By freeing local women from domestic chores, thus enabling them to take lucrative jobs in factories, hospitals, offices, newspapers and universities, the cheap imported labor of women from the poorest countries has helped fuel the “Asian Miracle” in Pacific Rim countries.
By sending money home to their families, these laborers help fill the coffers of impoverished countries with precious foreign currency and relieve some of the pressure on their home governments to provide employment and social services to their citizens.
In exchange, migrant domestic workers are paid penurious wages. They work up to 18 hours a day, with little or no time off. In some host countries, they may be subject to virtual imprisonment, physical abuse and rape.
There are no reliable figures on the number of migrant domestic workers, but the UN’s International Labor Office (ILO) estimates there are at least 1.5 million female migrant workers from Asia alone, most of whom work as domestic servants.
The ILO says the numbers may be much higher because thousands work abroad illegally. For instance, illegal Indonesian overseas workers are estimated to outnumber legal workers by a ratio of up to 7 to 1.
The Philippines is the largest exporter of domestic workers, but the numbers for women from Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, Pakistan and Thailand are growing rapidly.
In recent years, some high-profile cases of alleged abuse have attracted international attention.
– In the year following the end of the Gulf War in March 1991, nearly 1,400 Asian maids fled the homes of their employers in Kuwait and sought refuge in their embassies. They told representatives of Middle East Watch, a rights-watchdog group, harrowing tales of working under near-slavery conditions, which included virtual imprisonment, physical abuse, rape and non-payment of salary.
– Four days after arriving in Hong Kong to work as a domestic helper in April 1994, Haidi Juperatum, 26, was found dead in her room with a wire hanger twisted around her neck. An autopsy found chemical burns around her nose and mouth, disinfectant in her stomach and bruises on her body. The death was ruled a suicide, a finding that outraged migrant advocates.
– A Filipina maid, Sarah Tabor, died in a Dubai hospital in January 1995 of loss of blood attributed to a self-induced abortion. Migrant advocates suspect foul play, especially because the paternity of the fetus remains undetermined.
– In March 1995, Singapore ignored the appeals of Philippine President Fidel V. Ramos for a stay of execution and hanged Flor Contemplacion, a 42-year-old Filipina domestic servant, for the murder of another maid, Delia Maga, and the 4-year-old Singaporean boy Maga was caring for. With many Filipinos convinced that Contemplacion was innocent, the resulting uproar in the Philippines forced Ramos to suspend ties with Singapore temporarily. Charges of negligence, later dismissed, led to the resignations of Philippine Foreign Secretary Roberto Romulo, Labor Secretary Nieves Confesor and 12 other officials.
– Another international rupture was averted in October 1995, when the United Arab Emirates reduced Sarah Balabagan’s sentence of death to one year in prison and 100 lashes. The Filipina maid had been convicted of murdering the elderly employer who she claimed had raped her. Balabagan recently celebrated her 17th birthday in prison; she was only 15 when she left the Philippines to work in the UAE. In view of her youth, the 100 lashes were softened by requiring the person administering them to hold a book under his arm.
In leaving their home countries to work abroad, migrant domestic workers face discrimination on three fronts: They are migrants and therefore without many of the legal protections enjoyed by citizens; they are women and subject to sexual discrimination and exploitation, and they are domestic workers, an occupation that in many countries is despised, underprotected and underpaid.
Most vulnerable are women in the Islamic countries of the Middle East, where all women face restricted movement. In these countries, a maid may not be allowed to leave the house, use the telephone or write letters, and thus will be unable to contact her embassy.
This isolation, combined with a “slave-owner mentality,” can lead to severe mistreatment, said Ramon Bultran, Mideast coordinator for the Asia Pacific Mission for Migrant Filipinos.
“In the Middle East the No. 1 complaint of maids seeking help from us is rape,” Bultran said.
For Anna (not her real name), a 39-year-old Filipina former domestic worker, employed by a kind and good-natured woman in Saudi Arabia, the nightmare began when her boss went to Egypt to attend the funeral of her father.
Anna said she was left alone in the house with her employer’s husband, who began to make suggestive remarks and to walk around naked in front of her. Finally, she said, he raped her.
Anna did not report the rape to the police.
“I was afraid I might be the one to be imprisoned,” she said.
