Skip to main content

Helpers be Helped – Special Chinese New Year Double Issue 救救外傭 – 春節雙刊

The images are gruesome and the details are chilling. A woman held captive in a residence has been starved and beaten beyond recognition. Her teeth are chipped, cheekbones fractured and her limbs covered with cuts and burn marks. It sounds like the Ariel Castro kidnappings in suburban Cleveland or the Brixton Bookshop abduction in Lambeth, England – except it is not. It all happened in Tseung Kwan O, a densely populated community of high-rise residential blocks and large shopping centers. It was there 23-year-old Indonesian domestic helper Erwiana Sulistyaningsih was allegedly tortured at the hands of her Hong Kong employer for eight months. She was not paid a cent.

Erwiana, before and after her eight-month stay in Hong Kong

By now the story has captured the attention of the entire city – and far beyond. Not since Edward Snowden checked into the Mira Hotel last summer had so much spotlight been thrown on the not-so-Fragrant Harbour. Beneath the media frenzy and tabloid-style coverage, however, is the sad reality that Erwiana is not alone. In the past six months, a spate of similar abuse cases have come to light, all of them involving Indonesian workers who have a reputation for being soft-spoken and easily intimidated. Last September, for instance, a Hong Kong couple was jailed for falsely imprisoning their maid, beating her with a bicycle chain and scalding her with an iron. Just last week, a Chinese University professor was arrested for assaulting her 50-year-old helper. To get a sense of how common these abuse cases are, look no further than Bethune House, a shelter for foreign domestic workers that handles hundreds of assault cases every year. A recent survey by Mission for Migrant Workers found that nearly one in five domestic helpers in Hong Kong had been physically abused.

At first glance, it seems implausible that prolonged cases of domestic violence and false imprisonment can go unreported in a crowded city like Hong Kong. Many wonder why victims like Erwiana put up with the abuse instead of running away the first chance they get. The answer is simple: domestic helpers in Hong Kong are trapped in a system that is stacked against them. Among the many flaws in our migrant worker policy and its execution, none puts the domestic helper in a more vulnerable position than the dual evil of unlawful agency fees and the 14-day deportation rule.

Alleged abuser, 44-year-old housewife Law Wan-tung, in police custody

Employment Agency Fees

By law, employment agencies in Hong Kong are permitted to charge up to 10% of the migrant worker’s minimum monthly pay, or HK$401 (US$52). Back in their home countries, there are laws regulating recruitment and training fees. What happens in practice, however, is a different matter. Agencies on both ends routinely extort exorbitant amounts from migrant workers who are desperate for a job placement. The going rate in Hong Kong is HK$28,000 (US$3,600), roughly seven times the worker’s monthly salary and 70 times over the legal limit. Erwiana allegedly paid her agency HK$18,000 (US$2,300), an amount considered a bargain by the community’s standard. To avoid getting caught, crafty employment agencies accept only cash and never issue receipts.

Migrant workers pay these hefty fees by borrowing from friends and family, but more often, from moneylenders in Hong Kong. The five-figure principal, plus interest accruing at a double-digit rate (sometimes as high as 60%), forces the helper to turn over nearly all of her salary for months, sometimes even years, to pay off the debt. Illegal agency fees are the leading cause of distress for foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong, as well as the main reason why abused women like Erwiana choose not to flee from their House of Horrors. For once they escape, they will be out of a job and their mounting debt will go unpaid. Debt collectors and their harassment tactics will follow. One nightmare will simply give way to another.

Erwiana's employment agency

All that is happening under the noses of our government. Despite repeated pleas from the migrant worker community to crack down on excessive agency fees, law enforcement turns a blind eye. After all, there are billion-dollar drug trades to bust and weekly anti-government protests to rein in. Who would bother with petty consumer disputes between foreign maids and their agencies? In the meantime, bureaucrats go on renewing business licenses held by unscrupulous employment agencies and moneylenders year after year. In fact, if Time magazine and the Associated Press hadn’t picked up Erwiana’s story, would Labour Secretary Matthew Cheung have just let the police handle the incident as a common assault case and not have said a word about punishing employment agencies?

Will our Labour Secretary act?

