Job Discussion Forums

[Yes Sir I Can Bogey]

It seems that things do not seem to have got all too much better for 'foreign domestic helpers' (aka imported slave labour) in HK since the publication of the first edition of Nicole Constable's 'Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers' (NY, Cornell University Press, 1997), as has been asserted elsewhere on the forum by Kowlooner. The book has now been updated by Constable ('Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Migrant Workers', NY, Cornell University Press, 2007), but in the first (1997) edition, Constable documents some quite atrocious abuses of Filipina maids at the hands of their Hong Kong Chinese employers, including a case in which one such maid was actually branded with an iron:

http://books.google.com/books?id=08P_zzYfphYC&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq='Maid+to+Order+in+Hong+Kong:+Stories+of+filipina+workers+branded&source=bl&ots=-3liwBxMoV&sig=-yaCXUvjYfBRwWaZF8AAvF5EFpc&hl=en&ei=82gXSsrdGs6dkAWR78TtDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1

Well, we now have a similar case. A local, HK Chinese female employer has been sentenced to a poxy seven months (!) imprisonment for branding her maid on the forearm for "ironing too close to her baby" (SCMP, 'Employer who burned maid with an iron loses appeal', 22.05.09).