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[anaeka]

A friend of mine in Singapore was telling me over the weekend how tired she was from having to juggle work and her baby. I was sympathising with her until she told me that had she had to deal with the cooking and cleaning as well, she would have broken down.

Wait! So you have a maid?
No! You don't say maid anymore. It's helper now. Sematics aside

Comments

[alisonrae]

Hate to break this to you, but even if you outsource your caregiving to a childcare centre here in Singapore, the people who look after your kid (and it's a 1:8 ratio) from 7am to 7pm Monday to Friday only get paid about $1,100 a month. It's more than the individual, it's the system.

[anaeka]

Incidentally, how much does an individual pay for daycare in Singapore, vs live-in caregiving?

But I get your point. Even so, like I said, I wonder if the system will ever be allowed to change by the populous. Here (and trust me I am no fan of here, but still) here, commercial day care centres pay $17 an hour for a teaching assistant and ppl say it is too little/think it is unfair because an assistant in a government linked daycare is paid $27 dollars an hour.

Maybe as income levels rise in Singapore (I guess I thought they were high enough to have effected this change), we will start seeing some of the wealth seep over to some of the more crucial but overlooked professions.

I hope so at least.

[jemauvais]

While the cost of hiring domestic help may be explained by economics of supply and demand, what really riles me is how some people think that having a domestic helper means you can subcontract all sorts of tasks to them: walking the dog, feeding the baby, and yet treat them as subhumans or serfs, e.g. they cannot eat at the same table, cannot eat until you are done, and can only take the leftovers; not to mention too the curbs on their social life, how they were balking at even giving them one day off a week, etc.

There have been reasons and excuses proffered in the past, but I just can't accept any reasoning why the helper who cooks the meals must wait till you're done with dinner before having the scraps.  I'd rather call them maids and treat them as humans than call them helpers and treat them as maids.

[anaeka]

Ya. It's the ultimate power right - power over another human being.