Foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong are the quiet backbone of many households in the city, meeting the daily demands of housekeeping and caretaking in homes where younger and elderly family members require around-the-clock care that work-age adults often cannot provide themselves due to gruelling work schedules and careers, typically for a monthly salary that’s well below the statutory minimum wage. However, it seems not everyone thinks that foreign domestic workers should be financially appreciated for all the time and work they put into taking care of our households and families.
A Hong Kong group representing employers of foreign domestic workers – the Quadripartite Alliance for Harmonious Employment Practices (QAHEP) – has recently petitioned the city’s Labour Department to freeze the minimum wage for domestic helpers to reflect the economic slowdown and align with current economic conditions. As the cost of living rises and financial pressures have grown in households, the QAHEP wants to implement firmer regulations on the wage adjustment system for domestic helpers.
To argue their case, QAHEP also presented the results of a survey they conducted with 392 employers of foreign domestic workers, where 93 percent of respondents detailed running into problems related to their domestic helpers, such as those who have borrowed money – 72 percent of such employers subsequently faced harassment from debt collection agencies. Some respondents have also encountered situations where foreign domestic workers have used their former employers’ addresses to secure financial loans long after their employment had ended.
Other areas of concern were raised in the petition, such as domestic helpers suddenly terminating their contracts early in what is known as ‘job-hopping’, or taking on additional illegal employment, possibly in a bid to supplement their income. Call us crazy, but surely that should be an indicator that foreign domestic workers are not being paid enough for their work…
As bad as it sounds, QAHEP is not the only organisation that wants to freeze the statutory minimum wage for foreign domestic workers. Another Hong Kong employers’ group, the Hong Kong Employers of Overseas Domestic Helpers Association, entered the conversation earlier this month calling for the same action, citing the current economic situation as unfavourable. A higher base salary for foreign domestic workers may lead to fewer job opportunities, as employers may not be able to meet the increased cost.
All of this opposition appears to be in response to a call for action made earlier in August by the Hong Kong Federation of Asian Domestic Workers Unions in a meeting with Labour Department officials, demanding an immediate 30-percent pay increase for Hong Kong’s foreign domestic workers, as well as a doubling of their monthly food subsidy. Inflation, the value of the work being done by foreign domestic workers in the city, and their contribution to the local economy were given as reasons in raising this demand.
Foreign domestic workers earn less than the statutory minimum wage and are instead subjected to the minimum allowable wage, which is currently $4,990 per month. Despite the 2.5-percent raise in minimum wage granted last September, food allowance was not increased – at $1,236 per month, this works out to around $40 per day.
In response to these appeals, our city’s domestic workers are expressing disagreement and fighting their case. A migrant workers’ group called the Asian Migrants Coordinating Body (AMCB) said in a statement on Thursday, August 21, that domestic workers are also impacted by inflation and a salary freeze would not lessen the economic hardships faced by Hongkongers. Instead, the AMCB urges employers to ask the government to tackle unemployment and high living costs, adding that foreign domestic workers ‘should not be the scapegoats for the Hong Kong government’s negligence in addressing the worsening situation’. In all honesty, if local households are facing greater financial pressure from the current economic conditions, we can only imagine the city’s 370,000 foreign domestic workers must be feeling the heat that much more.
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