Migrant Workers Pay Out to Work Abroad
TWC2's president wrote an article about what migrant workers have to pay in order to work abroad, putting the issue of exploitation into another perspective.
The Ministry of Manpower has introduced new work permit conditions to prevent employers from transferring various costs to their domestic workers. They came into effect on 14 July 2008. Some employers responded by writing to the media and complaining about being 'exploited' by their domestic workers.
TWC2's president wrote an article about what migrant workers have to pay in order to work abroad, putting the issue of exploitation into another perspective. A version of this article appeared in 'The Straits Times' (19 July 2008) under the heading 'Alone and exploited - pity our migrant workers'.
Does Everyone Want a Bite?
I remember, as a child, being gripped by a nature programme about the life of Alaskan salmon. Some are eaten by other fish when they are eggs or are still small, but the survivors grow and make their way down to the sea. There, they vanish mysteriously until, as fully grown adults, they return to breed in the waters where they were hatched. The upriver journey is a battle. They sometimes have to swim through the rushing waters of rapids, and leap up waterfalls. Dams are an added obstacle. Along the way, there are bears eager to scoop them out of the river and
feast on them, as well as human beings who relish the thought of catching large salmon.
The survivors reach their spawning grounds, lay eggs or fertilise them and then, totally exhausted, they die.
Listening to some of the experiences of migrant workers, I can't help being reminded of those salmon. They set out from their birthplaces on journeys into the unknown, and along the way, they have many obstacles to overcome. A lot of people want to take a bite out of them.
There's the recruiter who turns up in a village with stories of the money to be made in wealthier lands. He wants money for his efforts, and maybe he has to pay something to one or two locals whose cooperation he needs, such as a village headman. The worker goes to an agency, which may provide some form of training, obtain necessary documents and arrange the next stage of the journey. The agency wants money too: it adds together what it paid to the recruiter, its own charges for the worker's travel expenses, accommodation, food and training, as well as its fee. Depending on the country of origin's regulations, charges are made by the national government for passports, insurance, or other documentation.
These charges amount to a hefty sum. Migrant worker are not expected to pay for them immediately in most sender countries: after all, people who had the money to do that would probably not need to seek work abroad in the first place. So the agency in the home country is paid by a partner agency in Singapore, which then needs to recover the money it has paid out and add on its own set of fees for the services it provides, such as obtaining necessary Singaporean documentation and
temporarily housing a worker before placement. The sum of money involved by this time, for a Filipina or Indonesian domestic worker, would be around $$2000; for a male construction worker from southern India or Bangladesh, rather more. A Bangladeshi will typically start work in Singapore carrying a debt of $8000-$9000.
When, in 1978, Singapore's government opened the doors to recruitment of domestic workers from overseas, it was commonly accepted that the costs of recruitment would be borne by their employers. It was seen as the decent thing to do. As time went on, a change crept in. Competing for custom, some agencies offered bargains that many employers found irresistible: the '$0 maid' or the '$88 maid. The price for this generosity was to be paid by the workers. Their employers were given a 'loan' for their hire, and it was paid back by deductions from the
workers' salaries.
And thus it was that people who sought work abroad to support their families and pay for the education of children or younger brothers and sisters found themselves paying for their own employment so that wealthier people would hire them. What a contrast this is to the practice that prevails to this day when a company recruits a professional whose skills it wants through an agency: it pays the costs involved, and would not dream of recovering them by deductions from its new employee's salary.
The burden of this debt has grown as the various charges made have crept up without a matching rise in the workers' salaries: payments of between $240 and $300 per month for a new worker are still normal, despite sender countries' efforts to promote increases. In 2000, a domestic worker was able to repay the 'loan' to her employers with the first six months of her salary, but today, the repayment term has grown to 8-10 months. That makes a big hole in the workers' earnings from a first two-year contract term: at least one third of her salary is lost before her family sees a cent of it.
This repayment period will be extended if the worker decides she wants to transfer to another employer, for any reason (that is, providing her first employer can be persuaded to release her). Some agencies will charge her little more than the real cost of processing the documents she needs, and she'll pay the equivalent of a month or so's salary; if she's less fortunate, she'll be charged two, three or even four months' salary. This does not seem consistent with the view, voiced by some
employers, that domestic workers are inclined to flit from one employer to another on a mere whim; on the contrary, most know how expensive and troublesome it can be to change employers and will not do it unless they feel that they have a good reason.
