Foreign domestic workers (FDW) are ubiquitous in Singapore; you can see them in droves on Sundays, taking a day off from the tiresome week.
Maids are like miracle workers, from cleaning the house to cooking and taking care of children and elderly and people tend to (willfully) forget that they are also human.
Working from the moment they get up till bedtime, they only earn about $500 or so a month and if the roles were reversed, we’d be complaining and whining and I am pretty sure, you’d be demanding OT pay, cause I know I would.
The underlying issues
There are deep-seated issues in the way Singaporeans perceive FDWs, and according to a survey in 2017, 60% of domestic workers in Singapore were exploited.
If the report is used as a representation of Singapore as a whole, more than 140,000 maids were exploited.
And in an article by Anthony Bourdain’s popular (and sometimes controversial) series, Parts Unknown, it sheds light on the underbelly of the maid agencies in Singapore.
The article talks about how the monikers of maid agencies insinuate that FWDS are “relegated to a lower rung of Singaporean society than the majority of the population.”
A scathing article by Al Jazeera English talks how FDWs are put on display and how they will be ”working” such as cradling a baby doll and pushing each other around in wheelchairs at the maid agencies.
Jolovan Wham, executive director of the Humanitarian Organisation of Migration Economics (HOME), a migrant workers advocacy group based in Singapore, mentioned that some agencies market their domestic workers like “commodities”.
“Racial stereotypes are sometimes used in transactions with patrons. Some of the stereotypes include Filipinos as ‘smarter’, Indonesians as ‘less bright’ and Burmese as ‘sweet-natured and compliant’,” he said.
While the article might seem a little exaggerated or that it is all gloom and doom for FWDs, that is not the case.
There is progress
There is a performance bond of $6,000 in place now where employers have to cough up $6,000 if they abuse their maid and there is also a mandatory day off weekly for them.
In the article from Parts Unknown, they interviewed May, who is happy with her employer and has been working for them for four years and she hopes to stay with them as long as she can.
“But even if they’re not good, I don’t want to go back to this agency! I’d rather go back to the Philippines,” she said.
In a way, they need us as much as we need them.
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This article was first published on goodyfeed.com
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