"It was slavery... especially when she used to click her fingers, that’s slavery right there... I’ve got a name, use my name."
A Tory MP’s housekeeper says she was treated like a slave, suffered insults and was ‘worked like a dog’ and eventually had to go to court to get paid.
Hazel Settas worked for Jonathan Djanogly and wife Rebecca for 12 hours a day from 7am to 7pm at the family’s £7million home in West London, but often found herself working until 11pm, the Mirror reports.
She says that she was made to feel worthless and the MP looked down on her as ‘not even human’, alleging that the MPs wife said: “My husband’s an MP, you’re worthless.”
Setting out the appalling conditions under which she was made to work, on a salary of £20,000 a year, Hazel told the paper that she was ‘given rigid instructions on answering the phone within four rings, how long to run the tap – and even how to arrange avocados in the fruit bowl’.
On one occasion, she says that when she got something wrong she was made to ‘sit there and read out the whole folder out loud and I was crying’ and Rebecca told her to ‘stop crying, grow up and carry on reading’.”
Hazel said: “It was slavery… especially when she used to click her fingers, that’s slavery right there… I’ve got a name, use my name.
“I did feel angry, devastated actually. I applied for a role that turned out to be something else.
“I just had to bow down to anything she said. I couldn’t speak up. The easiest way to describe it is how you think a slave would work.”
She also said that no help from Djanogly was forthcoming and on one occasion was even told by the MPs wife that if she lost weight, she would ‘be quicker…. this is my house, this is my rules, if you don’t like it you know where the door is.’
Hazel is one of two women who successfully took Mrs Djanogly – under her maiden name of Silk – to court in order to get their wages.
The other woman, who is not named, even turned to the Salvation Army’s modern slavery unit for help.
A judge ordered Hazel be paid £886. The judge also ruled that in the case of the second housekeeper, Ms Silk, 56, “sought to deprive” her “of important rights available to workers and employees”.
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
(Picture credit: Chris McAndrew: Creative Commons)
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