When a Sri Lankan maid complained that she had been abandoned inside a wealthy Hong Kong investment banker's home with no food, money or keys while her employer went on holiday, the case came as no surprise to Jim Rice.
In his opinion, the case of Saroja Jayasekara, 36, who claimed early this month that she ended up surviving on food handouts from neighbors and charities, typifies a widespread but hidden problem of maid abuse in the territory.
More than 300,000 women, mostly from the Philippines and Indonesia, work as live-in maids for Hong Kong families, and Rice, a philosophy lecturer at the city's Lingnan University, said many are secretly abused or underpaid.
Because they know too little about the law, employers almost always get away with such abuses, said Rice, who has now written a low-cost legal guidebook to try to help downtrodden maids in the city of 6.8 million stand up for their rights.
Jayasekara's case appears strikingly similar to one that Rice himself came across some years ago and first persuaded him that the city's army of domestic helpers were in need of help themselves.
Locked in the house
"Near where I lived, there was an Indonesian woman who was locked up in her employer's house alone for a month while she went away on holiday," Rice recalled.
"She had to call friends for help just to get food," he said. "They were bringing it to her and stuffing it through the gate. She was literally locked in the house. If there had been a fire, she wouldn't have been able to get out."
Rice offered to go for help, but the maid was horrified when he suggested publicizing her case.
"She begged me, `Please don't make any trouble,'" he said, "so I didn't go to the police or the press. I observed her wishes, and eventually she got a new employer and moved. Nothing ever came of it."
"These things happen and the employee is so frightened of getting into trouble because she knows the cards are stacked against her in terms of the labor procedures," he said.
Foreign maids in Hong Kong are guaranteed a minimum monthly wage of around US$440, far more than their counterparts in Singapore, and Hong Kong has been praised by the New York-based Human Rights Watch for protecting domestic helpers' rights.
Nevertheless, Rice, who has worked with help groups providing aid to maids involved in disputes with their employers, argued that they are very much second-class citizens in legal terms.
Visas revoked
If maids are dismissed, their visas are revoked immediately, and they must leave the territory within two weeks, meaning that complaints of abuse or wrongful dismissal are rarely heard.
"Once a helper is dismissed, she has no right to be here," Rice said. "I know of cases where people have sacked their maids, packed up their suitcases, sent them to the airport, and they are on their way to Manila within a few hours of being dismissed, and they get away with that."
"I am trying to inform workers they have other options, and I think they need to hear this. It can help them enormously in terms of dealing ... with immigration officers or the police," he said.
Most maids are unaware of their right to silence if they are reported for working illegally, a widespread phenomenon in the territory and encouraged in many cases by employers who take on part-time maids.
"Some individuals have been questioned about illegal employment," Rice said, "and they have burst into tears and told all and ended up with an eight-month sentence."
"I know another woman who was aware she had the right to silence, and she shut up and she was questioned and grilled for hours and hours, and then they let her go because there was no evidence," he said.
Rice's book, entitled Take Your Rights Seriously, is being sponsored by a human-rights campaigner so it can be sold at a cover price of around US$5.
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
RSS