I remember when I first moved to Oman I worked for a small branch of a bigger company and my promised salary was serriously late. This is not at all common in my home country of Canada where, if my salary were late more than 5 days time, I and everyone else, would probably quit coming to work, and refuse to do so until we were prompotly paid all owed (and maybe a little extra for the inconvenience) with a guarantee that it would never happen again.
I know I am not the only one that this has ever happened to in Muscat. It doesn't just effect poor Indian and Pakistani migrant workers either. And what happened to me was not at all serrious compared to the months and months and months some workers stay trapped in their jobs as they are unable to afford food and clothes let alone a ticket back to their home countries when their emloyers don't pay up.
But I will tell you what happened to me anyways.
I was promised in a few weeks my salary would come when I complained. I protested of course, that I had just enough left over from last month to pay my rent. When asked how much my rent was, my employer told me to go get a cheaper place. I was like, excuse me? This is cheaper than I EVER was forced to live because I was nice enough to agree to work for your crummy office even though I had better offers and no way am I going to be a slave or go ghetto just to stay and work for you.
I waited for my salary while I saw my Omani boss buying a new car off a Khuwair car lot, and some of his Indian workers hadn't been paid for months. I felt shy to complain when they accepted the situation, worse off than I, but I had noooooo money whatsoever and no food, so I remember one night I snuck out of my one room bachelor over a nice Omani villa (owned by the nicest Omani family ever in Al Athaiba) and was picking the lemons and dates off the ground that fell off the trees from peoples gardens and stuffing them into my mouth, I was that hungry.
The nephew of my boss, a much more compassionate person, and his wife, I guess happened to have spied me munching on their dates and lemons like a thief in the night, because they started cooking me breakfast and lunch every day and leaving it at the company, Allah bless them right. They were, apparently, my neighbors.
Now, these days, much better off, I remember having "stolen" those lemons (the dates weren't really an issue as they were on the ground) thinking at the time in hunger that since they were for the driveway probably no one was going to eat them, but as a Muslim, I think, what if they were, and I stole, I should totally go back and give the families whose lemons I pilfered a bag of lemons ect... But then, you know, that would be TOTALLY embrassing because, most likely they'd be like, ahhhh miskeen {poor} Canadian girl, and invite me inside for coffee and fruit and try to give me stuff. That's Omanis as I mainly know them.
But then there's Omanis like the kind that maybe pay me but forget everybody else. Because a girl like me is easy to feel sorry for. I mean, I look totally helpless and desperate trying to scrape dates off the road in the middle of night right, lol, when I live in the same neighborhood as your family, and they know what kind of life I gave up to come here to live in a Muslim country and earn a halal {not interest or any profit earned from sources Muslims aren't allowed to use ect) income for myself. But what about that Indian guy here? He's harder to feel sorry for, for some people I guess, forgetting he's got a wife and kids to feed back in India, and who knows what'll happen to his wife worse than what happened to me if her husband never gets paid and can't afford to ever come home. And their families don't live next door to him.
So to continue the tale, while everyone who worked for the company (Indian) did not recieve their salaries a week later as promised, I did (and a couple of other Omanis). And then most of us quit to find better jobs. One really can't afford to quit without getting aat least one salary, that's the problem.
I had never forgotten the situation until I learned about a group of men in our village who haven't been paid for months now, who are starving and can't buy basic things like clothes, blankets, soap ect. . I will tyr to collect some money or items like rice, cooking oil, soap, new blankets, ect... for them. But at the same time, I can't understand how the owner of the company who owes them their salary can live in a good way, with an expensive villa and luxury items knowing that men are starving to death while he does that.
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