14-day Reemployment Rule

By law, foreign domestic workers must leave Hong Kong within 14 days after their employment contract is terminated, unless a new placement is secured and a new work visa issued. The rule effectively evicts from the city any migrant worker who leaves her job, as the new work visa alone takes six weeks to process. The two-week provision is designed to achieve two objectives. First, the government wishes to deter employer-shopping and job-hopping. Even though it is perfectly normal for everyone else in Hong Kong to look for a better job and jump ship every now and then, it is not so for a migrant worker. Maids who quit and work for another home are looked upon as greedy and irresponsible.

The second objective is as unspoken as it is ignoble: to put arbitrary restrictions on the domestic helper’s stay to distinguish them from other expatriates. The distinction can have far-reaching consequences. In March 2013, the Court of Final Appeal ruled that foreign domestic workers, unlike fellow expatriates who work at big banks and law firms, are not entitled to permanent residency in Hong Kong regardless of the length of their stay. Focusing on the 14-day reemployment rule, the city’s highest court found the residence of a domestic helper “highly restrictive” and therefore not “ordinary” enough to meet the constitutional requirements for permanent residency.

As a result of the 14-day rule, migrant workers who switch jobs must live abroad while their new work visas are being processed. That’s why there are now boarding houses all over Macau and Guangdong where maids-in-waiting take up temporary residence in horrid conditions. For abused helpers like Erwiana, the risk of not finding alternative employment, the threat of deportation and the peril of borrowing more money for another round of agency fees is enough for her to bite the bullet and remain in the torture chamber.

"Please leave in 14 days. Thank you."

Other Systemic Failures

The mandatory live-in rule prohibits the domestic helper from living anywhere other than her employer’s home. The rule, based on racist and sexist assumptions about South East Asian women, is designed to prevent prostitution and other illegal activities when they are off duty. The irony is that Hong Kong is just about the least qualified place in the world to impose a cohabitation requirement. In fact, the same survey by Mission for Migrant Workers found that 30% of helpers are told to sleep in kitchens, bathrooms, hallways and closets.

Each time the government is asked to repeal the live-in rule, it will hide behind the same party line: doing so would exacerbate the city’s housing shortage and increase the cost of domestic help. It is a roundabout way of telling migrant workers to suck it up and “take one for the team.” Contrary to the government’s claim, however, killing the live-in rule is unlikely to unleash 300,000 maids into our streets, for the vast majority of helpers will choose to live with their employers to avoid high rent and a lengthy commute even if the rule is abolished. Instead, the policy change will give domestic helpers the option to seek an alternative living arrangement and, in Erwiana’s case, sufficient physical space to mitigate the chance and frequency of violence.

It's not uncommon to put the maid in the toilet

The United Nations defines human trafficking as the “recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring of persons by the use of force or other forms of coercion… for the purpose of exploitation.” Nearly every developed country has enacted anti-human trafficking (AHT) legislation in an effort to eliminate sex exploitation and forced labor. The latter covers involuntary servitude, debt bondage and restriction of movement, terms that resonate with many domestic helpers in Hong Kong. Incidentally, in August 2013, a Hong Kong man living in Vancouver was sentenced by a Canadian court to 18 months in prison for human trafficking. The accused was caught paying his Filipino maid (whom he had brought from Hong Kong) below the local statutory minimum wage and making her work seven days a week, conditions that were mild compared to what Erwiana had allegedly experienced.

Unfortunately, Hong Kong does not have an AHT statute that imposes stiff fines and heavy prison terms to deter forced labor. There is nothing in the law book that would slap an abusive employer with anything more than a “wounding” or “intimidation” charge or punish non-compliant employment agencies beyond revoking their business licenses. The absence of comprehensive AHT laws is coupled with a police force that thinks the only form of human trafficking is prostitution. In the 2013 Trafficking in Persons Report, the U.S. State Department wrote extensively about the foreign domestic worker issues in Hong Kong and gave the city a “Tier 2” rating for “securing no forced labor convictions… against abusive employers... or employment agencies [that] have charged fees in excess of Hong Kong law.” The report is downloadable from the State Department website and for all the world to see.

Available at www.state.gov

*                              *                                *

It has been four decades since the first batch of foreign domestic helpers arrived in Hong Kong from the Philippines. Since then, our economy has taken off but their status and working conditions have gone the other direction. Their grievances about domestic violence and unlawful business practices have fallen on seven million pairs of deaf ears. We either brush them off as “isolated incidents” or, as some have shamelessly suggested, turn to even more docile workers from Bangladesh and Myanmar. But enough is enough. The time to take a hard look at our migrant worker policy is now.

