But only in the more needed and productive ways.
Went to see
No Day Off by Eric Khoo on Friday. It was a film about a 23 year old girl from Sulawesi Indonesia who is in Singapore to earn money to buy a house in Indonesia. She's married and has a kid and doesn't speak English. The camera focused only on Siti (the girl's name) and almost no other faces were shown in the entire movie. Everyone talked at her in 3 different languages in 3 different households. It was a screening done by UNIFEM, TWC2, Aidha, and HOME so obviously meant to show the hardships for domestic workers here. Obviously, it was decently biased. While the work might be correct, the loneliness it aimed to portray I thought was a little too exaggerated. Throughout the entire movie, we only saw her have conversations with another human being at the very end.
A Q&A ensued that blew my mind. Keep in mind that I haven't looked up any facts yet and all this information was gotten from various movements working to have domestic workers be able to take a day off.
1) Domestic workers (live-in maids) make about $250/month. It costs ~$600/month to hire a live-in maid. Where does the difference go? I had assumed the maid agency but no, it's the Singaporean government. The government's argument is since most maids come from Indonesia and they don't want to encourage unnecessary immigration to the country, they're imposing levies on domestic workers to be paid by their employers so that hiring a maid from Indonesia will be almost comparable to hiring a Singaporean. In addition to this, they have to pay a $5000 bond for immigration fees and if the domestic worker is "lost" they lose this deposit. Maids are also tied to their employers and forced to go back almost immediately after they're terminated.
WHAT? So instead of creating a minimum wage that would create the same effect on unnecessary immigration, the Singaporean government is taking the difference between a respectable minimum wage and what domestic workers are paid? Their argument for not creating a minimum wage is that they don't want to discourage competition. In what why are they not limiting competition in this case??
2) The current goal of the organizations is that allow domestic workers to have one day off per week. We suggested maybe having relief workers help out or having 7 maids work for 6 families. We were immediately shot down. 1 maid working for > 1 family is illegal and part time work in Singapore is illegal unless performed by Singaporeans and Singaporeans won't want to. Ok...
3) Employment pass provides certain basic benefits but domestic workers do not have employment passes and are excluded from these rights
4) Indonesia recently pass regulation stating that no more domestic workers will be sent to Malaysia because one domestic worker was assaulted in Malaysia. NGOs seemed to play a large part in bringing this about.
5) Human rights is associated with communism. WTF.
I'm working on getting more involved with UNIFEM and Aidha so hopefully I'll have an answer to all these questions... but for the time being... if you do any research that will shed any light, please comment.
