What am I, the maid?

In the US this is a rhetorical question generally employed by people who wish to draw their family’s attention to the fact that they are doing a lot more housework – particularly picking up socks and towels – that should be done by everyone else as well. But in Singapore the question might well be posed by any live-in maid: What am I, the maid? Employee, family member, slave, thief, or spy?

Live-in maids are so inexpensive in Singapore that they are often cheaper to hire than a weekly cleaning service. Just think of how it must feel to live in someone else’s home, not as a renter or roommate, but as an employee. What rights would you have?

Most maids in Singapore come from other, poorer countries – generally Thailand, Malaysia or Indonesia. Phillipine maids tend to speak more English and can more easily work in ex-pat homes, so they are more expensive. Indonesian maids were so exploited by Singaporeans that the Indonesian government demanded that they be paid an extra $150/month to deter the worst cheapskates (bringing their total pay up to a whopping $450/month). But in any case they are far from home and the protections that might be provided by friends and family – and even the protections they might claim from their own governments are tempered by the fact that the employer or the maid brokerage service keeps their passports.

It starts right away – the passports are locked away so that, if the maid turns out to be a thief, she can’t go home. Fair enough, sort of, since if you have someone else live in your house she necessarily knows where you keep all your valuables. She can meet up with some guy from her home land – say on the one Sunday afternoon off per month you are required to give her – and let him in to take your goods when you’re not home. So why trust this person you have in your house?

Face it – you HAVE to trust the people living in your house, or there’s no peace of mind. And you have to trust the person doing all the scut-work you don’t want to do – caring for your aged parents, caring for your infant children, cooking for you. But how can you trust someone you’ve hired after one interview, or because she’s cheap? Cover your ass – sequester her passport.

Or it could be for her own protection – that sweet-talking guy from her homeland can easily persuade her to run away with him, and then he can sell her into a brothel in Thailand, Vietnam, anywhere they go with their passports. At least if she stays in Singapore she has rights as a registered alien worker – assuming she has the nerve, knowledge, and language skills to assert them. She has the right to an annual trip home, paid for by her employer, likewise three or four annual medical check-ups. I believe she also has a right to have a cellphone – at least I have never met a maid without one – but even that is a prickly question. Does the maid have a right to privacy?

The husband of one of my colleagues checked through their maid’s cellphone records, and examined all the photos she had taken. She had sent someone a photo of herself in her underwear in the employer’s bathroom, which caused a huge kerfluffle – partly because she was showing a stranger the inside of her employers’ house, and partly because the employer often sees himself as responsible for the sexual purity of the maid.

Some employers sexually assault their maids – this happened often enough that maids below the age of 23 are no longer legally employed in SIngapore (I guess over 23 you’re no longer attractive). But MANY employers want to control all the social contacts their maids have, to ensure their own security. You can see how that works – if she has a boyfriend she can have him in the house while you’re away, and who wants that? – but on the other hand it’s tough on the maid, who may well want a social life.

Most maids have Sunday afternoons off – as I mentioned, they’re legally entitled to one afternoon off per month – and on that day they put on their best clothes and go to town. They congregate with others from their home countries and towns, have picnics in the parks, window shop, chat and snack. But this is also when they can make friends with the wrong kinds of people (wrong from the employers’ point of view), who may try to woo them away or worm into your house while you’re gone.

Chinese employers are notorious for overworking their maids. There are several cases a week where maids fall to their deaths from high-rises in the city – not because they were pushed, but because they were cleaning the outsides of windows, leaning precariously out to reach the corners, when already exhausted by all their other duties. Among maids, working for American or European employers is known to be the best option, in terms of workload.

It is illegal to beat a maid in Singapore, and the frequency with which maids are beaten shows in the fact that they had to pass a law to make it illegal. While I was there a police commissioner was found guilty of beating his maid, because (he claimed) she was stupid. He was jailed, and rightly so, but he was one of the few caught and brought to book.

