Maids
The social price
Foreign maids serving a middle class in Asia regarded as feudal practice in West. By Seah Chiang Nee.
Jan 19, 2004

AFTER years of hands-off approach, the government is trying to get its citizens to treat their foreign maids better - and for good reasons. It may save lives.

First-time employers will have to go through an orientation programme about their responsibilities, and maids are being told not to obey their employers when ordered to do dangerous work.

In the last three years, 99 maids have died falling off high-rise flats while cleaning windows or putting out laundry to dry, a shocking figure of employer neglect and insensitivity.

With 90% of the population living in tall buildings, this has become a big worry. Most of the maids come from Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka - and have never lived in flats.

There have also been a few high-profile cases of physical abuse, although their numbers have declined since the courts began jailing and caning abusers.

That is not a major problem. More serious is the widespread problem of overwork and insufficient rest.

Singapore is probably one of the world’s most dependent countries on a per capita basis when it comes to maids.

The people will swear they absolutely need a maid to clean the home, cook, look after their kids or tend to their aged parents. They get angry at the slightest suggestion of raising the cost of having one.

There are 140,000 foreign maids here, about the same number as in Hong Kong whose population is almost twice as large.

But as more Singaporeans become worldly wise, a few fresh questions are being raised.

One is whether this dependency on maids by so many families may not already have inflicted some permanent harm on society, especially the children.

Then by overworking - and sometimes mistreating - the maids, Singapore (and elsewhere) is gaining a poor image abroad.

Routinely, many maids work from 6am to 11pm every day, seven days a week for wages ranging from S$200 to S$350 per month, and Singaporeans do not even think it is unfair.

Not much will change because the government won’t interfere, regarding it as a matter between employer and employee.

Officials explain it’s not much point having regulations because the government can’t go into people’s homes to enforce them.

Imposing a hard regime on their servants is widely practised by the well-educated, liberal-minded professionals, which smacks of double standards.

These are often the same avid defenders of labour protection for Singaporean workers - and for themselves.

There is, however, a faint voice of protest, saying that making domestic servants work 16 to 17 hours a day, 365 days a year, is a practice of the feudal past that stands in the way of Singapore becoming a civil society.

Many of the young maid-using liberals are caught in a bind between what they believe in and what they require their maids to do. Most choose to follow the crowd.

Another awareness is that the phenomenon - of a massive import of maids to serve the middle-class - exists in only a few affluent Asian cities, not in the West.

In fact, it is alien to the United States, Western Europe, Japan or even South Korea. Top executives of Fortune 500 may have them, but few others.

In a recent radio commentary, a Singaporean man said he believed the Republic would be better off if fewer people could afford maids.

"It is a First World country, yet Singaporeans, even those in the lower middle-class, live like Third World pashas, with servants at their beck and call," he said.

For most part of the year, he lived in Austin, Texas, where he did not have a maid.

"In America, only the likes of Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Bill Gates and the President of the United States, have servants. The rest serve themselves.

"Both my wife and I have busy work schedules, and have a child to raise, but we take care of our domestic chores," he said.

"What would happen if we got rid of maids? Some Singaporeans have told me that without them Singaporean women professionals cannot work and raise children. That is absurd.

"If American, British and French women can manage without full-time live-in maids, I don’t see why Singaporean women can’t. Singaporean men, of course, would have to get off their haunches and do some housework, but that wouldn't kill them."

The hard-working maid is helping to pamper a whole generation of children who can’t do the simplest housework, like ironing their clothes or cooking rice.

Others pick up their parents’ worst behaviour on how to shout, discriminate or look down at a person under their employment.

Most children - just as most employers - are well behaved but a few worrying cases have surfaced. Several months ago, an official working committee organised an essay contest for Primary Classes 4 to 6, entitled "The Maid at Home."

Judges had expected them to tell kind tales. Children at this age group are generally close to their maids, regarding them as surrogate mothers.

They were shocked with one boy who said: "After some time, I started hating her. I hated her and even did not like to see her face."

Another kid wrote: "I am just glad that she never burnt the house down."

One judge said that in an Asian society where children were taught to respect elders, it was disturbing to see families who expect their maids to call an 11-year-old child 'Sir'.
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A recent Internet chat-site spoke of a family with two children sitting at a country club.

"Their maid was standing by the side hanging on to the golf bags and other belongings," said the writer.

None in the family bothered to ask the maid to put the heavy stuff down and have a seat. "The face of the employer was the type that says ‘Me master, you slave.’"

How about laws on minimum standards? Probably not for a long, long time. The employers don’t want them; the authorities are not keen.

With the economy picking up strongly, the number of maids will steadily rise. One day, even the lower middle class may have maids.

The business is here to stay. The government isn’t doing too badly, either.

With 140,000 maids at a levy of S$345 per maid per month, you can work out the simple arithmetic of how important the business is to Singapore’s Treasury.
(The article was first published in The Sunday Star on Jan 19, 2004.)