It was this one here Shandra Woworuntu: My life as a sex-trafficking victim - BBC News
Much of my family lives in a country where domestic help is quite common, and the apartment buildings have a floor for staff with small rooms and shared bathrooms/kitchen areas. I've always wondered why Hong Kong can't manage something like this. In my building there is all of this stupid wasted clubhouse space that no one ever uses. I would so much rather helper's quarters than mahjong rooms or whatever.
Sure.
Virtually all Indonesian revenue handling positions are literally bought and paid for. Hell, you even have to pay a substantial bribe to become a bank teller. Now imagine what it costs to become a police inspector, or say (just picking at random here) a consul.
It's like tax farming. Big up front costs and then a race against time to cover investment and get a return before the allotted period is up.
So much the better if it can be clothed in some tin drum banging about national pride and progress.
For the rest, if people want to travel to another country and clean my bathroom and iron my clothes so that their children can get an education and hopefully avoid repeating the cycle, more power to them and more convenience for me. Again, not big on knee-jerk virtue signalling stuff about 'exploitation'. I don't exploit anyone.
I understand that some agents certainly are less than 100% ethical... but then again we're talking about very poor people who have to hock half a year or so of their labour to an agent to finance a ticket and their way through the necessary bureaucratic hurdles. Sure some agents are iniquitous. On the other hand, had said helpers stayed back home they'd be in hock to the local money lenders for life anyway. It's just one of those things. Life is cruel. Goes for all of us. Up on top of the world today, cancer tomorrow. Can't fix everything.
Last edited by Kinch; 20-05-2016 at 12:37 PM.
Whatever the stated reason for the live-in rule, I think it is fairly obvious that it is done for financial reasons. Or in other words it is done so that the poor and middle class can afford to have a helper. Right now the minimum required salary to employ a helper is 15K/month (yes, ridiculous). If one had to pay a helpers wage + provide housing it would render domestic help unaffordable to many..like most other parts of the world where domestic help is rare due to the cost.
Hong Kong gets around this by having helpers live in...they essentially remove the housing cost from the equation...which is a substantial cost. Helpers aren't even required to have their own room and many of them sleep in crawl spaces, garages and even in the same room as the children.
Last edited by Open Casket; 20-05-2016 at 04:34 PM.
As you point out, the effect would be to see these less well-off Hong Kong families priced out of the helper market and thereby remove x,000 Indonesian and Filipino children from high school or college and shove them into their village fishmarket/garage/scavenging business/brothel/etc?
Nobody forced their mothers/sisters to get on a plane at gunpoint to come here. They did it out of familial love and / or obligation.
It's not perfect. Nothing ever is. But on the whole it is win-win. Helper gets to support her family, low-income Hong Kong family gets to send the housewife out to work in some typical C9 tea lady type job (which brings in a bit more than the helper's salary) and everybody comes out of it a bit richer. The poor Indonesians and Filipinos get to own land and build HOUSES out of it back home FFS -- more than any low income Hong Kong local could ever dream of.
Last edited by Kinch; 20-05-2016 at 04:55 PM.