“In Saudi Arabia, a woman who charges her employer may herself be charged with prostitution,” said Bultran.
Instead, Anna begged her employer to send her home. Now back in the Philippines, Anna said she has not been able to tell her familly about the rape. She recently sued her former employers for back wages, and a court awarded her $600. As of yet she has received no money.
Even in host countries in which more modern attitudes toward women prevail, foreign maids often find themselves subject to a wounding lack of respect.
In keeping with its eugenicist policies, the Singapore government demands that female overseas domestic workers be given pregnancy tests every six months. A positive test results in the immediate deportation of the maid and forfeiture of a $3,500 bond put up by the employer.
Foreign domestic maids are forbidden to marry Singapore nationals, and the government slaps a $231 monthly tax on employers hiring foreign maids, an amount exceeding the maid’s monthly salary of about $210.
These humiliations helped fan the flames when the Philippines erupted in rage after Contemplacion’s hanging in Singapore. In the year since, Contemplacion has been elevated to the status of a national saint.
Her dark eyes, framed in a fine-boned, pretty face, peer from leaflets extolling her as a migrant Everywoman, martyred at the hands of the foreign land that exploited her labor, then took her life. One such leaflet, distributed by the Philippine activist organization Migrante, describes her ordeal as “The Passion of Flor.”
The details of her life are compelling in their ordinariness. Her mother-in-law, Norita Magsirang, said Contemplacion was 42 years old at the time of her death, the mother of a daughter and three sons, including twins. Her husband was a seasonally employed truck driver. Before leaving her village in San Isobel, south of Manila, she worked doing laundry and as a maid.
She left for Singapore in 1987 when her children were 16, 12 and 10 and returned home only once, in 1989, for a month’s vacation. In Singapore she earned $210 a month, of which she sent $140 home each month to support her family, her mother-in-law said.
“She was a good daughter,” Magsirang said simply.
In leaving the Philippines to work in Singapore, Contemplacion joined the ranks of what Ron Skeldon, a social scientist at the University of Hong Kong, referred to as “sojourners.”
Like the Chinese laborers in the 19th Century, imported to build America’s railroads, these are people who labor in countries in which they have no rights of citizenship or abode, no families, no permanent ties.
And as the 20th Century draws to a close, the globalization of the world economy has swelled the number of sojourners to millions, ranging from highly paid executives Skeldon calls “expatriate mercenaries,” who drift around the world from one corporate job to another, to the unskilled and usually poorly educated women who flee joblessness and poverty at home.
Female domestic workers are gradually replacing male construction workers as the primary overseas contract workers.
“Domestic work is less vulnerable to recession than construction work,” said Nana Oishi, co-author with Lin Lim of an ILO study on Asian female migration. “It’s a status thing. For instance, oil-rich Arab families will hire servants for status regardless of the state of the economy. The demand is steadier.”
“There have historically been three major opportunities for these women,” said Hana Zlotnick, chief of morbidity and migration in the United Nations Population Division. “First, factory work, although with much worse pay than men. Then domestic work, with even less pay and poorer working conditions. At the bottom, although perhaps best paid, is prostitution.”
Most, but not all, of these women come from impoverished rural areas of Third World countries, where a shift to a cash economy has destroyed traditional farming societies, lured men away to the cities and left women with the primary burden of supporting children and the elderly, said Anne Jordan, a lecturer in law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
“In parts of Asia, there are no men left in the villages,” said Jordan. “While they may come home to help at harvest time, when you look at who’s really supporting the families in the developing world, it’s the women.”
Not all migrant domestic workers are uneducated peasants however. Surveys have shown that one-third to half of Filipina overseas domestic workers have at least some college education. Their ranks include lawyers, nurses and teachers who have found that they can make more money working as domestic servants in Hong Kong or Singapore than they can scrambling for jobs in the imploded economy of the Philippines.
Regardless of their level of education, migrant women entering domestic work expose themselves to many risks, especially when the woman lives in, isolated within the household.
“The work and personal relationships are very intermingled,” said Manolo Abella, a senior management specialist with the ILO in Geneva. “There are a lot of physical problems.”
Living intimately in the family, the maid can become embroiled in family emotions and feuds. She can fall prey to sexual harassment or simply get on the employer’s nerves. When she charges abuse or harassment, it can be very hard to prove.
To add to the risks, labor laws rarely apply to domestic work.
