For those who do not know, Hong Kong will generally grant residency (Right of Abode) to any international worker who has lived in the Special Administrative Region (HKG SAR), provided they have continually worked and paid taxes full time for a period of seven years. Well, it will provide residency unless you are a "domestic helper", a person who has most likely come to HKG to raise people's children, care for aged parents, and clean the houses and offices of those Hong Kong folks who can afford their services (which a extraordinarily cheap by Western standards).
Under Hong Kong's constitution, the Basic Law, a foreigner can gain permanent residency after living continuously in the territory for seven years. In a landmark court ruling last month, the court deemed the city's immigration law, which excludes some 290,000 domestic helpers from applying, unconstitutional....
Opponents fear granting the right of abode could open the floodgates to an influx of up to half a million people, including the children and spouses of the helpers.
The Hong Kong government plans to appeal the ruling.
In Canada, most of my friends and relatives plan and scrimp and save to afford a baby sitter for a few hours. In Hong Kong, a parent has a full-time nanny/maid/nurse/dog-walker/gardener, six days a week, for as little as USD$600 a month.
To the working poor at home in the West, that is clearly a fair bit of cash, but Western folks in Hong Kong are - by and large - not the "working poor". Even those in the lowest of salary brackets seem to find a way to have a full-time care-giver for their children (arguably necessary, since working hours in Hong Kong are much longer than school hours, and single parents - in particular - would need someone to care for their children until they are home from work).
I love my "helper". I had originally hired her to walk my dog when I was at work, and when she asked me to take over her contract here in Hong Kong, once the family she had worked with for some 8 years no longer needed or wanted - or could afford (ha ha) - her services, I was happy to do it; though I have always, always been uncomfortable with paying someone for these services.
To this end, I have long been haunted by Caitlin Flanagan's March 2004 article in The Atlantic, "How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement."
In it, Flanagan notes:
Many professional-class women, who had previously encountered mistress-servant relationships only in literature, are stunned to find themselves suddenly plunged into just such a relationship, a consequence of hiring a nanny that they had never even considered. Hondagneu-Sotelo points out that although these women don't like to think of themselves as members of the landed gentry, paternalistically doling out favors to humble dogsbodies, neither are they eager to think of themselves as "employers" in the contemporary American sense of the word, or of their homes as workplaces. They prefer to think of themselves as consumers of a service—and consumers, of course, have no obligation or responsibility to what they consume. In such a perspective, the relationship may seem cleaner, less encumbered: a sterile transaction of cash for services. But the law is very clear on this, and it was written to protect domestic workers: unless they make less than $1,400 a year, they are deserving of the same wage and hour regulations, the same disability insurance, and the same Social Security set-asides to which all other employees in this country—from the law-firm partner to the lowly Wal-Mart clerk, and everyone in between—are entitled.
"Mistress-servant relationships." Makes one gag more than a little at the North American historic echoes there. The fact remains, domestic helpers in Hong Kong are regarded as servants. They are denied the Basic Legal rights that other international expatriate workers are entitled to because of class and race, and - we must assume - gender.
And regardless of how deeply this runs counter to a wooly-liberal Canadian's sentiments, the fact is, there is no denying that I have benefited from this situation.
Nevertheless, I whole-heartedly support Hong Kong's domestic workers in their suit, and though I am certain it will take a long time, I pray that their wages rise to levels that make the current status unsustainable.
While Flanagan is writing specifically about child care, I still believe her closing argument applies across the board to all domestic helpers, and certainly to those men and women who are denied their rights based on their work:
Upper-middle-class working mothers may never have calm hearts regarding their choices about work and motherhood, but there are certain things they can all do. They can acknowledge that many of the gains of professional-class working women have been leveraged on the backs of poor women. They can legitimize those women's work and compensate it fairly, which means—at the very least—paying Social Security taxes on it. They can demand that feminists abandon their current fixation on "work-life balance" and on "ending the mommy wars" and instead devote themselves entirely to the real and heartrending struggle of poor women and children in .... And they can stop using the hardships of the poor as justification for their own choices. About this much, at least, there ought to be agreement.
As to Hong Kong: The Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions chairman Pan Pey-chyou was quoted as saying "we are not discriminating against migrant domestic helpers, as they are workers and we want to protect them too." However, he also warned that
A survey by the Hong Kong Employers of Overseas Domestic Helpers Association showed an overwhelming majority of helpers would apply for right of abode if there was a chance of it being granted, (and that) migrant workers' command of English could put local workers at a disadvantage.
Shocking: Multi-lingual, hard-working, educated men and women from around Asia might crowd out a less-educated, unilingual, local workforce.
Be still my heart.
Go forth and prosper, Hong Kong domestic workers. I can wash my own dishes and laundry.
