Newsweek - Maids
One in every seven households has one. But not us. Three years ago, when we moved to Singapore from London, I told myself, "She'd spoil the kids rotten." With the impending arrival of our third child, though, I'm giving in. We're hiring a live-in maid.
So it was, one recent Sunday, that my husband and I found ourselves sitting in a small room at an employment agency, poring over the files of eight job applicants. We read details of their family background, how many children they had left behind in the Philippines or Indonesia, previous working experience, whether they were willing to cut their hair or cook pork.
Hiring someone to whom you're going to entrust your house and children is no easy task. But, hey, as the agency says, if I don't like her I can "exchange" her within six months, no questions asked. Given that most spoke only limited English, I pondered whether to give our candidates a reading test. Too humiliating, I concluded. Even so, one young woman blurted out to us, indignantly, that the couple in the next room had just asked her to read a children's book. She could!
The touchy question was always why these women would want to leave their current employer. For those who work for local Chinese families, the answer is often obvious. According to one survey, the average monthly pay of a maid in this prosperous city-state is $154. She typically works from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. Three in 10 report they do not get breaks, and half do not get even one day off per month. In these conditions, working for a Western family can mean hitting the jackpot. Expats tend to pay more, give every Sunday off and, reportedly, treat them better. I say reportedly because after-dinner conversations invariably turn to what misdeeds one's maid has been up to, from talking on the cell phone too long to watching television when their employers are away.
Apart from the long hours and low pay, I was shocked by other disturbing realities of the maids' working lives. Elvy, a tiny 31-year-old Filipina who shifted nervously on her chair, told us that her employer had physically and verbally abused her. I felt guilty. As much as I wanted to help, I couldn't hire someone so emotionally scarred. Two other maids also said they were verbally abused. For us, that made three out of eight.
The ubiquity of such abuse concerns the government. As of April 1, first-time employers now have to sit through a four-hour "orientation" course on how to treat an FDW, as foreign domestic workers are officially called. "Using the term maid is a bit degrading," our instructor explained. As if that were the only degrading thing. During our instruction program, I heard about one employer who thought nothing of watching her maid shower in the morning—not out of prurience, but to ensure that her exacting standards of hygiene were being met. Another employer locked her maid in the house when the family went away on weekends. I was advised to give my FDW her own bed and let her take a break now and again. I was also told it would be all right to start her off with just a day off each month, and that it would be perfectly standard for me to restrict access to her salary by paying it into a joint account—so she could not run away.
Was it a slave or a maid I would be hiring? I still have mixed feelings, even as I embark on this particular adventure in easy (for me) living. If, in three years, I find myself gossiping about the shocking expectations maids have these days—such as eating fresh vegetables or taking hot showers—I'll know it is time to move on.
Newsweek - 17 May 2004