Double Standards

More on Maid Mistreatment in Hong Kong

A journalist once told me that letters to the editor are the last refuge of the anally retentive, a view I’m often happy to agree with despite my reservations about the suitability of any journalistic advice. But today I read the print edition of the South China Morning Post here in Hong Kong and decided that silence changes nothing. Adorning the front page was an article encouraging the employers of lowly paid domestic helpers to cancel their contracts and rehire them to take advantage of the suspension of an employer-paid levy I mentioned recently.

The absolute irresponsibility of that article and other coverage in the issue should be clear from the letter I wrote to the editor a few hours ago.

Dear Editor,

I am appalled at the tone of your publication’s irresponsible lead article on 31 July (‘4 years off maid levy for some’). Suggesting that employers of foreign domestic helpers can “get the most” out of the levy suspension by breaching a set-term contract, which will force a period of unemployment on their employees, is the epitome of callousness. Leaving aside the fact that any such actions would not be “terminations” as reported (a contract is terminated due to wrong doing, not fiscal expediency), the chances of many employers even bothering to secure agreement from their helpers is small, given that the Immigration Department does not require them to fill out the reasons section of the form they submit when a contract is prematurely ended. This fact alone makes nonsense of the Secretary for Labour and Welfare’s claim that helpers should not fear being sacked because of the new arrangements. What will constrain irresponsible employers?

The Evil People Do

Human Rights Violated in Hong Kong

Imagine the worst day of your life. Think for a while about a beating that leaves you stunned and panicking. You have a black eye, you’ve been kicked in the groin, your clothes are ripped and otherwise cut – all of them, not just what you’re wearing – your paper money has been torn up and flung to the ground. Clearly this isn’t a mugging because the money meant nothing. And it’s not a rape – the intent was purely malicious, meant to harm, and harm well, rather than violate. How do you feel?

Now think about one more thing. You were beaten for doing your job. Nothing more, nothing less. You were asked to clean up each day after workmen finished renovations at one of your employer’s rental properties. For three days you returned home to be beaten by your employer’s wife for no reason.

This is the life of one domestic helper in Hong Kong.

As I was writing a post on the meaning of freedom earlier I received a phone call detailing the case. The victim has now given evidence to the police, and has been taken to hospital. Two of the group I’m part of are with her and two more are on their way to the police station. They’ll meet another member of our group with yet another domestic helper who is speaking to the police. Still another woman who was beaten by her employer last week has just returned to my family’s apartment – she’s been staying with us since being threatened with a knife and grabbed at so hard her arms bruised.

Physical violence is a daily possibility for many domestic helpers in Hong Kong, but the inhumanity doesn’t end there. At a legal rights meeting on Sunday one woman spoke about only being given one day off a month; others said that they received no pay or were forced to work when sick. Last week another woman was asked to sign a rider on her contract barring her from visiting certain public places, amongst other draconian conditions. She refused, and her employer has been persecuting her ever since.

What links all of these cases, and many more, is that they each involve employers violating the civil and human rights of people who come from other countries. There’s nothing as grandiose as state abuse of power involved – just people being evil to people less fortunate than themselves then returning to their tranquil middle-class lives. The police seem genuinely surprised that it’s happening and most people here would deny that it could happen. Foreign domestic helpers are abused and otherwise mistreated in purely domestic situations, set apart from prying eyes and waging tongues. Like other forms of domestic violence, the victims most often silence themselves for fear of reprisal should they take a stand.

Evil wins because it dares the victim to ask for change, and few societies really want that. We’re working every day to make a difference in a few lives, involving NGOs to do what we can’t, thinking of new ways to identify those brave women who have had enough, who understand human rights are those things that keep them alive. Our task is to make change acceptable, one day at a time.

If you’re reading this in Hong Kong and know of a domestic helper who is being abused or otherwise mistreated, please ask her to contact the police in her district immediately. The phone numbers are available on the police contact page, and the emergency number is 999. The following organisations also provide invaluable help, every day.

