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| Corazon's weighty pay |
For three months, Corazon silently suffered
through slave-like conditions in the household of her Chinese employers in Sai
Kung. Many were the times she was fed rotten food, or woken up in the middle of
the night so she could iron clothes.
But the straw that broke the camel’s back,
so to speak, was when her employers paid her a weighty salary – a bag of $10
coins totaling just more than $3,470 after questionable deductions. And this,
after her pay was inexplicably delayed for seven days.
The helper, a 28-year-old single mother, has walked
out on her job and is now talking with her agency about her next option.
“When I asked for my salary, my employers
said they had no money. Then, after seven days, that’s what they gave me. I
didn’t bother to ask them why they gave coins,” Corazon said.
The maid said her employers, both teachers,
had treated her badly since she began working for them in April.
“If they gave me food, it would already be spoiled,
or it was all fishbone,” she said. “And they made me work me like a carabao.”
One time, the maid said she begged to fry
an egg because she was very weak from lack of food, but the employers allegedly
told her: “No, it’s not your food.”
It was food doled out by other Filipinas on
the block that helped her survive, Corazon said.
What’s more, the maid said that since July
4, the couple had been leaving her in the lobby for half a day. Unable to enter
the flat, she would wait for them to return home late at night before she could
eat.
At other times, the couple would wake her
up at past midnight after her day off, saying it was time she resumed work.
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| A long list of deductions from her pay |
Or they would ask her to iron clothes at
midnight, knocking on her door when she was already about to sleep.
Corazon had other complaints: “I had been
to the hospital a number of times because my shoulder swelled. My doctor
advised my employers to provide me a trolley but they didn’t listen,” Corazon
said.
During these summer days, Corazon said she
would sleep with her clothes off in her room because she was not allowed to use
electricity.
“It’s too hot in my room because they
(employers) sealed the wall socket in my room with tape so I couldn’t plug an
electric fan,” the maid said.
She said she had been warned that if the
employers caught her using electricity, they would call the police and tell
them she had been stealing power from them.
Now tired of all the abuses she had
suffered, Corazon gave her employers a month’s notice that she was terminating
her contract.
The maid showed a piece of paper where the
employers computed deductions from her salary for June. The was a deduction of
$138.40 times two, apparently for two days of absences, $112 for 8.5 hours of
absence out of 10.5 hours of work, $300 for a crystal apparently broken, $30
for a bucket and $20 for two missing spoons.
Filipina helpers employed previously by the
couple said they had mostly lasted only a few months. One who claimed she was the
couple’s first helper said she managed to carry on with her work for just a
year and five months. She said her successor stayed five months,
the next one managed eight months, the fourth stayed seven, and the fifth,
eight.
The informant, however, could not remember how long the helper who Corazon replaced had lasted.
The informant, however, could not remember how long the helper who Corazon replaced had lasted.
Having given up on her job, Corazon's only hope for recourse
now is to get her abusive employers on the “watch list” of the Philippine
Overseas Labor Office so they don’t get to hire and oppress another Filipina
helper again. – Vir B. Lumicao
