Hong Kong’s Asian Migrants’ Coordinating Body (AMCB) has urged the government to ensure a living wage, standardised working hours, better living conditions and the abolition of live-in arrangements for the city’s foreign domestic workers. Photo: Asian Migrants’ Coordinating Body. With Tuesday marking International Domestic Workers Day, the NGO also called for a scrapping of the two-week rule, which forces domestic workers to leave the territory within a fortnight if a contract ends. See also: Investigation: Illegal firings, cancelled visas and lack of healthcare – how domestic workers facing critical illness are left in limbo “Abolish the mandatory live-in arrangement, the restrictive two-week visa rule, and malicious accusations of ‘job-hopping’ that trap workers in unsafe environments and escalate the violence. These restrictive and discriminatory policies leave workers highly vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse,” the AMCB said.
‘Equal, fair, and decent treatment’
The current Minimum Allowable Wage for foreign domestic helpers in Hong Kong is HK$5,100 per month. By law, they must live with their employers, who are also obliged to provide food or an allowance for food. File photo: Robert Godden. The NGO urged the government to increase the wage to HK$6,172: “Under the economic and political crisis migrant domestic workers have to survive under the sub-liveable wages and the food allowances that fail to cover basic costs of living in Hong Kong and support families back home.”
In a Wednesday press release, they said that the law only loosely defines “suitable” accommodation and a food allowance, but “some workers are forced to sleep on kitchen floors, in corridors, or in modified closets, severely exacerbating mental fatigue and a lack of privacy and developing physical ailments or psychological distress.”
The group said that domestic workers are often “denied dignity, equal, fair, and decent treatment as workers and human beings,” as they warned of “modern-day slavery hiding behind closed doors.”
The AMCB is a coalition of a dozen domestic worker groups, and is a member of the International Migrants Alliance.
Last month, a spokesperson for the Labour Department told HKFP that the “government is firmly committed to protecting the rights and benefits of foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong.” They added that there is a 24-hour hotline available to domestic workers, and that they may seek free advice from the department’s branches across the city.
Hong Kong hosts over 360,000 migrant domestic workers from the Philippines, Indonesia, Nepal, Thailand, Sri Lanka and other countries.