Taking care fo the maids' welfare

P Gunasegaram in his Question Time column has written on an issue that has been on my mind for some time. I have always had the opinion that the short end of the deal is always the poor maid. I am very sure that if the agents' fees (both local and foreign) are reduced to a reasonable level, most employers would be only too happy to give the maid an increase they deserve.

As in most things in Malaysia, the "layering" cost is getting from bad to worse. Costs increase without any value added. The agents always complaint that they do not get much. If this is the case, then "open the books". Are there people who are skimming from the top?

We must recognise from a practical point of view that Malaysia need these maids. Therefore, it should be the Government's priority to look properly into the issues. We must abolish wastages or unwarranted costs to make us more efficient. If not, these costs will be passed on indirectly to all anyway sooner or later.

With all the tranformation talk and all the big words and acronymns, let's talk less and do more.

Below is the article from The Star.

The Star, 8 June 2011 - Taking care of maids’ welfare

Question Time
By P. Gunasegaram

A fair solution entails just wages, a contract to safeguard the rights of maids and employers, and cutting the take of middlemen.

IT’S a problem prickled with myriad moral and ethical issues. Those who employ maids are concerned with how well they serve them at reasonable cost, but there is an overriding need to ensure that the welfare of the maids is not compromised.

While safeguards to ensure decent working conditions are lacking, net wages are unreasonably low. Middlemen siphon off as much as half what the maids earn in two years. The solution has to be both financial and humanitarian.

Middle Class Malaysia, or MCM, is spoilt. A lot of that has to do with the relative poverty of our neighbours. In how many countries around the world can the middle-class afford to have live-in maids?

At mid-morning coffee sessions or afternoon tea, the conversation among some privileged housewives turns too often to complaints about their maids.

But seldom do they pause to reflect that the leisure that they enjoy is due to the maids they employ. Until things change.

After supply dried up from Indonesia when the country banned exports of maids to Malaysia in June 2009, MCM felt the pinch and turned to other countries such as Cambodia with unsatisfactory results sometimes.

We looked to Sri Lanka, India, Myanmar and Philippines to replace the lost numbers from Indonesia but the laments grew loud and raucous.

Those who could not afford the Filipinos or did not like their relative desire to have a life of their own opted instead for Cambo­dia.

But the cultural and language divide often proved to be too great. If you can’t communicate with your maid and if their way of life is too alien from yours, then you simply can’t get much done without a considerable amount of training.

The crux of the matter is MCM is too dependent on foreign maids, just as a country we have become way too dependent on cheap foreign manual labour. It will not be easy to wean us off from this and it will take time even if we could.

Now a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Malaysia and Indonesia promises the return of maids from Indonesia, by far the main source of maids previously. But resistance is likely to come from the middlemen in both the countries because the MOU envisages a significant cut in what the maid agencies receive.

Ensuring fair wages is the most difficult task. Maids pay six months of their future salary to agencies in their home countries and a further six months to the local agency as commission, which is paid in advance by their employers in addition to other fees the employers pay.

That means maids have already lost a year of their two years of salaries – a ridiculous 50% of their compensation goes to the agencies. If the respective governments cut out the middlemen or reduced their cuts, maids will benefit immediately.

But often, in both countries people have to deal with maid agencies whose licences are often obtained by a system of connections and patronage with links to the immigration authorities. This has to be broken.

Currently, employers pay as much as RM6,000 in agency fees to obtain a maid, plus a number of other charges to the Government, medical check-ups and so on which over two years, will take the bill easily up to RM8,000, or RM330 a month over two years. Add that to the maid’s salary of at least RM550 a month and the figure works out to RM880 a month.

They typically pay six months salary in advance to the agencies, which amounts to RM3,300 or a total of around RM11,300 in upfront costs. If the maid leaves after six months, the employer has lost the agency fees and needs to pay up again.

To add insult to injury, the employer has to make a police report and then be fined RM500 by the authorities for – I don’t know what – perhaps contributing to the addition of one more illegal before he can apply for a maid.

The only clear winner in this entire series of transactions is, yes, the maid agency which not only gets paid upfront, provides little if any training typically and takes hardly any risk.

The Malaysian agency takes as much as RM9,300 up front or 70% of the salary that the maid earns in two years.

If you take out the one year in salaries (assumed to be RM550 a month) that the maid pays out to agencies here and abroad, the Malaysian agency alone earns 140% of the net salary of the poor maid. How unfair is that!

Now add on the other humanitarian aspects. Maids come here out of economic necessity and poor living conditions in their home countries.

They leave their families and friends behind, often have no social life and are almost completely at the mercy of their employers.

While many or even most Malaysians are likely to treat their maids decently, there are lots of others who take advantage of them, force them to work long hours, don’t give them a day off even if they want to and mistreat them in a thousand other ways.

It will be foolhardy to rely on human generosity to ensure maids’ rights.

These should instead be written clearly into the contracts, especially the right to a day off if maids want it, minimum hours of sleep and categorising the kind of work they should be doing. And it is important that these rights are explained to the maid.

Yes, I can hear the complaints already. What if the maids run off with their boyfriends, or keep bad company, or don’t want to continue with their work?

Well, as with any other job, that’s risk that the employer has to bear together with his agency. Maids are not chattel to be owned, used or abused by their employers.

As prickly as the maid problem is it can be mitigated by cutting profiteering, recognising the rights of maids and giving them an avenue for redress, and safeguarding the rights of employers by getting agencies to share risks and be more responsible. Essentially, that’s all it takes.

In the longer term, we should look towards weaning ourselves off maids and any other kind of cheap labour.

Until the next time, cheers.