Higher Pay Lures Many Into Virtual Bonded Labor : Philippine Women Find Toil, Trouble in Hong Kong

HONG KONG — Thousands of Philippine women perform virtual bonded labor in Hong Kong, choosing domestic servitude over the grinding poverty of their homeland. Philippine officials find it embarrassing but cannot do without the $25 million a year the women send home.

There are about 30,000 Philippine women, or Filipinas, working as maids under standard two-year contracts that forbid them to take any other kind of work--even though many are trained as nurses, teachers and secretaries--or even to change employers without government permission.

Most work long hours, six days a week, under often unpleasant conditions. Yet Manila employment agencies can charge up to three months wages for a placement in Hong Kong because the paltry wages--room, board and about $255 a month--are far higher than the women can earn at home.

For some, a job in Hong Kong is a way to support their children or parents. For a lucky few it can lead to a husband or a job in the United States, Canada or Great Britain.

Bad Experiences

But for many, the dream turns turns bad.

One such is Vicky, a 32-year-old mother of two who was recently released from Victoria Prison and placed on a plane to Manila.

Despite two years of college, Vicky left her children with a sister and came to Hong Kong two years ago knowing that she could earn more as a maid in the colony than in her office job at home.

Employed by a Portuguese family, she sent home money each month and, when her sister needed an operation, borrowed from a Philippine-based bank at 3% per month interest, giving up her passport as collateral.

When her employer made repeated sexual advances, she quit her job, realizing only afterward that she had no income to pay off the loan and no legal way to get another job without the passport.

Barred by law from seeking other kinds of work and ashamed to go home broke, she entered a twilight world inhabited by hundreds like her. She stayed with friends, worked illegally as a part-time maid or waitress when she could and haunted the discos with a vague hope of finding a boyfriend who would pay her debt.

Eventually, inevitably, she was arrested while entering the Pussycat Club in the notorious Wanchai bar district. Convicted of overstaying her visa, she was fined $385, which she did not have, or sentenced to 45 days in jail.

Officials Defend Policy

“I’m being treated OK,” she told a visitor across a bare wooden table in the aging jail just before being deported. But the small tears trickling down her cheeks betrayed an emotional if not a physical toll.

Hong Kong officials defend the tough immigration policy that consigns well-educated women to what one local newspaper has called a “life of domestic serfdom.”

Labor Department official Leung Lit-cheong pointed out that the standard two-year contracts, which must be signed before visas are issued, meet the requirements of all international labor conventions and contain several measures to protect the employees.

These include a minimum monthly pay of $230 and clauses obliging the employer to provide one day off a week, pay all medical expenses and pay the woman’s passage home at the end of her contract.

If a woman wants to take another type of job, “she can go back to her country of origin and apply again,” he said, though in practice few Filipinos are admitted to Hong Kong except as maids or musicians.

Friction Created

Cheong said the Philippine domestics were first admitted to work for Western families who valued them because they speak English. But now most are employed by Chinese families who find their children benefit from having educated nursemaids.

That success has created frictions that threaten the future of the program, and the government has begun a review of its policies following demands from organizations representing Chinese domestics for a reduction in the number of Filipinas.

There is also a feeling that the Peking government, which regains sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997, would like to see the colony accepting fewer maids from the Philippines and more from equally impoverished southern China. Hong Kong has so far resisted, fearing that Chinese women would be much harder to find if they overstayed their visas.

The Manila government is moving to provide a welfare center for the women, and former Philippine Labor Minister Augusto Sanchez twice visited Hong Kong to explore the issue before being dropped from the Cabinet late last year.

But while they seek solutions to the immediate problems, Philippine officials admit that the root is the poverty at home that sends Filipinos abroad.

Vicky earned four times more when she was working in Hong Kong than in her last job at home, where she earned the equivalent of $50 a month in a clerical government job.

Her girlfriend Susie earned $32 a month as a secretary for a publication in Manila before coming to Hong Kong as a maid.