(IPS) feature

'Maids and pets not allowed', once read the signs at the entrance to some exclusive country clubs in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Dignity for foreign domestic workers are elusive concepts to many in Asia's labour-hosting countries, although they are host to tens or hundreds of thousands of Filipino domestic workers who allow employers to pursue careers and have their home tended to.

In worse cases, some domestic workers are little more than bonded labour, increasingly exposed to social isolation and dismal conditions exacerbated by errant employment agents whose contracts spell out more duties than rights, and employers who are strangers to the emotional needs of their workers.

''We often lose our right to freedom and dignity as a maid. Sometimes employers, it seems they are right all the time. They look down on their helpers,'' says Ninfa Loredo, founder of the Iloilo Association in Hong Kong, a group that tries to empower Filipino domestic workers and is named after central Iloilo province in the Philippines.

Lai Poh Chin, associate professor in geography at Hong Kong University who has employed four Filipino domestic workers since 1993, agrees that some domestic workers are denied their rights to humane working conditions.

''Some helpers were paid one salary but work for two households (the other being that of the extended family). Their working hours are extremely long, about eight hours for each household per day. Some do not have their own room and sleep in the living room or laundry area, '' Lai added.

Exposed to abuses

The media in host countries often carry stories of domestic workers exposed to abuses that lead some opting to break their contracts, and many ''escaping'' with the employers' valuables too.

Groups like the Iloilo Association helps provide sanctuary for those who, on top of the woes they might have at work, are often torn between earning a steady income overseas and living with homesickness, dealing with social denigration and emotional deprivation.

Some get into depression when they receive news that their spouses are having affairs back home. But even in the countries where they work, it is not uncommon for domestic workers, away from families and in search of relationships, to turn to casual trysts with seafarers, many of them Filipinos too, on port calls in Hong Kong.

Loredo says casual relationships borne out of loneliness and reactions to a spouse's infidelity have led to cases of unwanted pregnancies, which can in turn lead to deportation under local laws in some Asian countries.

In the end, though, the treatment of domestic workers at home and employers' sensitivity to their plight as individuals who stay years, even decades, in a foreign home, can make a big difference in their lives — and in their work.

Relations with domestic help

Some host countries like Singapore are learning from past cases of physical abuse, some of which have ended up in court, and have courses designed to brief employers on relations with domestic help.

But it is easy for employers to think of domestic workers purely in terms of work, although they share the same house, tutor their children and even go with them on trips. Not all easily see them as individuals with human needs, separated for long periods of time from their families and social support networks.

The fact that Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong are not signatories to the UN Convention on the Protection of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, which says workers should be treated no less favourably than locals, says a lot.

The convention has yet to be ratified 11 years after it was signed. Filipino officials have long seen the support of the biggest labour-receiving countries as key to making it a strong international commitment — Malaysia and Singapore have tens of thousands of Filipino domestic workers and Hong Kong is home to more than 100,000 of them.

Esther Tan, a Malaysian bank officer who has employed two Indonesian maids, agrees that ''most employers do not care much about the emotional misery suffered by their maids''.

But she says the problem is unlikely to be solved by employers who want efficiency in domestic chores and sensitivity in handling their children.

''The employer is nothing more than a stranger — he is the boss whose instructions the maid is to follow. This is coupled with the problems of language and value differences in a situation where maids keep everything to themselves and do not look to the employer as a person whom they can trust,'' she muses.

Onus on employer

But Lee Min, executive director of the Malaysian chapter of the Colorado-based Focus on the Family and who has hired domestic workers, says, ''The onus is on the employer to show them that they are welcome as a person but that their profession happens to be a house helper. But they should still be treated and respected as a person.''

Happy Lim, wife of a Malaysian banker, attributes varied abuses to the gap between the domestic worker's environment and exposure and the employer's demands for efficiency from paid labour.

Lim has had two Filipino domestic workers sharing the family dinner table, and ''practically running the house'' over the last 14 years. ''I don't think too many people treat their maids like family but that's how it's always been with us.''

Over time, she says she has come to know them too. ''As much as they have to live with our moods, we also learn to tolerate their bad days, the occasional long faces. Sometimes, after they receive letters from home, they become moody, but we tell the children to leave them alone and to understand their homesickness,'' Lim explains.

Lee urges employers to welcome their domestic worker ''as if she is going to be a staff of an organisation where the employer is running''.

Short of quality time

But employers say they are already running short of ''quality time'' with their children after an average 12-hour workday in the corporate world.

''Every night I only have about two hours with the children, to look through their school work, to talk to them, to eat with them. Sometimes I also have to attend to my own families, my office work,'' says Esther Tan. ''Frankly, I hardly have any room for the maid.''

''My way of getting closer to my maid is to engage in conversation with her whenever both of us are in the kitchen, get to understand her situation in her home back in Indonesia,'' she adds.

Working in someone's private home also makes a working environment for a foreign domestic worker that is quite different from that of other migrant labourers.

Says Lee: ''Sometimes when there's conflict between husband and wife, or between parents and children, there is this aspect where you just want to let go, and you let go on the most vulnerable person in the house — and usually it's the maid.''

Meantime, as some Filipino domestic workers find a second home in their employers' families and others suffer abuses, more will continue to come as long as the Philippines' economic woes remain and its government is unable to remove the reasons for large flows of migrants in search of work overseas.

In the end, Loredo says of the domestic workers' miseries: ''We blame our government.''