This is not the end of the story. To leave behind one's family can be hard, but some workers have the heart-rending experience of realising, over time, that those they have sacrificed their labour to support are growing away from them. Instead of intimate family conversations and letters, communication turns into a routine report attached to a request for money - although most workers already try to send home all they can earn. Stories abound of workers who return home to meet young children who do not recognise them; and of women who discover that the
money they worked so hard to earn has been misspent.
A return home can be another occasion for being parted from earnings. The terminal for domestic workers at Jakarta's main airport has long been notorious as a place where parasites seek to extract money from returning workers for giving back their passports to them after taking them by deceit, or for transporting them home at exorbitant prices. Workers expect to take back gifts for their families. Often, they'd like to be seen in their home communities as having been successful, and that can mean spending money on entertaining friends and neighbours. Sometimes, remote acquaintances and long lost relatives show up to claim their share of the workers' generosity, and so, not wishing to seem mean, the worker parts with more.
Migrant workers thus give their host country a subsidy to its entire economy by providing it with low-priced labour, and freeing up many of its own citizens to undertake better paid jobs. Their own country gains a valuable supplement to its national income directly through fees and indirectly through the spending of remitted money. Along the way, many individuals take a bite out of their earnings. They may not end up dead, like those Pacific salmon, but they often return home with their healthiest years behind them and little personal advantage to show for
it.
The Ministry of Manpower recently introduced changes to work permit conditions to prevent additional transfers of costs that employers should bear to domestic workers. It did nothing to induce employers to pay the costs that were transferred to workers in the past, and yet it produced a chorus of protest from employers who said that they were being exploited by their workers. Do they really know what exploitation means? If they could put themselves in a migrant worker's shoes for a couple of months, would they still think the same way?
John Gee
President
Transient Workers Count Too
Note: Research undertaken previously by TWC2 volunteers proved valuable
in putting this article together. 'Unregulated business: How foreign domestic workers are recruited, trained and deployed in Singapore homes' (Tan Hui Yee, Puvaneswari Sundaram, Liew Khai Khiun, with acknowledgements to Mandy Heng and Ng Wei Chian) was produced in 2003: sadly, there is very little in the experiences it describes that has changed for the better since it was written. 'Debt, Delays, Deductions: Wage Issues Faced by Foreign Domestic Workers in Singapore' was a report contributed by many volunteers who helped to collect the raw material for the report. It was published in September 2006.
Both are available in the Library section of this website.
TWC2's president wrote an article about what migrant workers have to pay in order to work abroad, putting the issue of exploitation into another perspective. A version of this article appeared in 'The Straits Times' (19 July 2008) under the heading 'Alone and exploited - pity our migrant workers'.
Does Everyone Want a Bite?
I remember, as a child, being gripped by a nature programme about the life of Alaskan salmon. Some are eaten by other fish when they are eggs or are still small, but the survivors grow and make their way down to the sea. There, they vanish mysteriously until, as fully grown adults, they return to breed in the waters where they were hatched. The upriver journey is a battle. They sometimes have to swim through the rushing waters of rapids, and leap up waterfalls. Dams are an added obstacle. Along the way, there are bears eager to scoop them out of the river and
feast on them, as well as human beings who relish the thought of catching large salmon.
The survivors reach their spawning grounds, lay eggs or fertilise them and then, totally exhausted, they die.
Listening to some of the experiences of migrant workers, I can't help being reminded of those salmon. They set out from their birthplaces on journeys into the unknown, and along the way, they have many obstacles to overcome. A lot of people want to take a bite out of them.
There's the recruiter who turns up in a village with stories of the money to be made in wealthier lands. He wants money for his efforts, and maybe he has to pay something to one or two locals whose cooperation he needs, such as a village headman. The worker goes to an agency, which may provide some form of training, obtain necessary documents and arrange the next stage of the journey. The agency wants money too: it adds together what it paid to the recruiter, its own charges for the worker's travel expenses, accommodation, food and training, as well as its fee. Depending on the country of origin's regulations, charges are made by the national government for passports, insurance, or other documentation.
These charges amount to a hefty sum. Migrant worker are not expected to pay for them immediately in most sender countries: after all, people who had the money to do that would probably not need to seek work abroad in the first place. So the agency in the home country is paid by a partner agency in Singapore, which then needs to recover the money it has paid out and add on its own set of fees for the services it provides, such as obtaining necessary Singaporean documentation and
temporarily housing a worker before placement. The sum of money involved by this time, for a Filipina or Indonesian domestic worker, would be around $$2000; for a male construction worker from southern India or Bangladesh, rather more. A Bangladeshi will typically start work in Singapore carrying a debt of $8000-$9000.
