Maid in Singapore: Policy Failure or National Bigotry?

Source: The Online Citizen

The latest social issue that is gripping one segment of our society is whether to legislate the one day per week off for domestic workers. For a full story, the online citizen has the facts and debates. I would recommend reading the comments section for an appreciation of the kind of stupid dumbassery that some Singaporeans are known for.

The point of view I am offering concerns how we as a nation have arrived at this point in our development: the way nationalist pride in our economic growth and standards of living has grown in tandem with a snobbish sense of entitlement, an utter disregard for the rights of other human beings who "serve" us, and a complete ignorance of the way macro policies have manipulated us as a citizenry to behave in a manner that disgraces us amongst our global peers.

I am referring to a widespread opinion (no numbers since no institution has published any decent study of attitudes towards migrant domestic workers) that maids do not require a mandated day off because
(a) they would use the day off to engage in morally unacceptable activities such as sexual relations;
(b) they would get pregnant as a result of (a) and hence be deported, resulting in the loss of the employers' $5000 surety fee;
(c) they would become too "savvy" as a result of interaction with other maids and "cause trouble" for their employers;
(d) they do not want a day off anyway because they have no money to spend.

The above opinions are common excuses offered by Singaporean employers for denying their maids a day off. To give some context to the issue, we do not have any labour law that gives domestic workers any rights to a day off. It means that maids literally work 24 hours (the number of hours they sleep varies according to the decency of each employer) 7 days a week. It was recommended some years ago that employers give maids a day off, or compensate a day's wage in lieu of that. However, this has never been legislated and a majority of employers continue to work their servants 7 days a week. (There is the exception of Filipina maids, their contract mandates a weekly day off due to Filipino labour laws)

To address the horribly flawed arguments against this legislation which I've enumerated above, Singaporean employers typically take a suspicious and cynical view of granting such a right to their maids. An ex-boyfriend of mine objected to my argument that his mother should give their maid a day off, saying that I "did not understand how these people are". Essentially, "these people" would get really crafty and create trouble for their employer if given a chance to socialise with other maids, he claimed. He also told me that they had caught their maid with photos of herself naked with some guy stashed in her mobile phone. How they had gotten access to her mobile phone troubles me, but back then, I had to let the matter rest since it wasn't my domestic helper.

Singaporean employers are dismally uneducated when it comes to what's legally right and what's morally wrong.  They do not forfeit their $5000 deposit if their maid gets pregnant and is deported, this fact may be little known to them, but I doubt making this public knowledge would change the anachronistic mindset that it is preferable for their maids to remain "naive" and stay out of trouble than to risk their becoming "clever" by socialising with other maids.

The implication being that socially closeted and marginalised maids make more compliant employees. Reminds you of the doctrine of a certain government in a certain era doesn't it?

The saddest part about this story isn't that Singaporeans indulge in irrational logic borne of arrogant stupidity. It is the fact that the maids suffer psychological stress as a result of overwork and social isolation. Some employers who had written to the Straitjacketed Times alleged that their maids were not overworked at all and even described how cushy their lives were in comparison to the horror stories of overworked and abused maids. After you close your mouth from the sheer idiocy of such a claim, you would wonder what objective yardstick this person had used to measure her maid's burden of work in order to arrive at this dodgy conclusion.

If anyone were to turn the lens onto themselves, as Singaporeans love to do when it's time to complain about their own troubles and burdens, they would do well to consider if they would like to forgo their days off on Saturdays and Sundays. After all, based on our national productivity rates, Singaporeans spend most of their work day on Facebook and at the smoking section anyway (apart from two hour lunches and double tea-breaks).

The truth is, it is no walk in the park to do domestic work. Ask any maid who has attempted suicide. I'm not saying that working in the home drives one to suicide, there are usually other serious conditions that tips the balance. I have been at home for 6 weeks nursing a baby and doing the chores. On days when I am completely alone with the baby, I feel like I am going batshit crazy by the time my husband returns. I wouldn't even compare myself with what a maid has to do, since I don't do any cleaning, I have the Internet, the TV and the freedom to leave the house even if I don't want to with an unpredictable infant.

A possible reason for the common disregard for maids' rights is that people do not consider domestic work REAL work. I am sure this isn't unique to Singapore, but we are certainly not unique in the way we have approached the issue of unpaid and lowly paid household work. A maid who cooks, cleans and cares for an elderly, disabled or infant member of the family is seen as merely doing the work that the female (usually the wife) in the family does. Because housewives (or homemakers, if you prefer the politically kosher term) are not paid and are not counted as part of the workforce, their work is not valued the way paid workers are. The truth is domestic work is still work, whether or not the value generated can be measured in real wages. What happens is, on a societal level, domestic work is utterly undervalued and maids are hardly thought of as active members of the economic workforce who deserve their day of rest.

*********

Let's look at what state policy has done to contribute to the national reliance on maids from Third World countries. First, our female labour participation rate isn't even among the highest in the world, the Scandinavians being top of the list and NOT being a mass importer of low-wage domestic labour. Yet a bonafide lack of childcare options awaits the mother who wishes to return to work once she is over maternity leave. Therein lies Problem B: we do not have a nation-wide access to affordable and quality child-care. And I would hazard a guess that our government with its worldclass GDP-growth forward-thinking strategies forgot to plan for the infrastructure that would support a large female workforce which doesn't compromise birth rates as well.

Second, there is no social safety net of any sort since the family as the first line of social support is the doctrine of the government. Welfare is minimal and applicants have to jump through numerous bureaucratic hoops to prove one is truly in need before being given a paltry state handout. This leaves the population in a persistent mental state of vulnerability, a state suffered by all except the upper classes. State-sponsored care for the elderly and disabled or sick among us is relegated to private or non-government organisations. There is basically very little help for Singaporeans who need to provide constant care to a family member and so they turn to maids who are often underaged, under-qualified and ill-equipped to deal with such specialised care.

Whenever I start complaining about doing two people's work (a nanny and a maid) Daniel often asks me, how do people in the West, with no access to cheap labour, do it then? I would say, when there's no choice, you don't get to complain much. Having said that, Western European governments provide lots of state support and their policies are oriented towards helping women have children and return to work. They are also a lot further along in dismantling the patriarchal structures of female discrimination when it comes to domestic work. For every argument against this citing Europe's high tax rates, I would caution you to consider the other price tag we pay for our supposedly "low" tax rates: no healthcare, no retirement funds (since all our CPF will b depleted by our property) no protection against unemployment, low wages.

I am not advocating doing away with maids altogether. But I am offering a possible reason for the dismal state we have fallen into: trapped by our needs and bullied by our state's policies. And yet it's still not an excuse to take a crappy attitude towards the people who come here to alleviate some of our burden. They do the hard work in the home so that we can go out and do work that pays us a pittance and keeps us in a vicious cycle of insecurity and need.