Maids are trained by the brokerage agencies to please their employers by doing whatever they are told. Yet, of course, if you’re asking someone to run your household, watch your children, care for your elderly, you need someone who will use her best judgment. Being a maid militates against exercising judgment – any initiative in any direction is likely to offend the employer. So if the six-year-old demands a pencil from you so she can do her homework, you go get the kid a pencil. One of my friends found her children growing so lazy and demanding that she got rid of the maid – that way the kids at least had to fetch their own pencils.

And finally, maids have to deal with their own families back home. Those cell phones are in constant use, keeping in touch with maids’ own children or husbands, or with parents. Generally this is a good thing, right, to console the maid for being so far away from her loved ones. But it can also be poisonous – the people at home, unemployed, gambling and drinking, can demand more and more money from their industrious daughter/sister, guilting her into handing them her entire paycheck without any provision for her own future security.

So what am I, the maid? What is the maid in Singapore, or anywhere? Trusted family member? Charity case? Spy? Slave? Thief? This question is at the heart of the incessant nattering in Singapore – and any place where hiring domestic help is part of the culture – about the servant problem, the maid problem, the unreliabilty of foreign workers, etc. etc. etc. I found these conversations interesting at first, then tedious to listen to, because there is no answer, and the maid never gets to participate. What is the maid? This question so puzzled me that I couldn’t stomach hiring one and did my own damn work.

Turns out it’s not simple. In the first place, the whole building and contracting tender system in Malaysia is conducted behind closed doors, so nobody knows what the lowest bid was. So nobody knows how much a builder or services contractor gets to keep in his own pockets once a contract has been “won” – a better word is “awarded.”  Easy money for contractors!

OK, said I, but surely it can’t be so difficult to hire some poor but honest person to clean the bathrooms once or twice a day? Wouldn’t it be worthwhile in a tourist-oriented place?

Well, turns out it is difficult, and that’s because of the easy money problem. Nobody wants to earn a simple living by cleaning stuff (or actually performing any services) because the whole culture revolves around the notion of easy money – of skimming off the top. With toilet cleaning, there is no top. Unless you run a cleaning firm. So let’s say your cleaning firm wins a contract to clean toilets at the museum. You of course don’t mind overseeing the actual cleaning person, but doing the work yourself is out of the question. So you hire someone to do it it for a pittance. That person may or may not do the cleaning – you don’t surpervise them very closely, because you already have your cut from the contract and don’t care if the toilets are clean. And the cleaning person probably doesn’t care either – nobody’s checking to see if the job is done, nobody’s in a position to receive or act on negative feedback from customers. So money may be spent, but nothing gets done.

This is apparently a big problem in Malaysia, where the bidding process is closed. In Singapore, by contrast, the uncle or aunty who cleans the bathrooms is accountable to their supervisor, and if there are complaints from end-users the supervisor makes life miserable for the cleaner. (In turn, the cleaning company is not paid if the cleaning is not done – a condition that seems not to obtain in Malaysia.) The bidding process in Singapore is open, so everyone knows who is responsible. People claim that there’s an easy money mentality in Singapore too, at least for the already-wealthy, but it doesn’t seem to trickle down to the point where nobody does anything, because they’re always hoping for a cut from an uncle in the construction business.

But they paid me anyway.  In fact, I think they paid me twice as much while I was on leave as I get for actually working.  Part of this is that HR didn’t communicate clearly with Payroll.  The other part is that I underwent a performance review (after being a full-time employee for only 6 weeks, but that’s another story) and qualified for a pay raise.  That evidently triggered an additional payment regime, rather than supplanting the original one.  So I returned to find my bank account overflowing with a couple of payments at the increased rate, supplementing the other, unstopped payments.  I’m rich!

Or rather, my project grant is poor!  Once the YOG lockdown ceases this weekend,  I can access the office, along with the HR, budget and payroll staff I’ll need to deal with in order to sort this out.   Let’s assume I start the ball rolling on Monday morning – how long do you think it will take all and sundry to straighten this out?  I’d say a minimum of two weeks, perhaps lingering on for eight.  Anyone want to make bets on it?

