Foreign maids in Singapore work up to 17 hours a day and only half get one day off a month, but the domestic workers say physical abuse is not rampant, a survey showed on yesterday.
While one in six of 284 maids queried by The Sunday Times said their treatment could be better, 82 percent said they are happy here.
Most of the 140,000 maids come from Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka. Others are from Myanmar and India.
Abuse of maids is a major concern of Singapore's Manpower Ministry, which reported 99 fell to their deaths while washing windows or doing other chores from high-rise apartments between 1999 and last June.
The courts are issuing harsh penalties on employers who beat or physically harm maids in other ways.
Those interviewed averaged 26 in age and earned an average of S$261 (US$153) a month.
Most are up by 6am and finish between 9pm and 11pm. Seven in 10 are allowed to take breaks during the day.
Only half get days off, and usually only once a month.
Fifty percent said they have their own bedrooms and eat three meals a day, usually the same food as their employers.
Three in 10 have been shouted at and one in 100 said they have been physically abused.
Verbal and emotional abuse is likely to persist, said Anthony Slim, vice president of the Association of Employment Agencies of Singapore.
"Calling maids `stupid' and threatening to send them back and deduct money from their wages will continue, because there's no way to verify it's taken place," the newspaper quoted him saying.
Knowing that maid abusers were in the minority was nothing to celebrate, said Bridget Lew, who chairs the Commission for Migrants and Itinerant People.
"There shouldn't be any abuse in the first place," she added.
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
Former Chinese ministers of national defense Wei Fenghe(魏鳳和) and Li Shangfu (李尚福) were both sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve over graft charges, state news agency Xinhua reported on Thursday, underscoring the severity of the purge in the military. The armed forces have been one of the main targets of a broad corruption crackdown ordered by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) after coming to power in 2012. The purges reached the elite Rocket Force, which oversees nuclear weapons as well as conventional missiles, in 2023. Earlier this year they escalated further, resulting in the removal of the top general in
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
The Philippine Coast Guard yesterday said it deployed aircraft to issue radio warnings to a Chinese research ship in a disputed area of the South China Sea “swarming” with vessels from Beijing’s so-called maritime militia. The research vessel Xiang Yang Hong 33 (向陽紅33), which is capable of supporting submersible craft, was operating near a reef in the contested Spratly Islands (Nansha Islands, 南沙群島), which Taiwan also claims, the Philippine Coast Guard said. The Chinese ship was deploying a service boat toward the Spratly’s Iroquois Reef on Wednesday when it was spotted by a coast guard plane, “confirming ongoing unauthorized [marine scientific research]
RSS