Firm charged over maid ads

Singapore agency hit with 243 charges for selling helpers online

Singapore: Singapore has charged an employment agency for posting advertisements offering Indonesian helpers for sale on an e-commerce site, the city-state’s labour ministry said.

Singapore is home to almost 250,000 maids – mostly from poor parts of Indonesia, the Philippines and Myanmar – who head to the tiny but wealthy city-state to earn higher salaries than they can back home.

Conditions for Indonesian maids in tightly regulated Singapore are generally regarded as better than in other places such as Malaysia or parts of the Middle East, but the ads on online marketplace Carousell sparked a rare flare-up of tensions over the issue.

Posted under the user name “maid. recruitment”, the ads offered the services of helpers from Indonesia, while some ads indicated that maids had already been “sold”.

The ads triggered anger in Indonesia, with NGO Migrant Care slam- ming them as “unjust and demeaning”, and were later removed from the site.

The ministry said on Thursday that it had slapped a total of 243 charges on SRC International Recruitment and the employee responsible for the posts, including 49 counts each for publishing “insensitive advertisements”.

The job agency’s licence was suspended last month.

The Singapore ministry said it expected employment agencies “to exercise sensitivity when marketing their services”.

Kevin Teoh, commissioner for employment agencies at the ministry, earlier said that advertising foreign maids on an Internet platform meant for trading goods was “completely inappropriate and unacceptable”.

Manpower minister Josephine Teo said she was “deeply disturbed” by the adverts and urged Singaporeans to treat maids with respect. — AFP