Erwiana Sulistyaningsih has been failed by our city in every way: by her employer and employment agency, by our law enforcement and policymakers. Every safeguard in the system has failed, all the way to the end when she fled the city for medical help, when immigration officers at the airport noticed her severe injuries but chose to do nothing. There are no words to describe the depth of her suffering or the breadth of our collective callousness. In the same way many Hong Kongers are demanding Philippine President Benigno Aquino III to apologize for the Manila hostage crisis in 2010, the migrant worker community in Hong Kong will be justified in asking C.Y. Leung for an apology for all the systemic failures that have led to Erwiana’s plight.

The city owes them an apology
________________________

This article was published on SCMP.com under the title "Why Hong Kong's government should apologise for failing abused domestic workers."

As posted on SCMP.com


Popular Posts

“As I See It” has moved to www.jasonyng.com/as-i-see-it

As I See It has a new look and a new home!! Please bookmark www.jasonyng.com/as-i-see-it for the latest articles and a better reading experience. Legacy articles will continue to be available on this page. Thank you for your support since 2008. www.jasonyng.com/as-i-see-it

Tokyo Impressions 東京印象

Twice a year, I make a pilgrimage to Tokyo, one of my favorite cities. Like many in Hong Kong, I take guilty pleasure in all things Japanese. Saddled by the burden of history, all ethnic Chinese in my generation are taught to loathe the Japanese or at least keep them at bay. How we are to separate our sworn enemies’ heinous past from their admirable qualities continues to elude every Japanophile among us. Moral dilemmas aside, I find the Japanese aesthetics irresistible. The marriage of Shintoism and Zen Buddhism has produced such core values as wabi (侘; simlicity and transience) and sabi (寂; beauty of age and time). They are the underpinnings of every aspect of the Japanese culture from theater and architecture to food preparation and social etiquette. A perfect storm was formed when these values collided with bushido (武士道), the strict code of conduct of the samurai warrior, resulting in an idiosyncrasy that is exacting, nuanced and immensely graceful. At once a philosophy and

About the Author 關於作者

Born in Hong Kong, Jason Y. Ng is a globetrotter who spent his entire adult life in Italy, the United States and Canada before returning to his birthplace to rediscover his roots. He is a lawyer, published author, and contributor to The Guardian , The South China Morning Post , Hong Kong Free Press and EJInsight . His social commentary blog As I See It and restaurant/movie review site The Real Deal have attracted a cult following in Asia and beyond. Between 2014 and 2016, he was a music critic for Time Out (HK) . Jason is the bestselling author of Umbrellas in Bloom (2016), No City for Slow Men (2013) and HONG KONG State of Mind (2010). Together, the three books form a Hong Kong trilogy that charts the city's post-colonial development. His short stories have appeared in various anthologies. Jason also co-edited and contributed to Hong Kong 20/20   (2017) and Hong Kong Noir   (2019). Jason is also a social activist. He is an ambassador for Shark Savers and an outspo

From Street to Chic, Hong Kong’s many-colored food scene 由大排檔到高檔: 香港的多元飲食文化

Known around the world as a foodie’s paradise, Hong Kong has a bounty of restaurants to satisfy every craving. Whether you are hungry for a lobster roll, Tandoori chicken or Spanish tapas, the Fragrant Harbour is certain to spoil you for choice. The numbers are staggering. Openrice, the city’s leading food directory, has more than 25,000 listings—that’s one eatery for every 300 people and one of the highest restaurants-per-capita in the world. The number of Michelin -starred restaurants reached a high of 64 in 2015, a remarkable feat for a city that’s only a little over half the size of London. Amber and Otto e Mezzo occupied two of the five top spots in Asia according to The World’s Best Restaurants , serving up exquisite French and Italian fares that tantalise even the pickiest of taste buds. Dai pai dong is ever wallet-friendly While world class international cuisine is there for the taking, it is the local food scene in Hong Kong that steals the hearts of residents a