Well, take performance appraisals at the university. These are directly tied to performance bonuses, which makes sense. And the number crunchers assume that if you graph people’s performance appraisals they should fit a bell curve and you’ll get a normal distribution of good, bad and middling performances. In fact, they say, a bell curve PROVES that you are avoiding nepotism and favoritism, and furthering the uniquely Singaporean dream of meritocracy (and incidentally cutting down on corruption).

This makes sense until you realize that if recruiters are hiring only the best-qualified candidates you should only have high performers. But the university bean counters don’t think that way, and they require, in the top-down manner typical of Singapore management, that departments submit bell curves with all their staff neatly fitted into them.

So university departments are stuck with the job of deciding who has done worse in their jobs and whose pay, free of performance bonuses will remain static. And logically, those who were recently promoted or hired are the ones newest to the job, therefore cannot possibly excel at it, therefore go on the low end of the bell curve, and therefore get no performance bonus. Problem solved, even if people were hired or promoted because it was felt that they would do the job well.

Voila! By using math and logic, Singapore creates a system in which promotion does not pay.

I have also priced a root canal, which is about $1500; the dentist apologized repeatedly for the cost but said it was an expensive procedure.  

I hear it’s even cheaper next door in Malaysia, but haven’t needed to find out yet.

We have health insurance through the university, where my spouse is a professor.  He upgraded coverage for our family of three, to the maximum best-possible coverage, and for this we pay $700 (Singapore currency) a year.  This means we can go to any doctor or clinic that’s on the plan (and that’s most of them on the island), pay a $5 co-pay, and get a consultation, at the end of which we pop by the dispensary (in-clinic pharmacy) and pick up whatever drugs may be prescribed, at no additional cost.  Hospitalization costs are much lower too, with a 10% co-pay. (I’d give you more details but have not been hospitalized, so don’t know them.)

It’s good coverage, but medicine itself is cheaper here as well.  The campus clinic is in a small space next to a lecture theater; it’s the size of two elementary-school classrooms combined, and includes a waiting area, reception/filing area, dispensary, optometry center, small laboratory, and six consulting rooms.  Not a lot of wasted space.  If you need more deluxe treatment you can go to a larger clinic, in the mall or at a hospital.

There’s no single-payer requirement.  If you’re a Singaporean you have a Medi-Save account, where you store money for future medical expenses, but otherwise you have to purchase insurance or pay full fees.  But you do have various options in case of hospitalization or extended care; there are A facilities, with air conditioning, or B facilities, cheaper, smaller, shared rooms without AC.  Your choice.

Aren’t they cute?  Mei, can you translate the cake characters for us? I can read “moon” and “good,” but not the other two.

Most of what is available is really BIG, designed to fill up that 2×3 metre space on your office wall.  Much of it is in bright candy colors. Masses of it are pornographic.  A huge percentage of it is incredibly ugly.  Lots of it reminds me of high school art projects.  But there were two paintings I liked and photographed:

Isn’t this nice?  Is she dealing with baskets of fruit? Or are they balls of wool? Who cares? whatever they are, I like the picture.

The next one I need some guidance on:

Who is the target audience here?  I like the kids – both the happy one in school and the naughty girl sticking her tongue out.  Obviously a parable about modern kids’ disillusionment with communist education – is it a comment on the Cultural Revolution?  Who would buy it?  A modern capitalist who’s overcome his/her communist education and become rich?  Could this person exhibit this painting in China? Or is this for export only?

For this you get a computerized database online and many branches to visit.  There are pretty good collections of books, although the DVDs tend to be relentlessly oriented towards self-improvement or education – no mere entertainment!  And the architecture of some branches is great.  The Jurong East library has a waterfall in the lobby.  

And, this being Singapore, each library has a cafe in it.