Yes, you heard right. One day off a month.

Since then, more facts and opinions have been revealed, refreshing the headlines regularly. Every day, I feel I should write something about the subject, but each new revelation floors me all over again, and I find myself at a loss for words!

Tonight, I have recovered sufficiently, thank you for your concern.

In our city of slightly over 4 million people,

There are between 140,000 and 150,000 maids here, mainly from Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and India.

A Sunday Times poll of 284 maids in November and December 2003 found that only half of them got days off. Of these, two-thirds had one day off a month while 23 per cent had two days off. Only about one in 10 had a day off every week.

The figures were not surprising, according to maid agencies. 

-- Straits Times, 25 Oct 2005

That quote came from the news article that mentioned the one-day-off-a-month proposal.

A closer read of the story revealed that it wasn't a proposal from the government, but from a consumer watchdog in charge of accrediting maid agencies. Being a non-governmental body, the proposal would not have force of law. Instead it was for maid agencies to incorporate a clause in all maid contracts, entitling maids to a monthly day off.

* * * * *

 
Singapore does have an Employment Act, which governs ordinary working hours, overtime pay, obligatory rest days, annual leave and such like. With respect to rest days, Clause 36 says,

Rest day

36. ­(1) Every employee shall be allowed in each week a rest day without pay of one whole day which shall be Sunday or such other day as may be determined from time to time by the employer. 

(2) The employer may substitute any continuous period of 30 hours as a rest day for an employee engaged in shift work. 

(3) Where in any week a continuous period of 30 hours commencing at any time before 6 p.m. on a Sunday is substituted as a rest day for an employee engaged in shift work, such rest day shall be deemed to have been granted within the week notwithstanding that the period of 30 hours ends after the week. 

(4) Where the rest day of an employee is determined by his employer, the employer shall prepare or cause to be prepared a roster before the commencement of the month in which the rest days fall informing the employee of the days appointed to be his rest days therein.

Alas, a domestic worker is not an employee for the purposes of the Act. In the Interpretation section of that law, it says, 

"domestic worker" means any house, stable or garden servant or motor car driver, employed in or in connection with the domestic services of any private premises; 

"employee" means a person who has entered into or works under a contract of service with an employer and includes a workman and any officer or employee of the Government .... but does not include any seaman, domestic worker, or any person employed in a managerial, executive or confidential position... for the purposes of this Act;

Moreover, clause 67 of the Employment Act says,

Minister may apply Act to domestic workers. 

67. The Minister may, from time to time by notification in the Gazette, apply all or any of the provisions of this Act with such modification as may be set out in the notification to all domestic workers or to any group, class or number of domestic workers and may make regulations to provide generally for the engagement and working conditions of domestic workers.

Evidently, the minister has not gazetted the applicability of the Employment Act's provisions for rest days to our maids.

* * * * *

 
The accreditation agency's proposal even included a loophole. It said employers who needed their maids badly could dispense with that day off so long as they paid her for working on that day.

Press reporters had no difficulty finding employers who said they found their maids indispensable, and would be willing to pay them off so that their maids would work 365 days a year.

As if the one-day-off-a-month idea wasn't toothless enough, the practical reality should also be borne in mind. If an employer flouted the contract and refused to give the maid a day off, the maid might have to hire a lawyer to sue, since the matter was one of private contract. Can you imagine a maid suing her employer while she has to live under the same roof?

A few days after that stunningly humane (sarcasm intended) proposal was floated, the question of webcams at home came out. A number of employers sang praises of this new technology, enabling them to monitor their maids while they themselves were at the office. Mary Tan said she caught her maid handling her toddler roughly. Real estate agent Kent Tan said he caught his maid putting on his wife's clothes while doing housework. Another family caught their maid bringing a Bangladeshi man back -- we have many guest workers from Bangladesh in our construction industry. (To even the score, yet another family caught their own daughter bringing multiple men home.)

The consensus verdict was that webcams were useful and perhaps necessary tools. No one demurred about infringement of human dignity.

In a way, it is understandable, because upsetting behaviour (I think it's too prematurely judgmental to call it misbehaviour) by domestic maids is not an insignificant problem. One cannot deny employers some means to protect their homes and children. But webcams are merely treating the symptoms.

The question that few people seem to ask is: why is upsetting behaviour by maids a significant problem? It largely boils down to what I'd call the starting conditions, for example:

• Too many maids are still in their teens when they come to Singapore to work. They come from rural villages, they have never been away from their families, and then suddenly they are contracted here for 2 years without a vacation. It's an emotional shock, they can't get the food they're used to, they miss their friends and they get homesick very easily.

• They come from a different culture, and what is expected behaviour in our culture may not be so in theirs. This is compounded by the fact that many of them have very little schooling, and no awareness that cultures can be different. Take a simple thing, what is clean and tidy enough to one person may not be seen as clean and tidy to another. What is customary way to answer the phone and take messages in one culture is unheard of in the home village where no one has phones. There can be an infinite number of ways for misunderstanding and friction to arise.

• They are isolated by language differences.

• This is then aggravated when they do not get days off, so they have no opportunity to make new friends in Singapore from their own communities; no opportunity to unburden themselves and find support.

• We don't use maids to supplement housekeeping and childcare by the family, we use them in place of our own responsibilities. Many families delegate everything to the domestic worker, while both parents go out to work. Yet the infant is still precious, and so anxiety gnaws at the parents throughout the workday, leading to the impulse to monitor the maid remotely, or treating her with suspicion every time anything unusual happens. This then leads to the feeling of victimisation on the maid's part.

These starting conditions make cultural and personal conflict almost inevitable. Trying hard to keep the lid on the maids by locking them in the house, perhaps even with constant surveillance, doesn't solve the problem, but more likely piles on the pressure.

Just last week, a maid named Barokah, aged 26, was charged with killing her 75-year-old employer, Madam Wee Keng Wah.

In contrast, I can't recall a single instance of a foreign worker employed in the manufacturing, cleaning or construction industry (predominantly men from India, China, Bangladesh, Thailand and Burma) taking out their frustrations against their employers to the point of killing them.

Does this have to do with the fact that cleaning and construction workers get days off? And that they have their own quarters to retire to, unlike domestic maids who have to live under their employer's roof and are under watch all the time?

 
And then today I am left speechless again. An employer wrote to the Straits Times Forum explaining, justifying, why she had not given her maid a day off in the last 2 years.

I had known about this bond, but I had not known that people used this to justify virtually locking maids up at home.

It reminded me of the way communist regimes maintained social control. In every city neighbourhood or rural commune, there would be a party cadre responsible for the good behaviour of the individuals there. If an individual were to break any rule, express any "counter- revolutionary" sentiment, or even as in the case of China's one-child policy, become pregnant a second time, it was the cadre's responsibility to fix the problem at source, otherwise he would get the blame.

The cadre would be someone living within the same commune or neighbourhoood, and he would have his own informants (think webcam, now). Since he was liable to be punished for others' transgressions, he often went overboard in exercising control over the people in his charge. We know from history how inhuman and abusive people become when put in such a position of power and fear at the same time.

Has the same thing happened to us all in Singapore?

Has our government gone overboard in their admiration of methods of social control perfected by totalitarian states, turning selected citizens into brutal enforcers on their behalf?

Of course they will deny it, in which case, the follow up question should be: then demonstrate your humanity, by extending the Employment Act, and its requirement of one day off per week, to domestic maids.  

I am embarrassed that we have become a society so marked by inhumanity. I am embarrassed that we have a government that, far from providing moral leadership, has created a climate for inhumanity to metastasise like cancer.

© Yawning Bread