My recent trip
to Hong Kong and Beijing came at a time full of news for those cities and the region.
During my visit in Hong Kong, whistleblowing fugitive Edward Snowden was staying in a hotel in the city after revealing to the world how the U.S. government is snooping on
practically everyone in the world, including U.S. citizens. While Snowden was
in Hong Kong, President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping were meeting in
California, talking about cyber-hacking, among other things.
While in Hong
Kong, I went to the massive June 4 vigil commemorating the victims of the
brutal crackdown of the 1989 pro-democracy rally in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
I interviewed the man who organized that vigil. Tens of thousands attended—it
was the only such large-scale public acknowledgement of the 24th
anniversary of the 1989 crackdown in all of China.
A poultry plant
fire in northern China killed at least 120, sparking yet more outrage after
similar tragedies in Bangladesh and Cambodia. Some 300 Nike workers in Cambodia
were fired after protesting their working conditions during my visit to Asia.
In addition, a Chinese firm bought giant Smithfield Foods, the pork producer
that fought unionization for so long in North Carolina, pitting black and
Latino workers against each other. (Note Smithfield’s subsequent hypocrisy when
it dropped TV chef Paula Deen as an endorser because of her admission to using
racially insensitive language in the past.)
One of the
reasons I came to Hong Kong—as part of this blog’s commitment to the Global
South as well as the U.S. South--was to talk to workers and activists about the
recent strike that pitted the city’s dock workers against Asia’s richest man,
Li Ka-shing, whose holdings include 70 percent control of port activity in Hong
Kong. I also wanted to talk to people there about the migrant worker issue and
a recent high court decision denying foreign domestic workers any chance of
permanent residency.
Among those I
interviewed were: Lee Cheuk-yan, Hong Kong Labour Party chair, general
secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions and thus the city’s
top independent labor leader, and key organizer of both the dock workers’
strike and the June 4 pro-democracy vigil; Cynthia Ca Abdon-Tellez, general
manager of the city’s Mission for Migrant Workers organization; and Geoffrey
Crothall, communications director of the China Labour Bulletin, a
non-governmental organization that monitors labor actions and rights in China.
I also spoke with migrant workers from the Philippines as well as a Catholic priest
whose ministry includes migrant workers.
It was a rich
experience, both in Hong Kong and Beijing, and I’ll be reporting on it in
various stories over the coming days and weeks. My first story follows below,
an account of migrant workers in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong’s Foreign
Domestic Workers struggle for an “ordinary” life while living as an
“underclass”
HONG KONG -
Mariane Carnate, on the steps of the Mariners’ Club after attending mass at St.
Peter’s Catholic Church inside, considers herself lucky.
(To the right is Marian Carnate, a foreign domestic worker in Hong Kong)
The 30-year-old
native of North Cotabato in The Philippines is a domestic worker for a Russian
family in Hong Kong that treats her well and pays her “a little more” than
minimum wage. She lives with the family—a requirement of foreign domestic
workers here--and works 10 to 12 hours a day. She has been in Hong Kong for
eight years.
Others aren’t as
fortunate. “Sometimes it is hard,” says Carnate, an attractive woman with long
hair, carrying a large brown bag and wearing a green blouse and orange
pants during her Sunday break from work. “Hong Kong is full of regulations. …
Sometimes families are not easy to get along with. (Expenses) are more than
domestic workers earn. I’m lucky. Some of my friends, their employers are not
good to them.”
Carnate is one
of more than 300,000 foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong. Half of them are,
like her, from The Philippines and they’re nearly all female. Others come from
Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India. Indeed, life isn’t easy for many of them. Hong
Kong laws require them to live with their employer—a law intended to keep them
from taking second jobs and thus competing with local workers—and also
prohibits them from ever becoming permanent residents and thus eligible for
state-run health care services and other benefits.
The city’s Court
of Final Appeal ruled in March that foreign domestic workers don’t qualify as
“ordinarily resident” and thus can’t apply for permanent residence after seven
years like other foreign workers in the city can. The decision overturned an
earlier lower court ruling in the workers’ favor.
(Cynthia Ca Abdon-Tellez of the Mission for Migrant Workers)
“It is becoming
more clear that we are creating an underclass unfortunately,” said Cynthia Ca
Abdon-Tellez, general manager of the Mission for Migrant Workers, during an
interview at her office in St. John’s Cathedral in Hong Kong’s Central
District. “When you go down deeper into this worker migration … it is forced on
the people. Their home countries do not provide their people decent pay jobs.
Domestic workers’ salary here is equal to a junior executive’s in their home
country.”
The Mission for
Migrant Workers is one of several organizations in the city devoted to providing
assistance to a vulnerable population that is easily exploited and yet blamed
for societal ills.
The church,
whether Catholic, Anglican, or non-Christian, is an important resource as well
as a refuge for this population, said Father Valan Arockiaswamy, himself a
native of India as well as priest at St. Peter’s Catholic Church. “There’s
discrimination, racial abuse, exploitation. … They’re on call 24 hours a day.
No proper facility to sleep. They may sleep in the living room or share a room
with the children, with teenagers.”
(To the right is Father Valan Arockiaswamy)
Indeed, a 2013
study of Hong Kong’s so-called “live-in policy” conducted by the Mission for
Migrant Workers showed that 30 percent of foreign domestic workers do not have
a room of their own, 37 percent work 16 hours a day, and 9 percent said they worked
19 hours straight. More than half have suffered verbal abuse, and 18 percent
reported physical abuse. Some 6 percent reported sexual abuse.
“It is important
to support migrant workers,” said Lee Cheuk-yan, chair of Hong Kong’s Labour
Party and general secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, the
city’s largest independent labor organization. “This is the part of solidarity
that is very important. It is very important to make sure they have the same
rights as the local workers. … They had to leave their home to come to Hong
Kong to take care of our families, and they are very badly treated.”
