While I'm forever sounding-off in favour of more freedoms for citizens of many nations around the world, I often forget the even more crying need for the same freedoms, rights and protections for non-citizens.

The millions and millions of people from poor and oppressed nations who travel in search of work, often ill-paid and in appalling conditions, in more economically-advanced countries.

But then I see an Indonesian maid hard at work washing the master or the mistress's car, or hungrily trailing around with the kids in some restaurant while the couple she works for are happily stuffing their faces. Or I get a glimpse of one of those squalid shanties where male foreign workers live, or rather exist, while they slave away for peanuts, often in shockingly unsafe circumstances, constructing "luxury" developments.

And, in added insult to their exploitation, they're often harassed by predatory police and vigilante groups like Rela for being "illegals," and accused by the press of being responsible for Malaysia's real or perceived soaring crime rate.

Which some of them are, as a police inspector tells me, explaining that he hardly blames the more desperate among them for resorting to theft, as many have been cheated of part of the paltry wages they were promised by "agents," or simply not paid at all, and they have to survive somehow.

Who do they turn to?

There seem to be some signs that the Malaysian authorities are making moves toward affording these unfortunates more adequate protection from unscrupulous and abusive employers. But there's clearly a long, long way to go before they can expect truly just and humane treatment.

Many maids I know of, far from their familiar surroundings and many of them wives and mothers themselves, are worked without mercy not to mention privacy, civility of anything remotely resembling respect for as many hours a day and days a week as they're not sleeping in the kennel-sized "quarters" grudgingly allotted them.

And many are virtual or even actual prisoners, forbidden to go out alone, or have friends of their own, or even talk on the phone, and deprived of their passports lest they attempt to escape their unendurable situations.

And some, of course, are not just cynically and heartlessly used, but also verbally, psychologically, physically and sexually abused. Who victimised maids have to turn to I have no more idea than they must have. The police? Don't make me laugh. Immigration? You must be kidding. Their own embassies or high commissions? How is that possible, if they're locked-up, with no access to any form of communication?

And in any case, their own official representatives in Malaysia are likely as bad as the governments they work for, the very governments whose incompetence, corruption and callousness are responsible in the first place for their citizens' need to seek work elsewhere as sweated labour to earn survival money for themselves and their families back home.

Happens everywhere

I'm not suggesting that all employers of foreign labour in Malaysia treat their "guest-workers" shabbily. Many people I know treat their foreign maids and other staff with great consideration, kindness and generosity. Nor am I claiming that unfair and even inhumane treatment of foreign workers, male and female alike, is confined to Malaysia.

Wherever there are people with pots or barrels of money, from the oil-enriched kingdoms and dictatorships of the Middle-East all the way to the self-made economic success of Singapore, huge numbers of men and women from South, South-East and West Asia are imported to do much of the dirty-work and drudgery, and everywhere some of them are ill-used. As in the most

contemptible case of maltreatment of "servants" that I ever personally witnessed, which happened to be in Singapore.

The Philippines-born wife of an Australian advertising colleague of mine treated her two maids, both also Filipinos, as harshly as possible short of actual injury. She even denied them the room of their own that might have provided some slight refuge from her regime, forcing them to sleep on roll-out mattresses under the dining-room table.

That was many years ago, and I'm delighted to be able to report that my friend has since divorced the wife who treated her maids so badly. And I wish similar or at least appropriate ill-fortune on others of all genders and races who exploit and mistreat their workers, either foreign or domestic.

Prosperity is no fit pretext for taking unfair advantage of a fellow human being's poverty or other misfortune. Quite the opposite. Those of us who've achieved affluence, influence or both by virtue of our ancestry, talents, hard work, good luck or any combination of these factors, have a duty to share our bounty with not just our own families, but, within reason and according to our means, the whole Family of Man. And the Family of Man includes Woman. Even, or maybe especially, if she happens to be "only" a maid.