Helpers for Domestic Helpers: phone 2523-4020
Mission for Migrant Workers: phone 2522-8264

If you live outside of Hong Kong, please tell someone else about what’s going on here. Every word, anywhere, will help to break the silence.

City of Silence

In Hong Kong, Who Speaks to the Unspoken?

There has long been a crucial link between politics and the mass media that plays out in the background of our lives. Leaving aside self-congratulatory accounts of the so-called ‘fourth estate’, the media communicates what politicians want known. Occasional exposés break this comfortable relationship, but even in criticising government action, the media more often than not barely scrape the surface of the issues behind political decisions. The focus remains on the head of the body politic, not the organs that make it function. So it comes as little surprise that media commentary on the Hong Kong government’s decision to suspend a levy placed on the employers of foreign domestic helpers completely misses the point.

First, a little background. Following the economic downturn generated by the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong, during 2003 the local government decided to reduce the minimum wage payable to foreign domestic helpers – mainly Indonesians and Filipinos – and tax their employers to the tune of HK$400 a month. You might not see the immediate logic in this, until you realise that the euphemistically named ‘levy’, promoted as a way of collecting funds to help retrain locals disadvantaged by economic restructuring, was meant as a disincentive. Hire a foreign maid and pay for it. The operative word here is foreign; the idea was to have employers hire local helpers. Given the draconian conditions and low pay involved, few took up the offer.

In fact, the much vaunted multi-billion dollar retraining slush fund seems never to have been touched. With every request for information about it the government slides almost effortlessly toward another topic. The media doesn’t press too hard, so the issue fades until the government stumbles in one of its convoluted populist gestures. That happened recently when, as part of hastily assembled package to limit the effects of inflation, the government proposed a suspension of the levy for two years.

Given that the suspension applies to all contracts initiated within the period, it seems like a reasonable saving, until you realise that the HK$9,600 saved over the two years would be barely a few months’ lunch money for many employers, and hardly an amount substantial enough to somehow, miraculously, mitigate against inflation. As the package of ‘relief’ measures includes no incentives for saving, any money retained will most likely go to increased consumption.

Hey, presto! More inflation.

And what about the intended recipients of this ill-judged largesse? Well, some of them just can’t wait until September, when the suspension was first slated to start, and have started giving their maids notice – although in my neighbourhood some helpers have already been summarily dismissed. It would be entirely reasonable to ask why, and the tortured logic behind it is that the employers can save money now by dismissing their helpers and re-hiring, or hiring again, when the suspension comes into effect. Aside from the fact that this is completely illogical – the employers will save the entire amount when they renew the two-year contract anyway – it shows a callous disregard for the helpers themselves.

So, is the media focusing on this breach of human decency? No, not at all – and that observation covers both the English and Chinese language press. Typically, the coverage is mentioning the situation and interviewing NGOs that help maids, and the ever quote-worthy head of the foreign domestic helper employer group. But no-one has bothered to interview a single helper. The English language dailies could easily do that, given that most Filipino domestic helpers here, at least, have a better command of English than some of the reporters. But not a word.

Tread Warily, Fair Traveller

A Socioeconomic Journey into Vengeance

The world of economics is a curious domain, beset by mathematics, often at odds with the reason of everyday life, but enormously informative should you traverse its difficult terrain. I’m reminded, each time I enter, of J.R.R. Tolkien’s perilous land, the enchanting realm of Faerie wherein lie “pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold”. But I doubt another place could offer the governance of pirate crews and longevity of nuclear deterrence both to illuminate the human condition, still speaking of interest rates and supply matched mostly to demand.

Economics has taught me that much of what we assume is in no way actual, and that logic other people can’t understand is no less logical for it. So now I venture there again, to look around, to shout BEWARE! and to marvel at the concepts that lie in wait within.

The National Bureau of Economic Research in the US recently uploaded Naci Mocan’s working paper on vengeance. Yes, you read that correctly – vengeance. Those of you who, like me, have spent a while in and around academia might be tempted to think first of departmental politics, but not this time.

Mocan’s paper is a very carefully argued study of statistics drawn from the International Crime Victim Survey conducted by the United Nations, covering the responses of 89,000 interviewees from 53 countries. To cut a very long story short, it’s about what is likely to happen if your colour television is stolen that the perpetrator caught. How are you likely to feel?

