In wealthy Singapore, maids push for protection

By Jason Szep

SINGAPORE, March 19 (Reuters) - Selvi, a petite Indian woman with thick eyebrows and large, trusting eyes, remembers the pain she felt as her boss dripped burning wax onto her palm, shouting and demanding she answer his questions.

Gripping her arm, he poured on more scalding wax as she refused to talk. After that harrowing night, the 35-year-old fled to a shelter for abused housemaids in Singapore.

Five months later, revealing a burn on her hand the size of a large coin, Selvi is comforted by other maids drawn to the one-storey terrace refuge by similar stories of exploitation and abuse stemming from lack of rights and protection.

Singapore and Hong Kong, two of Asia's biggest centers of migrant workers, are under pressure to halt the exploitation of thousands of mostly young women drawn from the poverty of the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and other neighboring nations.

Often regarded as an inexhaustible underclass who are cheap and compliant, Singapore's 140,000 foreign domestic workers make the affluent Southeast Asian city state one of the world's top employers of maids.

One in seven families hires live-in maids. Most work 15 to 16 hours a day for about S$260 ($156) a month, a survey by the Straits Times newspaper found last year, providing vital income for their families back home.

None is guaranteed a minimum salary or automatically entitled to even a day off a week. Many are expected to be available at any hour. On the whim of an employer, they can be sent back to their countries without right of appeal.

"They are at the mercy of everybody. If the employer is kind and compassionate, it is a bonus," said Bridget Lew who runs the shelter where Selvi and 14 other women stay, a tidy and sparsely furnished home partly funded by the Catholic Church.

NEW PROTECTION

After years of reported abuse, Singapore is taking steps to strengthen protection of the women.

New rules from April will require first-time employers to undergo half-day training on how to treat housemaids, teaching them among other things not to hit the workers and highlighting penalties for abuse.

A similar course for maids will include briefings on how to recognize exploitative work, and who to call for help.

Employment agencies have been ordered to stop displaying maids in storefront windows or posting "biodata" such as their height or weight to attract employers, a practice the government said had turned them into "commodities".

Alarmed by the deaths of 96 Indonesian women, who have fallen from high-rise apartments since 1999 while hanging out laundry or washing windows or committing suicide, Indonesia is building a $1.2-million school on the nearby island of Batam for its domestic workers before allowing them to work in Singapore homes.

In classrooms resembling a typical Singapore apartment, young women will hang laundry from bamboo poles stretching from make-believe high-rise windows or learn how to bathe babies. They will take tests on at least 600 English words.

"Most of the problem lies in a lack of training," said Chalief Akbar, a spokesman at Indonesia's embassy in Singapore where about 10 maids a day seek refuge for problems ranging from squabbles over work hours and lack of food to sexual abuse.

But critics say Batam could breed other problems. Dotted with resorts and industrial parks, the island is known as a centre of prostitution catering to Singapore businessmen. Some fear the women will be tempted to sell their bodies for better money.

TOUGHER LAWS

Braema Mathi, a member of parliament, is lobbying the government to introduce a standard maid contract that provides at least one rest day a week, annual leave, a minimum wage and a code of conduct for employers and domestic workers.

"We have had instances where employers have said we don't give her a day off," said Mathi, who chairs maids' rights group Working Committee Two, set up after a Singapore man beat to death his 19-year-old maid in 2002, battering her with his fists, a cane and a hammer, and burning her repeatedly.

"We were shocked by the extent of her injuries. But what shocked us more was the neighbor who said that he could hear her screams and said 'It's not for me to act, it is for the powers above to know what to do'," said Mathi.

Singapore stiffened penalties against maid abuse in 1998, prompting a drop in the number of substantiated cases to 43 in 2002 from a peak of 157 in 1999. Critics say that is still high for a country that prides itself as law-abiding in a turbulent region - equivalent to about one case every eight days.

The Straits Times survey found that one in 100 maids had been physically abused, a ratio that translates roughly into about 1,400 workers. Three out of 10 did not get a break all day and half do not have a day off a month.

But the survey said most, or about 82 percent, described themselves as happy.

Mathi said conditions have improved in Singapore, whose government earns about S$400 million a year from a monthly S$345 levy on people who employ maids. But nearby Hong Kong, where maid abuse also makes headlines, offers better laws to protect domestics, she added.

"The effectiveness with which the law is implemented is of course a separate question, but at least they have a law," she said. ($1=1.710 Singapore dollar).

(Article is no longer on reuters.com)