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05-08-2013, 02:30 PM
An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:
We all pay a price for this slavish system
"Survey reveals abuse of foreign maids."
Wow, that's news! I am sure working as an ethnic-minority servant in Hong Kong is no bed of roses. However, it probably beats working in many Middle Eastern and Asian countries.
The survey of more than 3,000 women by a migrant workers' NGO found 58 per cent of maids have experienced verbal abuse, 18 per cent physical abuse and 6 per cent sexual abuse. Welfare activists claim the real figures are much higher.
It's ultimately irrelevant whether Hong Kong bosses are nice or exploitative and whether the maids are exploited victims.
The whole system is regressive, and has a corrosive effect on local parenting, family and society. It ensures the government and companies don't need to devise more enlightened policies on daycare, kindergartens and childhood services or promote maternity and paternity leave.
There is something fundamentally wrong about keeping more than 300,000 foreign-born women as a permanent underclass in self-styled modern and progressive Hong Kong. If nothing else, it teaches our children there are different classes of people.
You really wish Indonesia and the Philippines would get their acts together so their economies would provide more rewarding jobs for their women.
The availability of cheap foreign maids has freed a generation of local women to pursue careers and open for them senior positions in the corporate world and the government.
But that really amounts to liberating local women by exploiting the less fortunate foreign ones. It's a zero-sum game.
A cheap maid service enables the government to offload the responsibility of providing child care and so it has hitherto provided minimal or zero subsidies to most families, unless you are on welfare and belong to the poorest.
It enables firms to make women work long hours, without the need to pursue more enlightened policies like flexible work hours and longer maternity and paternity leave.
We may think we get a good deal exploiting other people's cheap labour. But in the end, everyone pays for such a regressive and slavish system.
http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-...slavish-system (http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1294299/we-all-pay-price-slavish-system)
改朝换代 告别腐败
Click here to view the whole thread at www.sammyboy.com (http://www.sammyboy.com/showthread.php?158936-Cheap-Maids-Bane-or-Boon&goto=newpost).
We all pay a price for this slavish system
"Survey reveals abuse of foreign maids."
Wow, that's news! I am sure working as an ethnic-minority servant in Hong Kong is no bed of roses. However, it probably beats working in many Middle Eastern and Asian countries.
The survey of more than 3,000 women by a migrant workers' NGO found 58 per cent of maids have experienced verbal abuse, 18 per cent physical abuse and 6 per cent sexual abuse. Welfare activists claim the real figures are much higher.
It's ultimately irrelevant whether Hong Kong bosses are nice or exploitative and whether the maids are exploited victims.
The whole system is regressive, and has a corrosive effect on local parenting, family and society. It ensures the government and companies don't need to devise more enlightened policies on daycare, kindergartens and childhood services or promote maternity and paternity leave.
There is something fundamentally wrong about keeping more than 300,000 foreign-born women as a permanent underclass in self-styled modern and progressive Hong Kong. If nothing else, it teaches our children there are different classes of people.
You really wish Indonesia and the Philippines would get their acts together so their economies would provide more rewarding jobs for their women.
The availability of cheap foreign maids has freed a generation of local women to pursue careers and open for them senior positions in the corporate world and the government.
But that really amounts to liberating local women by exploiting the less fortunate foreign ones. It's a zero-sum game.
A cheap maid service enables the government to offload the responsibility of providing child care and so it has hitherto provided minimal or zero subsidies to most families, unless you are on welfare and belong to the poorest.
It enables firms to make women work long hours, without the need to pursue more enlightened policies like flexible work hours and longer maternity and paternity leave.
We may think we get a good deal exploiting other people's cheap labour. But in the end, everyone pays for such a regressive and slavish system.
http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-...slavish-system (http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1294299/we-all-pay-price-slavish-system)
改朝换代 告别腐败
Click here to view the whole thread at www.sammyboy.com (http://www.sammyboy.com/showthread.php?158936-Cheap-Maids-Bane-or-Boon&goto=newpost).