WHEN we see a cleaner on the street working under the scorching sun, we feel pity and sorry for him and give him money. All religions including ours call for sympathizing with the poor and the needy. Those workers get paid low salaries and sometime their salaries get delayed and some cases they get paid half their salaries because their employers unfairly deduct part of their salaries for different purposes and pretexts. The majority of them get blackmailed back in their home country by recruitment offices, which compounds their misery. They end up selling all they have in the hope that they will get a work visa and go to the Kingdom or other Gulf countries. They work hard to raise money and send money to their families to support them. Because we know that those workers are victims of blackmailing and exploitation, we sympathize with them. However, what happened in Hail last Ramadan makes us rethink the way we look at those workers. Some newspapers ran stories saying that some Asian cleaning supervisors in Hail encouraged the cleaners to beg money from the public provided that the cleaners should give a certain percentage of the money to their supervisors. The cleaners were given less hours and were placed in places where they could beg money from as many people as they wanted. This is not the first time something like this has happened. In fact, cleaners in different parts of the country become beggars because begging brings them a lot of money. This is some king of fraud and cheating; however, their miserable conditions make them turn to begging and forget about cleaning. I am sure that most cleaners are victims of exploitation or fraud themselves. We do not know if we should give them money or not.
