nst.online
2009/09/11
By John Teo
I CRINGED when a friend recently said he feared what giving a mandatory day off for his Indonesian maids would mean.
He apparently had experience voluntarily letting them out and about and seeing the grievous consequences of their innocence and naiveté being abused outside his house gate, often at the hands of fellow Indonesians.
My friend's fears for his maids are akin to parental concern, but therein lay the crux of the problem with our collective dependence on maids - predominantly Indonesian — and the deeply disturbing turn such dependence has now engendered in Malaysian-Indonesian relations.
Let's face it: Indonesian maids are by far the most popular because they are cheap. In Kuching, they can be had for as little as RM200 per month. Of course, employers will argue they provide everything else the maids would need while under employment and pay a hefty initial placement fee to boot.
The execution of Filipino maid Flor Contemplacion in Singapore about a dozen years ago lighted a fuse among her compatriots in the Philippines that totally confounded Singaporeans and sent official relations between the two countries to an unprecedented low.
Whichever way one argues, most Indonesian maids in the country are literally being sold into servitude, although of course not forcibly. Indonesians themselves get the first cut in ruthlessly exploiting their own workers going abroad, no doubt, but we are fully complicit in accepting them.
I am, therefore, all for letting the Indonesians fix the minimum base wage for their maids coming here. If they do not in the process price their maids out of the Malaysian market first, they are in fact doing us a good turn.
There is nothing like an external jolt, such as the Indonesians are now dealing us, to goad us into re-jigging our economy to be one that is high-income.
A minimum base salary for Indo-nesian maids — if agreed to by Malaysia — will set in train a revision of salary scales all across the economy. It may even trigger a dormant supply of local maids who are otherwise happy to sit out such back-breaking chores because of unattractive wages. Consider some of the other chain-reaction possibilities.
Working mothers, if they do not opt instead to stop working to care for young children at home, will start to demand for better salaries themselves in their workplace.
Employers may also be forced to consider seriously the need for child day-care facilities in the workplace if young mothers are to be enticed back into the job market.
As well, oOther workers — particularly in the service-oriented industries — will clamour for higher wages to match what Indonesian maids will be getting. Employers and industries will be forced fairly quickly to adapt by seeking new and creative ways to increase worker productivity as the supply of ready cheap labour dries up.
I have gone through some of the media forums where ordinary Indonesians currently vent their spleen on Malaysians. Some of these are uncharacteristically in English and such Indonesians who are worked up by their perceptions of Malaysia are invariably from the middle to upper classes of Indonesian society.
If their concerns are truly for the plight of fellow Indonesians stuck in low-paying jobs in Malaysia, they will have no end to their misery, given the even more sorry plight of millions more Indonesians in their midst not lucky enough to land relatively better working conditions here.
No, their concerns are more for themselves. These well-to-do Indonesians will likely have made Malaysia their first overseas vacation, higher-education or business stop. They will be hard put to avoid running into their fellow citizens who have become such a daily fixture in Malaysian life.
The image such Indonesians working here portray jars badly with these visiting Indonesians' own national self-image.
Instead of asking searching questions about why so many Indonesians come to find it so much better to be seemingly roughing it out here than back home, well-off Indonesians end up developing a thin skin over the inevitable and occasional tales of horrific mistreatment of their compatriots by individual Malaysian employers.
2009/09/11
By John Teo
I CRINGED when a friend recently said he feared what giving a mandatory day off for his Indonesian maids would mean.
He apparently had experience voluntarily letting them out and about and seeing the grievous consequences of their innocence and naiveté being abused outside his house gate, often at the hands of fellow Indonesians.
My friend's fears for his maids are akin to parental concern, but therein lay the crux of the problem with our collective dependence on maids - predominantly Indonesian — and the deeply disturbing turn such dependence has now engendered in Malaysian-Indonesian relations.
Let's face it: Indonesian maids are by far the most popular because they are cheap. In Kuching, they can be had for as little as RM200 per month. Of course, employers will argue they provide everything else the maids would need while under employment and pay a hefty initial placement fee to boot.
The execution of Filipino maid Flor Contemplacion in Singapore about a dozen years ago lighted a fuse among her compatriots in the Philippines that totally confounded Singaporeans and sent official relations between the two countries to an unprecedented low.
Whichever way one argues, most Indonesian maids in the country are literally being sold into servitude, although of course not forcibly. Indonesians themselves get the first cut in ruthlessly exploiting their own workers going abroad, no doubt, but we are fully complicit in accepting them.
I am, therefore, all for letting the Indonesians fix the minimum base wage for their maids coming here. If they do not in the process price their maids out of the Malaysian market first, they are in fact doing us a good turn.
There is nothing like an external jolt, such as the Indonesians are now dealing us, to goad us into re-jigging our economy to be one that is high-income.
A minimum base salary for Indo-nesian maids — if agreed to by Malaysia — will set in train a revision of salary scales all across the economy. It may even trigger a dormant supply of local maids who are otherwise happy to sit out such back-breaking chores because of unattractive wages. Consider some of the other chain-reaction possibilities.
Working mothers, if they do not opt instead to stop working to care for young children at home, will start to demand for better salaries themselves in their workplace.
Employers may also be forced to consider seriously the need for child day-care facilities in the workplace if young mothers are to be enticed back into the job market.
As well, oOther workers — particularly in the service-oriented industries — will clamour for higher wages to match what Indonesian maids will be getting. Employers and industries will be forced fairly quickly to adapt by seeking new and creative ways to increase worker productivity as the supply of ready cheap labour dries up.
I have gone through some of the media forums where ordinary Indonesians currently vent their spleen on Malaysians. Some of these are uncharacteristically in English and such Indonesians who are worked up by their perceptions of Malaysia are invariably from the middle to upper classes of Indonesian society.
If their concerns are truly for the plight of fellow Indonesians stuck in low-paying jobs in Malaysia, they will have no end to their misery, given the even more sorry plight of millions more Indonesians in their midst not lucky enough to land relatively better working conditions here.
No, their concerns are more for themselves. These well-to-do Indonesians will likely have made Malaysia their first overseas vacation, higher-education or business stop. They will be hard put to avoid running into their fellow citizens who have become such a daily fixture in Malaysian life.
The image such Indonesians working here portray jars badly with these visiting Indonesians' own national self-image.
Instead of asking searching questions about why so many Indonesians come to find it so much better to be seemingly roughing it out here than back home, well-off Indonesians end up developing a thin skin over the inevitable and occasional tales of horrific mistreatment of their compatriots by individual Malaysian employers.
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