [the] mid-’60s formed a civil organisation called Puravesi Peramuna (Citizens’ Front) and chose a darker shade of yellow as its colour.
“He worked tirelessly to groom himself to reach the top rung of the UNP leadership then dominated by personalities like M.D.H. Jayawardena, Montague Jayawickrama, M.D. Banda, and Jinadasa Niyathapala; all closely behind Dudley and JRJ right at the top.”
The point to be made here is that it is the ideological tilt of Ranilism that has led to the deterioration of the UNP’s base of support over decades, a base built tirelessly by the likes of Ranasinghe Premadasa in the decades before.
The SJB is the vehicle being utilised to recapture that same pro-poor, pro-development ideology of the Premadasa UNP. The ideological shifts are clear; the emphasis on the poor, a focus on inclusive growth, prioritising investments in education, and another wave of industrialisation.
Instead of policies that accelerate the migration of workers, public policy should engineer an economy that develops their skills and generates employment here in Sri Lanka, work that pays a wage that allows them to educate their children and look after their communities; that, after all is the Sri Lankan dream, the dream that millions have left behind – those that spend years living away from their families, not because of some romantic notion of adventure or self-actualisation but because of the desperation of their circumstances.
These policies, far from moving towards industrialised exports, are actually incentivising the export of unskilled labour. Is there anything more dystopian than the understanding that such policy is by design and not by accident, and that this dependency is a political choice?
While the country’s various business chambers regularly award exporters for their success in generating foreign exchange income for the country, there are no such awards for the millions of women who have migrated abroad to work under arduous conditions just to send money back to their struggling families. Only Nanayakkara is available to accept the plaudits.
Upon his expulsion from Parliament, Nanayakkara seemed to praise himself for the billions of dollars that have come into the country on account of migrant worker remittances. Will he also then take ownership of the negative social impacts of Sri Lanka’s policies of labour market liberalisation?
(The writer has 15 years of experience in the financial and corporate sectors after completing a Degree in Accounting and Finance at the University of Kent [UK] and also holds a Masters in International Relations from the University of Colombo. He is a media presenter, resource-person, political commentator, and foreign affairs analyst. He is also a member of the Working Committee of the Samagi Jana Balawegaya [SJB]. He can be contacted via email: kusumw@gmail.com and X: @kusumw)