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Rate of hiring a housekeeper

Magnifico (1981 posts) • 0

you don't mind if i gossip to everyone in the neighborhood about your fetish for whips, chains, latex and your dungeon do you?

Alien (3819 posts) • 0

@Alex (the yahoo report): Domestic 'helpers' (servants) in Hong Kong are mostly Filipinas and Indonesians and have been treated badly for a long time (low pay, bad working conditions, limited rights and visa restrictions) - usually not as badly as this one was, but physical mistreatment has been reported before.

Magnifico (1981 posts) • 0

i didn't realize this was taking place in hong kong. i thought there was some kind of agreement made between hong kong and philippine govts regarding abuse of domestic helpers.

but saudi arabia is paradise if you want to own and abuse a slave. you can beat them and rape them. and if they get lippy, they get deported or sent to jail. there's a long list of ayi's on death row there. a very religious country, incidentally.

but some ayis have good gigs.

OP, sorry for ruining your thread!

Alien (3819 posts) • 0

Agreements between Hong Kong & the Philippines exist, but middle-class Hong Kong employers often look down on imported ayis, have the attitude that they're doing these 'poor unsophisticated women' a favor by employing them (despite the fact that not a few of their ayis are better educated than they are and speak better English), are uncomfortable with Filipina casual cheerfulness, complain when the ayis take their contracted time off & casually expect them to work overtime at the drop of a hat. The Filipinas usually comply, but when they don't their employers decide they're uppity.
My understanding is that in Kunming ayis don't feel they have to put up with this kind of thing, and they don't, but I have no first-hand experience.
Have always felt that servitude is a bum idea for both parties, and I have no problems in the local markets - yeah, I know some people need the employment, but I don't need the superior/inferior employer/employee social arrangement at home, where I go to get away from it. It's a nice thing about bars too, where, after a drink or two, this crap can drop away.

Magnifico (1981 posts) • 0

casual cheefulness. ha ha.

what's the difference where the superior/slave relationship takes place?

we're all slaves, man.

"it may be the devil, or it may be the lord, but you gotta serve someone" - bob dylan

Alien (3819 posts) • 0

Well, one difference is that the home doesn't have to run like an enterprise - get the Japanese movie "The Yen Family" to see a hilarious take on what happens when it is. Ran for about two years in Hong Kong in the 90s. Very funny - man pays wife every time they screw, mother pays kids for taking out trash, kids pay father for helping with homework; kids pay mother for making them sandwiches for lunch, sell some to other kids at school at a profit, come home & mother takes a cut as business manager, etc. Everything dissolves into numbers, and they have business meetings, argue about pay scales, go on strike, etc.

Magnifico (1981 posts) • 0

yeah, i guess you can run a family like a business. or you can run a business like a family.

Alien (3819 posts) • 0

To some extent I think maybe you can, but the external cut throat environment will limit the services and mutuality provided internally according to their overall competitiveness in economic terms. I think this happens to families as well, which may have something to do with the forces that reduce family size within a society as more & more people wind up in modern, urban, competitive capitalist environments - the same environments that eventually swallow small businesses by, e.g., Walmart, which isn't run like a family.

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