[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 8 (Wednesday, February 6, 2002)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E98-E99]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


        MINIMUM WAGE FOR FILIPINO DOMESTIC WORKERS IN HONG KONG

                                 ______
                                 

                               TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, February 6, 2002

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, Hong Kong is one of the most economically 
and culturally vibrant cities in the world, and its hard-working 
residents make an enormous contribution to the economic and political 
stability of the Asia-Pacific region. As a result, U.S.-Hong Kong 
relations have never been stronger, and ties between the governments 
and people of Hong Kong and the U.S. grow each day.
  While there are many reasons for Hong Kong's ongoing success, due 
credit must be given to the over 230,000 domestic workers in Hong Kong 
who watch children, cook and clean while their Hong Kong employers are 
off at work. Most of the women who fill these domestic positions are 
from the Philippines, and the remittances of their wages back to the 
Philippines support entire families. But the sacrifices made by these 
Filipina maids are enormous. They must leave husbands, children, and 
other family members behind for years on end to work incredibly long 
hours, six days a week. Given the small size of Hong Kong apartments, 
most of these maids sleep on kitchen or bathroom floors, or even in the 
closet. The minimum wage for Hong Kong maids is set at just $470 per 
month, and not all employers comply.
  During an official visit to Hong Kong in January, it was brought to 
my attention that the trade association representing the employers of 
Hong Kong maids had proposed cutting the minimum wage for maids by 14%. 
Given Hong Kong's leadership role in the Asia-Pacific region, I was 
frankly shocked to hear that such a proposal had even been put on the 
table.
  In meetings with Members of the Hong Kong Legislative Council and 
other senior Hong Kong officials, I raised strong concerns regarding 
this proposed minimum wage cut, echoing the strong statements against 
the proposal made by many Hong Kong residents and Filipina maids. I 
indicated that I was very sympathetic to the fact that many Hong Kong 
families have had to tighten their belts as a result of the recession 
in Hong Kong, but that it was not a solution to Hong Kong's economic 
problems to cut the wages of those who earn the least. Hong Kong's 
Filipina maids keep Hong Kong running and single-handedly support tens 
of thousands of families back home in the Philippines. The proposal to 
cut their wages was unfair and unethical, a fact realized by many solid 
citizens in Hong Kong.
  It is therefore my great pleasure to report that the proposal to cut 
the minimum wage for Hong Kong's maids has been rejected by the Hong 
Kong government. This decision by the government demonstrates the 
wisdom of Hong Kong's leadership on economic and other important 
issues, and shows why U.S.-Hong Kong relations will only grow stronger.
  I have attached a recent article from the Economist regarding this 
critically-important issue, and urge my colleague to read it in its 
entirety.

         An Anthropology of Happiness--The Filipina Sisterhood

                  [From the Economist, Dec. 22, 2001]

       Once a week, on Sundays, Hong Kong becomes a different 
     city. Thousands of Filipina women throng into the central 
     business district, around Statue Square, to picnic, dance, 
     sing, gossip and laugh. They snuggle in the shade under the 
     HSBC building, a Hong Kong landmark, and spill out into the 
     parks and streets. They hug. They chatter. They smile. 
     Humanity could stage no greater display of happiness.
       This stands in stark contrast to the other six days of the 
     week. Then it is the Chinese, famously cranky and often rude, 
     and expatriate businessmen, permanently stressed, who control 
     the city centre. On these days, the Filipinas are mostly 
     holed up in the 154,000 households across the territory where 
     they work as ``domestic helpers'', or amahs in Cantonese. 
     There they suffer not only the loneliness of separation from 
     their own families, but often virtual slavery under their 
     Chinese or expatriate masters. Hence a mystery: those who 
     should be Hong Kong's most miserable are, by all appearances, 
     its happiest. How? The Philippine government estimates that 
     about 10% of the country's 75 million people work overseas in 
     order to support their families. Last year, this diaspora 
     remitted $6 billion, making overseas Filipino workers, or 
     OFWs, one of the biggest sources of foreign exchange. Hong 
     Kong is the epicentre of this diaspora. Although America, 
     Japan and Saudi Arabia are bigger destinations of OFWs by 
     numbers, Hong Kong is the city where they are most 
     concentrated and visible. Filipina amahs make up over 2% of 
     its total and 40% of its non-Chinese population. They play an 
     integral part in almost every middle- class household. And, 
     once a week, they take over the heart of their host society.
       It was not always thus. Two generations ago, the 
     Philippines was the second-richest country in East Asia, 
     after Japan, while Hong Kong was teeming with destitute 
     refugees from mainland China. Among upper-class families in 
     the Philippines, it was common in those days to employ maids 
     from Hong Kong. But over the past two decades Hong Kong has 
     grown rich as one of Asia's ``tigers'', while the Philippines 
     has stayed poor. Hong Kong is the closest rich economy to the 
     Philippines, and the easiest place to get ``domestic'' visas. 
     It has the most elaborate network of employment agencies for 
     amahs in the world.


