Immigration and Labor
You can get a foreign maid to take care of your house and/or children, and there’s a complete set of laws to protect both you and her. The maid earns $300-$400 a month, but it costs you about $1,000. This is because you pay for her airfare from the Phillipines (both ways), three thorough medical check-ups annually (presumably to cut down on the number of maids who are beaten, starved, raped and otherwise abused by their employers), taxes and food. And probably your apartment has a little room that the maid can call her own. (Ours does, and we store the luggage in it.) Maids from Indonesia are less expensive because you save on airfare, but you have to hope their English is passable. The minimal age for a maid used to be 18, but is now 23 – a new rule passed last year, theoretically to protect employers (from flighty maids?) but maybe also to protect late adolescent girls from hornyor violent employers.
Immigration is strictly controlled here – Singapore is an island, after all, with two bridges that connect it to Malaysia and one main airport. Nobody gets in without a proper passport and visa, or at least that’s what everyone says. There are some 50,000 foreign workers creating all the high-rises for people to live in, and they’re all legally here. They are paid legally determined salaries and housed in government-created foreign worker housing – how’s that for a great idea?
Of course, if they’re not paid, the Ministry of Manpower sequesters their passports and forbids them to work while investigating the employer, and that can take a long time. My neighbor who works with foreign workers in trouble says there’s one poor man who’s been waiting four years for his lousy employer to come to trial – it’s a big construction company, so it’s quite a complicated case. There’s an exception under the law that allows this man to work for about 30% of what he’d been earning before, but understandably he’s not keen to clean toilets when he’d been working construction machinery before. So there’s charity, to supply meals and clothing to people in his position.
There’s a hierarchy of foreign workers, and it’s based strictly on what country they’re from. Fillipinos, because of their English, can do service jobs – nannying, clerking, etc. Indians can do some skilled labor. But the bottom of the heap, everyone agrees, is Bangladeshis, who are permitted by the government only to do the hardest manual jobs. I am not sure why this is; perhaps they are the least educated. Certainly they are the most desperate, and they are not coincidentally the most cruelly exploited by the “agents” who handle their migration to Singapore. Indians pay about $3,000 Sing to come here to work, while Bangladeshis pay an average of $9,000. So that’s heavy debt even before they start to work, and whether they earn enough to make their journey worthwhile is a good question. I think some of the hierarchy depends on how well the immigrants’ home countries can protect them – in other words, how valuable these people’s lives are to their home governments. So on this account alone I’m relieved to come from a country that seems ready to whack the bejeezus out of anyone it wants to.
All the foreign professors here at the university are called “Foreign Talent,” not “Foreign Labor,” so the same hierarchy does not apply. At least not that I’ve heard of, but it’s early.