That doesn’t seem entirely within the realm of economics, but it is given that Mocan finds different attitudes prevalent in different places, and according to different income levels, including per capita levels for the whole country. People from lower socioeconomic groups, and in poorer countries, will want to send that TV-stealing thief to jail for longer, and sometimes even for life.

The Grand Conversation

Featuring Our Cognitive Surplus

One of the ironies of blogging is that in pursuit of the grand conversation, the epitome of Web 2.0 togetherness, writing often takes precedence over reading and the chance to comment on some-one else’s blog dwindles with each new post. Those of us who work professionally as writers and editors feel this the most, partly because we read so much in our line of work anyway, but also because a small distraction in a day can set a project back by hours. And if it’s not done by six o’clock, you just have to keep working into the night. Or on the weekend. So as I try to do from time to time I’m using this post to highlight a blog that I really should be commenting on, Greg Sadler’s new effort, Our Cognitive Surplus.

Many bloggers are sceptical about new blogs, wanting evidence of longevity before the initial burst of enthusiasm can be evaluated. But my opinion is that silence never encourages, and that enthusiasm grows with enthusiasm returned. Greg left a couple of very pertinent remarks here earlier in the week, on both my rudimentary (and yet to be tested!) comment policy and my recent consideration of Roman historiography. They struck me as intelligent and meant very much in the spirit of conversation, so I visited his blog to see what else he’s been ruminating about.

Greg writes from Canberra in Australia, and while his focus is by no means on the city, he does capture its essence in one brief burst – his comments on being accosted by evangelical Catholics in Civic had personal resonance for me, having lived thereabouts for six years. Canberra is very often a city of extreme and contradictory opinion, thrown about without much consideration for whether anyone is listening. Greg’s also perceptive in his assessment of the encounter, considering the importance of beliefs expressed even as he rues the lack of an internally functional paradigm within much religious debate. In other words, reason flies out the window all too often when dissent dares object to the received wisdom.

You might not agree with everything Greg writes, but that’s the whole point. He wants to start a conversation, and disagreement is inherent in any dialogue. So Greg, if you’re reading this, I will reply to your comments soon and I’m sure there’ll be much more to talk about. To everyone else who cares to converse, pay Our Cognitive Surplus a visit. It’s just beginning, but there should be a great deal more to come.

It’s A Numbers Game

Will the Hong Kong Racial Discrimination Bill Make a Difference?

Sometimes monumental decisions slip past the public gaze, attracting comment for a while then fading into obscurity. The excuse could well be that we didn’t understand, that events blinded us to reason. But sometimes it’s just because people don’t really care. Hong Kong’s Legislative Council passed its ineptly named Racial Discrimination Bill last Thursday, yet the reaction has been muted. Anti-discrimination groups have been critical of the lacklustre attempt at abiding by global standards of decency, but they’re easily ignored. The focus has been on a simple numbers game, and minorities are always set up to lose.

Freedom from racism is a human right long ignored in Hong Kong. Almost 40 years after Britain signed the UN’s International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, compelling Hong Kong to enact appropriate legislation, the postcolonial result is a mixture of whimsy and whitewash. Crucially, the government has reserved its right to be racist in anything but employment matters. Look under the lid of that particular situation and you’ll see a desire for racial discrimination in immigration policy leap out at you.

Much is said about multicultural Hong Kong, this cosmopolitan ‘World City’, but the government constantly trundles out two time-worn figures – 95% of the populace is Chinese, and only 5% is ‘foreign’, which is a word spoken with gritted teeth hereabouts. The distinction is important because non-Chinese, even long-time ‘foreign’ residents, can never become fully legal citizens.

In other words, civil rights are circumvented in the denial of a human right.

But the infatuation with numbers runs even deeper than that. Non-Chinese are always lumped together as undifferentiated minorities – occasionally under the illusion that they form a coherent “ethnic minority community” – to show that even at their mightiest they can have but little influence. The media commentary that followed the passing of the law last week didn’t focus on how racism deprives people of liberty, and it skipped over the fact that racial discrimination is just plain wrong. Instead it waffled on about a provision in the bill whereby so few non-Chinese speakers could ask for such expensive translations in their own language, in particular situations.

