Lift ban on direct hiring, maids in HK ask PH gov’t

FILIPINO domestic workers in Hong Kong are asking the Philippine government to lift the ban on direct hiring of Filipino domestic workers (FDWs) abroad.

Household service workers (HSW) in the territory will take their demand today to the Philippine Consulate General, the United Filipinos in Hong Kong (Unifil) said in a statement.

Restoring the option of direct hiring would remove the threat to the livelihood of foreign domestic workers, especially those who are currently undergoing the processing of their papers, said the United Filipinos in Hong Kong (Unifil-MigranteHK), the organization leading the picket protest.

Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong would prefer to be hired directly by Hong Kong employers rather than go through recruitment agencies based in both Hong Kong and the Philippines which, they said, charge inordinately high fees for their services.

Recruitment agencies from Hong Kong and the Philippines are currently fighting over the placement fees to be charged Filipino domestic workers who have been unfairly caught in the middle of the conflict, Unifil said.

Philippine-based recruitment agencies want the government to allow them to charge the workers placement fees—which they are not allowed to do now—while also letting the Hong Kong-based agencies determine what fees to charge the workers.

“In the middle of this unresolved brawl, Filipino domestic workers are being wrongfully blamed and made scapegoats by the agencies, especially those based in Hong Kong. Such baseless accusations are fodder for the antimigrant sentiments being fanned by many entities in Hong Kong,” Unifil said.

Recently, the Society of Hong Kong Accredited Recruiters of the Philippines (Sharp), the organization of Philippinebased agencies, proposed a moratorium on sending Filipino domestic workers to Hong Kong, complaining of the overly strict and unreasonable Hong Kong government regulations.

Sharp said the proposal was aimed at “addressing the problems besetting the labor market and enhancing the protection and welfare of our workers.”

“In Hong Kong, our main and critical problem is the very high cost of recruitment. We cannot totally dispense with it because the prevailing market condition does not allow us to do so,” Sharp said.

It said that for the past 30 years, Hong Kong employers have not been paying the total recruitment and deployment costs as they should.