                          A Bed in a cupboard

       Although the Filipinas in Hong Kong come from poor 
     families, over half have college degrees. Most speak fluent 
     English and reasonable Cantonese, besides Tagalog and their 
     local Philippine dialect. About half are in Hong Kong because 
     they are mothers earning money to send their children to 
     school back home. The other half tend to be eldest sisters 
     working to feed younger siblings. All are their families' 
     primary breadwinners.
       Their treatment varies. By law, employers must give their 
     amahs a ``private space'' to live in, but Hong Kong's flats 
     tend to be tiny, and the Asian Migrant Centre, an NGO, 
     estimates that nearly half of amahs do not have their own 
     room. Some amahs sleep in closets, on the bathroom floor, and 
     under the dining table. One petite amah sleeps in a kitchen 
     cupboard. At night she takes out the plates, places them on 
     the washer, and climbs in; in the morning, she replaces the 
     plates. When amahs are mistreated, as many are, they almost 
     never seek redress. Among those who did so last year, one had 
     her hands burned with a hot iron by her Chinese employer, and 
     one was beaten for not cleaning the oven properly.
       The amahs' keenest pain, however, is separation from loved 
     ones. Most amahs leave their children and husbands behind for 
     years, or for good, in order to provide for them. Meanwhile, 
     those families often break apart. It is hard, for instance, 
     to find married amahs whose husbands at home have not taken a 
     mistress, or even fathered other children. Some amahs show 
     their dislocation by lying or stealing from their employers, 
     but most seem incapable of bitterness. Instead, they pour out 
     love on the children they look after. Often it is they who 
     dote, who listen, who check homework. And they rarely stop to 
     compare or envy.
       Under such circumstances, the obstinate cheerfulness of the 
     Filipinas can be baffling. But does it equate to 
     ``happiness'', as most people would understand it? ``That's 
     not a mistake. They really are,'' argues Felipe de Leon, a 
     professor of Filipinology at Manila's University of the 
     Philippines. In every survey ever conducted, whether the 
     comparison is with western or other Asian cultures, Filipinos 
     consider themselves by far the happiest. In Asia, they are 
     usually followed by their Malay cousins in Malaysia, while 
     the Japanese and Hong Kong Chinese are the most miserable. 
     Anecdotal evidence confirms these findings.


                           Happiness is kapwa

       Explaining the phenomenon is more difficult. The usual 
     hypothesis puts it down to the unique ethnic and historical 
     cocktail that is Philippine culture--Malay roots (warm, 
     sensual, mystical) mixed with the Catholicism and fiesta 
     spirit of the former Spanish colonisers, to which is added a 
     dash of western flavour from the islands' days as an American 
     colony. Mr de Leon, after a decade of researching, has 
     concluded that Filipino culture is the most inclusive and 
     open of all those he has studied. It is the opposite of the 
     individualistic culture of the West, with its emphasis on 
     privacy and personal fulfilment. It is also the opposite of 
     certain collectivistic cultures, as one finds them in 
     Confucian societies, that value hierarchy and ``face''.
       By contrast, Filipino culture is based on the notion of 
     kapwa, a Tagalog word that roughly translates into ``shared 
     being''. In essence, it means that most Filipinos, deep down, 
     do not believe that their own existence is separable from 
     that of the people around them. Everything, from pain to a 
     snack or a joke, is there to be shared. Guests in Filipino 
     homes, for instance, are usually expected to stay in the 
     hosts' own

[[Page E99]]