Abuse is Cheap

Or, a Rudimentary Comment Policy

Although it seems so much like a cliché, to say abuse is cheap is the most satisfying response to irrational and irresponsible comments left on blogs. Thankfully, Greetings Earthlings has only ever attracted pertinent comments, many of which have made me think again about important issues. Some – especially my exchange with Patrick Lambe about knowledge management – still have me thinking. But today the other blog I maintain, A Death in Hong Kong, received a ranting, possibly delusional comment about my wife and two close friends who have been working with me seeking justice for Vicky Flores and her family. So it’s time to reflect on invective, and think about what might pass for a comment policy here.

What makes someone rant at people who have given countless hours of time, significant amounts of money and sent themselves almost to exhaustion to help others? Jealousy could nail it, or derangement if the logic slips enough, but neither are particularly satisfying. Obviously the Internet offers convenient anonymity from which to fire barbs, although relatively few people realise just how simple it is to track down the IP address and thus location of a bitchy commenter. No, it’s not about ease of use. It’s got something do with quality.

Regardless of what else I could be accused, I pride myself in writing well, not only because I want people to read and agree, but also because I value ideas and their articulation. Not everyone sees things my way, but at least they can see what I’m getting at. Blog flamers, in contrast, really have no idea. Just as words strung out sequentially don’t necessarily constitute a sentence, a scattering of insults and wild presumptions are unlikely to comprise a comment.

As I mentioned earlier, abuse is cheap. Not only is it worth little in one sense of the word, but it’s also sleazy, both degrading of its context and demeaning for its perpetrators. And I intend to save abusive commenters from themselves.

So here comes what will pass for a comment policy on Greetings Earthlings. Any personal abuse of me or anyone else, including public figures, will be deleted. Attack my ideas or those of other commenters if you like. Attack the blog’s layout – criticise my choice of images if it pleases you – but I ask you to do so from a rational perspective.

After all, logic is everyone’s friend in this truly puzzling world.

Out of Time

On Hadrian and Being Harried

History is battleground of ideas, a terrain laid with hidden dangers and the sad remains of methods passed beyond the pale. You might imagine – or even remember – the dull drag of history across the page, but the dates and happenings are never just there, ready formed, waiting to be relayed. Historians take positions, form perspectives, dash in, out and around conventions that the reader may never recognise and would rarely care to know. History is, after all, a profession for some and carries with it the arcana of half forgotten lore.

But a feature of history on the run – magazine articles, television interviews, newspaper columns – is that the traces of skirmishes past, of major shifts in thinking, just barely show through, if at all. Take Robin Lane Fox’s account of the Roman emperor Hadrian in yesterday’s Financial Times, for instance. It’s a battle fought against the shadows of opponents long since gone.

Lane Fox is a long established historian at New College in Oxford and knows well the intricacies of ‘classical’ Europe. He has written with authority on Alexander the Great and published his Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian to a very favourable reception. Spend even a moment reading his Financial Times article and you’ll see why – his style is fluid but clear, his logic straightforward and his capacity to engage the reader in considering the relationship between past and present exemplary in a field that has elevated waffle to a high art.

Writing to coincide with the opening of an exhibition on Hadrian at the British Museum, Lane Fox argues that ancient history “is both powerfully near to and far from our own world”. His case for Hadrian as “a thoroughly modern emperor” is not entirely personal – it flits agilely between the emperor’s enthusiasm for hunting to address the recent hunting ban in England, his love of a younger man, which Lane Fox reminds us was by no means the same as contemporary homosexuality, an invasion of what is now Iraq and the always troublesome problem of Jerusalem. Hadrian solved the problem brutally, by levelling the city and forbidding Jews entry to the site.

There’s pause for reflection in that for us all.