When, in 1978, Singapore's government opened the doors to recruitment of domestic workers from overseas, it was commonly accepted that the costs of recruitment would be borne by their employers. It was seen as the decent thing to do. As time went on, a change crept in. Competing for custom, some agencies offered bargains that many employers found irresistible: the '$0 maid' or the '$88 maid. The price for this generosity was to be paid by the workers. Their employers were given a 'loan' for their hire, and it was paid back by deductions from the
workers' salaries.
And thus it was that people who sought work abroad to support their families and pay for the education of children or younger brothers and sisters found themselves paying for their own employment so that wealthier people would hire them. What a contrast this is to the practice that prevails to this day when a company recruits a professional whose skills it wants through an agency: it pays the costs involved, and would not dream of recovering them by deductions from its new employee's salary.
The burden of this debt has grown as the various charges made have crept up without a matching rise in the workers' salaries: payments of between $240 and $300 per month for a new worker are still normal, despite sender countries' efforts to promote increases. In 2000, a domestic worker was able to repay the 'loan' to her employers with the first six months of her salary, but today, the repayment term has grown to 8-10 months. That makes a big hole in the workers' earnings from a first two-year contract term: at least one third of her salary is lost before her family sees a cent of it.
This repayment period will be extended if the worker decides she wants to transfer to another employer, for any reason (that is, providing her first employer can be persuaded to release her). Some agencies will charge her little more than the real cost of processing the documents she needs, and she'll pay the equivalent of a month or so's salary; if she's less fortunate, she'll be charged two, three or even four months' salary. This does not seem consistent with the view, voiced by some
employers, that domestic workers are inclined to flit from one employer to another on a mere whim; on the contrary, most know how expensive and troublesome it can be to change employers and will not do it unless they feel that they have a good reason.
This is not the end of the story. To leave behind one's family can be hard, but some workers have the heart-rending experience of realising, over time, that those they have sacrificed their labour to support are growing away from them. Instead of intimate family conversations and letters, communication turns into a routine report attached to a request for money - although most workers already try to send home all they can earn. Stories abound of workers who return home to meet young children who do not recognise them; and of women who discover that the
money they worked so hard to earn has been misspent.
A return home can be another occasion for being parted from earnings. The terminal for domestic workers at Jakarta's main airport has long been notorious as a place where parasites seek to extract money from returning workers for giving back their passports to them after taking them by deceit, or for transporting them home at exorbitant prices. Workers expect to take back gifts for their families. Often, they'd like to be seen in their home communities as having been successful, and that can mean spending money on entertaining friends and neighbours. Sometimes, remote acquaintances and long lost relatives show up to claim their share of the workers' generosity, and so, not wishing to seem mean, the worker parts with more.
Migrant workers thus give their host country a subsidy to its entire economy by providing it with low-priced labour, and freeing up many of its own citizens to undertake better paid jobs. Their own country gains a valuable supplement to its national income directly through fees and indirectly through the spending of remitted money. Along the way, many individuals take a bite out of their earnings. They may not end up dead, like those Pacific salmon, but they often return home with their healthiest years behind them and little personal advantage to show for
it.
The Ministry of Manpower recently introduced changes to work permit conditions to prevent additional transfers of costs that employers should bear to domestic workers. It did nothing to induce employers to pay the costs that were transferred to workers in the past, and yet it produced a chorus of protest from employers who said that they were being exploited by their workers. Do they really know what exploitation means? If they could put themselves in a migrant worker's shoes for a couple of months, would they still think the same way?
John Gee
President
Transient Workers Count Too
Note: Research undertaken previously by TWC2 volunteers proved valuable
in putting this article together. 'Unregulated business: How foreign domestic workers are recruited, trained and deployed in Singapore homes' (Tan Hui Yee, Puvaneswari Sundaram, Liew Khai Khiun, with acknowledgements to Mandy Heng and Ng Wei Chian) was produced in 2003: sadly, there is very little in the experiences it describes that has changed for the better since it was written. 'Debt, Delays, Deductions: Wage Issues Faced by Foreign Domestic Workers in Singapore' was a report contributed by many volunteers who helped to collect the raw material for the report. It was published in September 2006.
Both are available in the Library section of this website.