     nuptial bed, while the displaced couple sleeps on the floor. 
     Small-talk tends to get so intimate so quickly that many 
     westerners recoil. ``The strongest social urge of the 
     Filipino is to connect, to become one with people,'' says Mr 
     de Leon. As a result, he believes, there is much less 
     loneliness among them.
       It is a tall thesis, so The Economist set out to 
     corroborate it in and around Statue Square on Sundays. At 
     that time the square turns, in effect, into a map of the 
     Philippine archipelago. The picnickers nearest to the statue 
     itself, for instance, speak mostly Ilocano, a dialect from 
     northern Luzon. In the shade under the Number 13 bus stop 
     (the road is off-limits to vehicles on Sundays) one hears 
     more Ilonggo, spoken on Panay island. Closer to City Hall, 
     the most common dialect is Cebuano, from Cebu. Hong Kong's 
     Filipinas, in other words, replicate their village 
     communities, and these surrogate families form a first circle 
     of shared being. Indeed, some of the new arrivals in Hong 
     Kong already have aunts, nieces, former students, teachers, 
     or neighbours who are there, and gossip from home spreads 
     like wildfire.
       What is most striking about Statue Square, however, is that 
     the sharing is in no way confined to any dialect group. 
     Filipinas who are total strangers move from one group to 
     another--always welcomed, never rejected, never awkward. 
     Indeed, even Indonesian maids (after Filipinas, the largest 
     group of amahs), and Chinese or foreign passers-by who linger 
     for even a moment are likely to be invited to share the 
     snacks.
       The same sense of light-hearted intimacy extends to 
     religion. Father Lim, for instance, is a Filipino priest in 
     Hong Kong. Judging by the way his mobile phone rings almost 
     constantly with amahs who want to talk about their straying 
     husbands at home, he is also every amah's best friend. He is 
     just as informal during his Sunday service in Tagalog at St 
     Joseph's Church on Garden Road. This event is, by turns, 
     stand-up comedy, rock concert and group therapy. And it is 
     packed. For most of the hour, Father Lim squeezes through his 
     flock with a microphone. ``Are you happy?'' he asks the 
     congregation. A hand snatches the mike from him. ``Yes, 
     because I love God.'' Amid wild applause, the mike finds its 
     way to another amah. ``I'm so happy because I got my HK$3,670 
     this month [$470, the amahs' statutory wage]. But my employer 
     was expecting a million and didn't get it. Now he's 
     miserable.'' The others hoot with laughter.
       The Filipinas, says Father Lim, have only one day a week of 
     freedom (less, actually, as most employers impose curfews 
     around dusk), so they ``maximise it by liberating the 
     Filipino spirit''. That spirit includes communing with God. 
     Some 97% of Filipinos believe in God, and 65%, according to a 
     survey, feel ``extremely close'' to him. This is more than 
     double the percentage of the two runners-up in the survey, 
     America and Israel. This intimate approach to faith, thinks 
     Father Lim, is one reason why there is virtually no drug 
     abuse, suicide or depression among the amahs--problems that 
     are growing among the Chinese.


                          The lifeline to home

       There is, however, an even more concrete expression of 
     kapwa. Quite simply, it is the reason why the Filipinas are 
     where they are in the first place: to provide for loved ones 
     at home. Most spend very little of their monthly HK$3,670 on 
     themselves. Instead, they take it to WorldWide House, a 
     shopping mall and office complex near Statue Square. On 
     Sundays the mall becomes a Philippine market, packed with 
     amahs buying T-shirts, toys and other articles for their 
     siblings and children, and remitting their wages. More than 
     their wages, in fact: many amahs borrow to send home more, 
     often with ruinous financial consequences.
       Father Lim tells a story. An eminent Filipino died while 
     abroad, and it was decided that local compatriots should bid 
     the coffin adieu before its journey home. So amahs showed up 
     to file past it. When the coffin arrived in the Philippines 
     and was re-opened, the corpse was covered from head to toe 
     with padded bras, platform shoes, Nike trainers, and the 
     like, all neatly tagged with the correct addresses.
       It is their role as a lifeline for the folks at home that 
     has earned the OFWs their Tagalog nickname, bayani. By 
     itself, bayani means heroine, and this is how many amahs see 
     themselves. Another form of the word, bayanihan, used to 
     describe the traditional way of moving house in the 
     Philippines. All the villagers would get together, pick up 
     the hut and carry it to its new site. Bayanihan was a heroic, 
     communal--in other words, shared--effort.
       It is no coincidence, therefore, that Bayanihan House is 
     the name the amahs have given to a building in Hong Kong that 
     a trust has made available to them for birthday parties, 
     hairstyling classes, beauty pageants and the like. One recent 
     Sunday, during a pageant, one of the contestants for beauty 
     queen was asked how she overcame homesickness, and why she 
     thought the people back home considered her a hero. She 
     looked down into her audience of amahs. ``We're heroes 
     because we sacrifice for the ones we love. And homesickness 
     is just a part of it. But we deal with it because we're 
     together.'' The room erupted with applause and agreement.
       ``Nowadays, bayanihan really means togetherness,'' says Mr 
     de Leon, and ``togetherness is happiness''. It might sound 
     too obvious, almost banal, to point out--had not so many 
     people across the world forgotten it.

     

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