The Beam in Our Eye 眼中的梁木

With 59 confirmed deaths and over 500 wounded, the Las Vegas mass shooting is the deadliest one in modern American history. Places like Columbine, Aurora, Newtown, Sandy Hook, Orlando—and now Sin City—are forever associated with carnage and death tolls.  They don't get it Not a week goes by in America without a horrific gun attack in a shopping mall, a school or a movie theatre.People outside the U.S. can’t fathom why the world’s wealthiest country can be in such denial over a simple fact: more guns means more gun-related deaths. But they don’t get it, don’t now? Instead, they tell us foreigners to stay out of the debate because we don’t understand what the Second Amendment means to the Land of the Free. So the anomaly continues: each time a shooting rampage shocks the nation, citizens respond with prayers and tributes for a while, but their lawmakers do nothing to change gun laws. And we—the foreigners—shake our heads in disbelief and wonder how many more innocen

Maid in Hong Kong - Part 1 女傭在港-上卷

Few symbols of colonialism are more universally recognized than the live-in maid. From the British trading post in Bombay to the cotton plantation in Mississippi, images abound of the olive-skinned domestic worker buzzing around the house, cooking, cleaning, ironing and bringing ice cold lemonade to her masters who keep grumbling about the summer heat. It is ironic that, for a city that cowered under colonial rule for a century and a half, Hong Kong should have the highest number of maids per capita in Asia. In our city of contradictions, neither a modest income nor a shoebox apartment is an obstacle for local families to hire a domestic helper and to free themselves from chores and errands. "Yes, mistress?" On any given Sunday or public holiday, migrant domestic workers carpet every inch of open space in Central and Causeway Bay. They turn parks and footbridges into camping sites with cardboard boxes as their walls and opened umbrellas as their roofs. They play

Brexit Lessons for Hong Kong 脫歐的教訓

It was an otherwise beautiful, balmy Friday in Hong Kong, if it weren’t for the cross-Channel divorce that put the world under a dark cloud of fright and disbelief. Asia was the first to be hit by the Brexit shock wave. BBC News declared victory for the Leave vote at roughly 11:45am Hong Kong time – hours before London opened – and sent regional stock markets into a tailspin. The shares of HSBC and Standard Chartered Bank, both listed on the Hong Kong Exchange, plunged 6.5 and 9.5 per cent, respectively... It ended in divorce ________________________ This article appeared in the 29 June 2016 print edition of the South China Morning Post . Read the rest of it on SCMP.com as " After Brexit, Hong Kong voters should take a careful look at what our own localist parties are really selling localist politics ." As published in the print edition of the South China Morning Post

The City that Doesn’t Read 不看書的城市

The Hong Kong Book Fair is the city’s biggest literary event, drawing millions of visitors every July. The operative word in the preceding sentence is “visitors,” for many of them aren’t exactly readers. A good number show up to tsau yit lau (湊熱鬧) or literally, to go where the noise is. In recent years, the week-long event has taken on a theme park atmosphere. It is where bargain hunters fill up empty suitcases with discounted books, where young entrepreneurs wait all night for autographed copies only to resell them on eBay, and where barely legal – and barely dressed – teenage models promote their latest photo albums. And why not? Hong Kongers love a carnival. How many people visit a Chinese New Year flower market to actually buy flowers? Hong Kong Book Fair 2015 If books are nourishment for the soul, then the soul of our city must have gone on a diet. In Hong Kong, not enough of us read and we don’t read enough. That makes us an “aliterate” people: able to read bu

10 Years in Hong Kong 香港十年

This past Saturday marked my 10th anniversary in Hong Kong .  To be precise, it was the 10th anniversary of my repatriation to Hong Kong. I left the city in my teens as part of the diaspora which saw hundreds of thousands others fleeing from Communist rule ahead of the 1997 Handover. For nearly two decades, I moved from city to city in Europe and North America, never once returning to my birthplace in the interim. Until 2005. That summer, I turned in the keys to my Manhattan apartment, packed a suitcase, and headed east. A personal milestone My law firm agreed to transfer me from New York to their Hong Kong outpost half a world away. On my last day of work, Jon, one of the partners I worked for, called me into his office for a few words of wisdom. He told me that there was no such thing as a right or wrong decision, and that people could only make life choices based on what they knew at the time. “I assume you’ve done your due diligence,” Jon gave me wink, “in that ca