Flickr Fascination

On Images and a Little Innovation

The very best images capture something of the movement that brings a moment alive, the idea central to a new understanding. They drag the viewer in and speak to the senses of what has been and what might have been, just beyond the frame. For every fact they leave a promise, an invitation to return later to think again. I mentioned in a previous post how Roy Blumenthal’s artwork on Flickr does just that. Roy offers his electronic paintings under Creative Commons licences, which are superb invitations to revisit, use, reuse and share. But the more I’ve been using Flickr to find the images that populate my posts – that explain, contradict or reinforce what I mean – the more frustrated I’ve grown with its Creative Commons search function.

Flickr is a fantastic resource for any blogger and an endless source of fascination for me. It offers something for everyone, from the truly weird and the powerfully stated to the deeply experimental and the blandly pornographic. That’s the whole point – it draws people in, allows them to share their efforts with those who are likeminded, or who might well become likeminded after a browse or two.

By every indication, Flickr groups, the virtual communities that form around certain styles, subjects and themes, are very much alive and well. As Clay Shirky observed in Here Comes Everybody, even the most ad hoc groups on Flickr serve the valuable function of allowing people to organise themselves without organisations. Photostreams featuring social movements and protest rallies abound.

But that’s also a problem. Ask Flickr to search for images labelled ‘poverty’, for instance, and you’ll soon see countless photos of middle-class white people protesting about conditions in the third world. It’s all a little abstract. You’ll also find the stunning and equally moving photography of Gregory Smith, founder of the Children at Risk Foundation in Brazil, which is a saving grace. Finding an image that speaks to you is a moment to treasure – a precise point in time at which you can learn something valuable. But finding another ‘make poverty history logo’ is a hollow experience. It leaves little else to say.

Thankfully there’s an alternative way of searching Flickr for Creative-Commons-licensed images. When I was speaking on the Everyday Extraordinary Lives Show podcast the other day, Mike Seyfang mentioned to me a web application that’s been around for a while and seems to have quite a few happy users – flickrCC.

When it Hurts to Stay Awake

Further Thoughts on Sleep and Pain

The two most fundamental warning signals we encounter in our many days, through the long nights of our lives, are tiredness and pain. They remind us of our limits and encourage us to change our ways. Individually they’re manageable, at least in small doses. But together they can spiral us down into the depths of illness. When sleep deprivation and the infliction of pain are combined they have a single name – torture. This might seem a little melodramatic, but think about it from an everyday perspective. You work a long day, sweating at physical labour. At night you ache, you hurt, and rest returns you to something approaching normality the next day. But what if you can’t sleep properly?

More pointedly, what if your job doesn’t allow you to sleep properly?

In recent posts I’ve written about sleep and pain separately, but I’ve been thinking about their combined effect increasingly often. The disappearance and death of Vicky Flores here in Discovery Bay, Hong Kong has had a lot to do with that. For those who haven’t read my previous posts on Vicky, she was a domestic helper who fled her employer’s house for no established reason and drowned later that night. The police have commented that she was very stressed, but friends have also mentioned that she was suffering from various aches and pains before she died. Domestic helpers are often expected to work extremely long hours in Hong Kong, and Vicky died with mild pain killers still in her system, so I began to wonder whether there could be a link.

This line of inquiry certainly won’t solve the mystery of Vicky’s disappearance, but it could well illuminate one of the darker corners in the lives of lowly paid contract workers around the world.

Two recent studies offer a glimpse into the socio-economics of pain, fatigue and how they combine. The first, covered briefly in the July print edition of Scientific American, reports a survey of the extent to which Americans feel pain in their daily lives. A majority of the interviewees who were feeling pain were also dissatisfied with life. Hardly a surprise there – it’s what the Americans call a ‘no-brainer’. But hold that thought for the moment. Another two statistics that add something more specific to the scenario are the percentages of those in pain who were earning more than US$100,000 per year and less than US$30,000 per year.