“Many countries specifically exclude domestic work from their labor laws,” said Lee Swepson, ILO chief of equality and human rights.
This means that the maid must work without a job description, without a right to an 8-hour day or overtime, sometimes without days off, medical insurance or social security benefits.
In most cases her job is basically what the employer decides it is, her hours whatever the employer requires.
Moreover, most immigration policies restrict the ability of foreign domestic workers to change employers, the ILO says, and most do not permit them to apply for citizenship or to change occupations.
No matter how long a domestic has lived and worked in a host country, she has no right of abode and no ability to advance. Perhaps most devastating, she has no right to bring her family, sentencing many to work for years, even decades, in loneliness and isolation.
Still, overseas workers show extraordinary loyalty to families left behind. For instance, remittances from Philippines overseas workers, which the Philippine government estimates at about 4.5 million workers, over half of whom are women, is the largest source of foreign currency for the Philippine economy, about $3 billion a year.
Attempts to provide international protection for migrant workers have accomplished little. ILO and United Nations agreements that seek rights for migrant workers languish unsigned by the major labor-importing nations. Receiving countries often ignore bilateral agreements, the study by Oishi and Lim found, and sending countries are powerless to enforce them.
In 1982, when the Philippines, disturbed by accounts of abuse, tried to prohibit domestic workers from taking jobs in Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia retaliated by threatening to freeze jobs for Philippine male construction workers, on which the Philippines heavily depended.
In 1987, the Philippines prohibited domestic workers from going to Singapore, but Singapore merely admitted the women as tourists and then gave them employment visas. The ban was later rescinded.
“The problem the sending countries encounter is that when they try to restrict the emigration of workers overseas, the workers go illegally, and then they have even less protection,” said Oishi.
“We used to call for bilateral labor agreements,” said Sharon Cabusao, of Gabriella, an alliance of Philippine women’s groups, “but our experience has been that if we work within the framework of international agreements, it could be 20 years before the workers could benefit.”
Now, Cabusao said, Gabriella is working to change the policies in the Philippines that the alliance believes created the unemployment and poverty that fuel migration.
In particular, Gabriella and Migrante are pushing for reintegration programs that can help overseas workers use the savings they have accumulated to start job-generating small businesses.
Surveys of overseas maids showed that although many expected that they themselves would benefit little from their sojourn abroad, most hoped that their families would benefit, perhaps by starting a business.
It’s a dream that few achieve, said Roger Zegers De Beiji, migrant specialist at the ILO in Geneva.
“Experience shows that there is so much failure — not that there isn’t the motivation but because they don’t have the skills. It’s not their fault. You’re not born with entrepreneurial skills. They must be taught.”
Zegers De Beiji said that the ILO is trying to raise funds to teach migrant overseas workers accounting and business skills.
In the meantime, Oishi said, the ILO is encouraging sending countries to expand their services to migrants working overseas.
Specifically, the ILO recommends better education for prospective workers so they have a realistic idea of what awaits them before they venture abroad, more labor attaches, especially female attaches, and the establishment of activity centers in the receiving countries where maids can go for support, to exchange information and to learn skills.
The ILO also runs an annual training program for labor attaches, designed to improve the understanding of migrant issues among embassy staff. Oishi said it’s not an easy task.
“I think it’s a case of elites versus non-elites,” she said. “It is so hard for a wealthy embassy official to see through the eyes of a maid or a construction worker.
“Even here,” she said softly. “At ILO and in the diplomatic corps (in Geneva). A lot of them have maids. Some of them treat them so badly. It’s very frustrating.”
FACTS,FIGURES
There are 1.5 million female migrant workers from Asian countries.
– 800,000 are legal; an estimated 700,000 or more are illegal.
– In 1976, women accounted for less than 15 percent of the 146,400 Asians working in other countries.
– In 1987, women accounted for 27 percent of 1 million Asians working abroad.
– In 1996, 60 percent of the workers leaving the Philippines for overseas jobs were women, 84 percent leaving Sri Lanka were women and 66 to 75 percent leaving Indonesia were women. There is no overall estimate.
Source: “International Labour Migration of Asian Women: Distinctive Characteristics and Policy Concerns,” by Lin Lean Lim and Nana Oishi, of the Migration for Employment Branch of the International Labor Office in Geneva.
