Domestic workers: the nannies, cooks and cleaners that make many families? lives so much better, are at a high risk of being abused and exploited. Because the work they do takes place in private homes, they are invisible and often can?t get government protection.On Aug. 6, the International Labor Organization?s Convention on Domestic Work was ratified ? setting international standards to protect the world?s 50 million to 100 million domestic workers.
The freelance reporter and mother Francesca Segre was an employer of a domestic worker in Singapore until two weeks ago, when she moved back home to California. Today she is cheering the Convention, knowing that domestic workers, who are often mothers themselves, need every bit of recognition and protection they can get. What follows are her thoughts based on her personal experiences:
To have a live-in nanny, cook and housekeeper is not a fantasy in Singapore, it?s a reality. On this modern island nation, one in every five families employs a migrant domestic worker, including our ex-pat American family of four.
Singapore is a ?maid economy? ? a place where the government welcomes hundreds of thousands of women from poor countries in so that professionals in the formal labor sector are freed up to work long hours and pump up the country?s gross domestic product. Luz , a reserved, intelligent 34-year-old Filipina from a poor farming family, moved into our high-rise apartment two years ago. One of nine children, not yet married, and with no jobs in her village, she tells me she decided to leave home rather than continue to help at her widowed mother?s grocery stall.
Thoughtful and organized, she was a wonder in our home. She toilet-trained our son when he was one and a half, taught herself American-style cooking, and cleans to meet her standards, which far outshine my own. Careful, calm and hard working, she was, and is, a role model.
At first I felt guilty for all she did. Then I became grateful, not just for how she helped us, but for basic elements of my own family life. Hard work, low pay and heartache are built into the jobs of migrant domestic workers. As a mother to two young children, it is the heartache that rattles me most.
Luz didn?t leave children at home, but many maids do. Women from countries like the Philippines and Indonesia come to the agonizing realization that they must work abroad if they want to provide adequate food, education and health care for their families. In the Philippines, for example, jobs are scarce and a mother can earn multiples more working abroad than at home. In Singapore, the average salary for a domestic worker is $300 a month, in American dollars. They?d be lucky to make a third of that for the same job in the Philippines.
Rosalyn, 39, who lives in my Singapore neighborhood, has been apart from her own children for seven years. She told me she pays an aunt in the Philippines to raise her children, ages 4, 11 and 14. ?The first time I went away, I cried every night,? she says. ?I still have the instinct of a mother. If they are sick, I am not there to hug them.? It breaks her heart to hear them cry on the phone, she says.
When, days after I talked with Rosalyn, my own 4-year-old daughter woke crying in the night with a painful ear infection, I felt the luxury of comforting my own child. That night, I held my daughter tight and wept into her hair for the mothers who must choose between supporting or soothing their children.
As if the heartache of leaving a child behind isn?t wrenching enough, these migrant women are often treated as lower-class citizens when they arrive in Singapore. When we first moved here, we were shown apartments for rent, and told that the claustrophobic bomb-shelters off the kitchens could be used for ?storage or for a maid?s room.? Domestic workers are virtually the only workers in Singapore who aren?t legally entitled to a day off (yet). And some bosses keep their employee?s salary ?for them.? Over dinner one night, Luz revealed that her previous employer kept her passport, work permit and cellphone, ensuring that even if she wanted to leave, she couldn?t. That same employer had her eat alone on separate cutlery. They hadn?t given her enough to eat ? for years.
Returning home after years of working abroad can be crushing. These nannies must say goodbye to an employer?s children on whom they have heaped their pent-up love for their own families. We?re moving back to the U.S. soon, and lately I?ve noticed Luz hugging my children more often and longer. She wants more pictures with them, too. And when married nannies finally do go home, they find husbands and fathers have often disappeared in their prolonged absence. Perhaps more upsetting is returning to children who believe they have been abandoned while mom has been working abroad. Sociologists call this phenomenon a ?care gain? for the employers of nannies, and a ?care drain? on the families back home.
Yet dreams and desperation keep women coming to Singapore and other maid economies globally. Sally, a friend?s domestic worker, left the Philippines when her son was 3 and didn?t see him again until he was 6. Her son?s father vanished in her absence. But in those three years, she?s earned enough to pay for her son?s schooling and to buy a house in Manila which she rents out ? things she says she never could have afforded had she stayed put. Despite the heartache, she stands firm that leaving home was the best choice for her son?s future.
Employing Luz has been an incredible help. Having her in our home has also meant playing a part in the complex web of forces that push women to leave their own families and work for another. Labor migration, I have come to believe, is not clearly good or bad. It is a risky stop-gap measure to stave off poverty with the potential to break free from it.
Since I haven?t figured out how to create enough decent jobs in developing countries so women can stay in their home country and support their own families, I have done what I can to help Luz. Like other employers, we have paid for her to go to schools like aidha, which teach domestic workers financial management and leadership. We have lent her funds to start a rice business back home. And we remind her, as constantly as she reminds us, how capable she is.
Francesca Segr? is a freelance reporter who just earned her Master?s Degree at the LKY School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.
Source: http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/the-heartache-of-the-migrant-nanny/
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