The corresponding figures were 22.9% and 34.2%. In other words, and obviously leaving aside 42.9% of sufferers between these two income thresholds, there is an almost 50% increase when we move from people in pain who are well off to those in pain who are just scraping to get by. Add in dissatisfaction with life and you get hint of what low income, and more often than not physical labour, can do. But we still haven’t touched on sleep, and it turns out that interrupted sleep could well lower pain thresholds and make people suffer more. This in itself is worrisome, but the effect is particularly noticeable in women, especially those who need to wake frequently, like new mothers and – you guessed it – lowly paid domestic helpers.

A Question of Money

Is the Allure of Remittances Fading?

Questioning orthodoxy is often the hardest, least rewarded task. Everyone hates a whiner, and even the most artful of dissenters rarely appreciate the value of their own kind. But only by pushing and prodding can we expand our understanding of the way things are, always with the aim of shifting them towards the way things should be. When J.K. Galbraith coined the term ‘conventional wisdom’ in the 1950s he did so in the belief that there was “a persistent and never-ending competition between what is right and what is merely acceptable”. He wanted to root out and analyse ideas that were popular only because they could be understood within a broad social consensus, regardless of their content. They were persistent because people built on them, using the same or similar methods to produce slightly different explanations.

I’ve written about money sent home by overseas workers to the Philippines before, but allow me now to consider recent comments by others to put the issue in perspective. When I attended the opening forum of the International Migrant Alliance in Hong Kong not long ago, the most credible of the speakers had an interesting tale to tell. Sonny Africa is an economist with the IBON foundation, a left-leaning think tank in the Philippines. He argued, very much against the conventional wisdom, that remittances might well be propping up individual households in the country, but there was no hard evidence that they were encouraging anything but low-level investment. Most importantly, he said that remittances were not beneficial to long-term economic growth.

Africa’s position sounds like sour grapes in a country that received a staggering US$17 billion in remittances last year, second only to vastly more populous China at $US25.7 billion. But other economists have been questioning remittances recently – not dismissing them, but asking whether their beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

YouNotSneaky, an economist blogger far more perceptive that the name suggests, has argued in much the same way as Africa that the benefits people think come from remittances are actually from the transfer of money within households. The overall economic benefit, he argues, comes not from the remittances themselves but from the entire process of labour migration. Reviewing the post at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen agrees that “the gains are to be found in the immigration itself, not the subsequent transfer. Beware double counting.”

Connecting the Commonplace

A Podcast on Possibilities

Privilege is an under-rated word – it tends to convey a sense of unwarranted wealth and power when it can more easily be a synonym for honour. The two concepts are diametrically opposed but together can produce a synthesis of sorts, with the honour perhaps just a little undeserved. In that sense I had the privilege earlier today of speaking to Dave Wallace and Mike Seyfang on their Extraordinary Everyday Lives Show. Along with Kent Newsome, the pair host occasional podcasts that range across the spectrum of technology, networking, people and ideas. Much of our focus today was on the work I’m doing with domestic helpers here in Hong Kong, especially in relation to Vicky Flores’ disappearance and death. But the concepts shifted from the significance of Creative Commons licensing to the nuances of activism and on to technical solutions for networked text messaging.

As I say, a privilege. You can listen to the podcast at the site, or download it to listen at your leisure.

Dave Wallace has featured here at Greetings Earthlings! a few times now, first as a commenter and then as the inspiration behind ideas I’ve reworked or reinterpreted. He describes his Lifekludger blog as an “ecosystem for enriching human life”, and his capacity to identify connections that other people might just barely notice is only really apparent when you speak to him in person. Or as ‘in person’ as a connection between Hong Kong and Adelaide will allow.

Mike Seyfang, a self-confessed “IT-git”, is also a pleasure to speak with because he digs into concepts and shakes their entrails. He’s particularly fervent about the possibilities of open licensing for intellectual property, and has featured at the Creative Commons wiki. He also blogs at Learning with the Fang, which I’ll be visiting a great deal in the near future.

Together the pair made me think more about the intersection of people and technology that’s becoming more commonplace, and indeed more liberating, as new possibilities move from fertile minds to people on the street who are busy living, learning, working and laughing. And from that everyday activity, other ideas move in the opposite direction.

It’s like an ecosytem, as Dave would say, or a merging of memes. Most importantly its about people meeting people regardless of the distance between them.