By Isabel T. Escoda
Older Filipinos sometimes fondly recall the 1950s and 1960s when wealthy people among them hired Chinese women from Hong Kong and Guangdong Province as servants.
Even before the Second World War, wealthy mestizo families imported Chinese women to run their households, in which there were also Filipino servants to perform menial tasks. Chinese amahs mainly cooked, minded children, sewed and did embroidery work.
A fraction of the Philippine population had these oriental domestics (called black-and-white amahs for the white singlets and black pajama-type attire common among poor Chinese women). They became status symbols due to high fees to import them from Hong Kong and their higher wages compared to the local help.
Then the tables turned. Mismanagement and plunder by corrupt Philippine administrations peaked in the 1970s when the dictator Ferdinand Marcos amassed his fortune and impoverished the country. Ordinary people needed to seek work overseas, like their ancestors in the 1920s and 1930s who toiled at Hawaiian plantations and in Alaskan fisheries.
The Marcos era produced waves of Filipinas eager to escape the economic quagmire by working as domestic helpers in Hong Kong and elsewhere. A canny Hong Kong entrepreneur had decided to import them when expatriate and well-off Chinese families started to lose their local amahs to expanding factories.
In the 1990s, the numbers of women hired in Manila to work as Hong Kong housemaids, nannies and cooks soared. Recruitment agencies proliferated. Sociologists noticed “the feminization of labor migration”. Others called it the “commoditization of women”.
Surveys counting expatriates in Hong Kong have shown the Filipinas heading the list, although they may be overtaken by Indonesian women, whose home economy also faltered. Indonesian domestics prove popular in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia because they may be forced to work for below the minimum wage. In Hong Kong, the authorities often ignore this illegal practice.
So a modern-day near-slave trade flourishes. Sad, even tragic, stories abound. The inequities and abuse faced by migrant workers, notably in Chinese societies like Hong Kong and Singapore, are so prevalent that the workers’ unions and advocates must struggle to defend them.
One defender is Jim Rice, an American academic working in Hong Kong, who has written a new book, Take Your Rights Seriously, for the migrant workers. (See the book review section.)
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Once upon a Time, Ferdinand Maros
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