ၾကည့္လိုုက္စမ္းပါအံုုးဗ်...Bukit Timah Shopping Centre ျမန္မာမိတ္ကိုု ေလ ွ်ာ့ေစ်း$38 ႏွင့္ ေရာင္းေနတာတဲ့ဗ်....
လူၾကားလိုု႔မွေကာင္းေသးရဲ႕လား.... အမိျမန္မာဘြဲ႕ရ ေရႊမေလးေတြအျဖစ္က.....
အစိုုးရကလဲ ႏိုုင္ငံျခားကိုု ေစတာနာမွန္ တကယ္လႊတ္ခ်င္ရင္ ဘာသာစကားႏွင့္ သက္ဆိုုင္ရလုုပ္ငန္း က ၽႊမ္းက်င္မႈ သင္တန္းေလး ေတြေပးၿပီးမွ ကၽႊမ္းက်င္ ၀န္ထမ္းအဆင့္ ေတြျဖစ္မွ လႊတ္သင့္တယ္ထင္တယ္....ဘယ္လိုုနည္းႏွင့္မွ အိမ္ေဖာ္အျဖစ္ႏွင့္ မလႊတ္သင့္ပါဘူး...
တျခားႏိုုင္ငံအိမ္ေဖာ္ေတြရဲ႕ အဆင့္ေတြကိုုလဲၾကည့္လိုုက္ပါ အံုုးဗ်... ပညာမတတ္တာေတြမ်ားပါတယ္...
ဘယ္ႏိုုင္ငံကမွာ ဘြဲ႕ရသူေတြ အိမ္ေဖာ္လုုပ္တာမရွိပါဘူးလိုု႔၊
ရင္နာစရာေကာင္းတဲ့....အံ့ၾသထူးျခားေနတဲ့ အမိႏိုုင္ငံဘြဲ႕ရေရႊမမေလးေတြဘဲ အိမ္ေဖာ္၀င္လုုပ္ေနတာဘဲ ရွိပါလိမ့္ မယ္ထင္တယ္...
Buy a discount maid at Singapore's malls |
In Singapore, maids are put on display and made available for 'purchase' in central shopping malls. |
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The women, domestic workers, come from Indonesia, the Philippines, and Myanmar. They sit beneath garish signs and posters, testifying to their friendliness and industriousness, or advertising "super promo" rates and "special discounts".
Some "maid agencies", as they're known locally, display women at work. Along one aisle, domestic workers push each other around in wheelchairs, as though they're taking care of the elderly. In another gallery, a woman cradles a baby doll and pretends to change its diapers. Others stand in mock living rooms ironing the same shirt, or making the same bed - scenes enacted elsewhere in Singapore at malls like Katong Shopping Centre on Mountbatten Road.
Jolovan Wham, executive director of the Humanitarian Organisation of Migration Economics (HOME), a migrant workers advocacy group based in Singapore, said that some agencies market their domestic workers like "commodities". He adds that racial stereotypes are sometimes used in transactions with patrons. "Some of the stereotypes include Filipinos as 'smarter', Indonesians as 'less bright' and Burmese as 'sweet-natured and compliant'."
There have also been complaints of women being underfed at certain employment agencies, according toUmmai Ummairoh, president of the Indonesian Family Network (IFN). "We always receive calls about agencies not giving enough food. In one case, an agency was spending $20 to feed 40 people."
Ummairoh, who also worked as a maid, added that the shopping centres made women look like "dolls at a supermarket".
For Anandha Nurul, a domestic worker who spent seven years in Singapore, her time at the shopping malls was marked by boredom and long hours. "They did not treat me very nicely," she said, recalling that she was fed instant noodles for the three days she was at her agency. "We didn't even boil the noodles properly. We just used warm water."
But standards vary considerably within the industry, and other agencies claim to afford female domestic workers more dignified conditions. "We should be fair and treat these workers as human beings," said Dawn Sng of PrimeChoice Maid Agency, who claims that her agency provides domestic workers with in-house training, free meals, and counselling. "We should not put them into a lower category of people."
A multimillion dollar industry
Bukit Timah and other shopping centres like it are the culmination of networks and organisations extending from Singapore to various parts of Southeast Asia: from brokers who recruit women from poor countries, to training centres that prepare women for life abroad, to "runners" who ferry domestic workers from airports to shopping centres, and finally to the employment agencies themselves, of which there are hundreds in Singapore, competing in what is effectively a multimillion dollar industry. Wham says that there are currently 215,000 domestic workers in Singapore.
For most women, according to Wham, the shopping centres are fleeting experiences that last no longer than a week. Before coming to Singapore, most domestic workers have already found their employers after a phone or webcam interview from their home countries. The malls are essentially transition points, and the women are soon sent to their employers after completing a "settling-in programme" and a mandatory heath check.
 But some maids return to the malls and can end up staying there for as long as a month. In the language of employment agencies, these women are "transfer maids", and have either been released by their original employers, or have requested to leave after experiencing problems at work.
Shelley Thio, executive member of Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), attributes most problems to "working conditions", and cites verbal abuse, non-payment of wages, and excessive work hours as among the most common reasons domestic workers request formal transfers.
Thio also raised concerns over Singapore's "live-in" requirement, by which a full-time domestic worker is legally obliged to live in the home of her employer.
"We have continually advocated that the live-in requirement is unsatisfactory because it easily leads to abuse," Thio said, adding that some women become vulnerable because of the removal of mobile phones, which isolates them from friends and organisations such as HOME and TWC2.
The live-in requirement can leave women vulnerable to sexual abuse. Earlier this year, a Cambodian domestic worker was sexually harassed by her employer's father, with whom she was made to share a room. Although the woman had complained about this arrangement, both to her employers and employment agency, nothing was done to change her situation prior to the abuse.
Poor monitoring and high debts
Problems in Singapore are sometimes compounded by unscrupulous practises and weak oversight in the female workers' underdeveloped home countries. In Indonesian training centres, for instance, women commonly complain that dormitories are overcrowded and that they are not given enough food, according to Wahyu Susilo of the advocacy group Migrant Care.
"We are always finding migrant workers in cramped rooms and living with poor sanitary conditions. In one case we found 200 migrant workers sharing two or three toilets."
He adds that monitoring by the Indonesian government is generally weak, which has led to exploitative conditions at a number of centres, including unreasonable fees and deceptive recruitment practises.
In some cases, monitoring of training centres in originating countries is limited due to corruption. According to the managing director of one centre in Indonesia, who spoke to Al Jazeera on the condition of anonymity, local police accept bribes from the training centres they are tasked with inspecting.
Most domestic workers who come to Singapore have large debts in the form of placement fees paid to agencies as monthly salary deductions.
Thio at TWC2 said that she has come across instances where domestic workers end up owing $4,500 to their agencies, adding that the average debts women accumulate are between $2,500 and $3,000.
"High placement fees are charged to the worker because the agencies can get away with it," according to Wham, who said that some agencies disguise these fees as "loans".
"The worker pays these fees because she feels that she doesn't have a choice. And our laws do not make it mandatory for employers to bear the bulk of the fees."
Some domestic maids also work in Singapore illegally. A number of women are employed even though they are underage, according to Thio, and some will be brought into the country under conditions indicative of trafficking.
But at shopping centres, where clients stroll past "Homekeeper" and "Budget Maid", and where domestic workers continue their unending simulation of household work, little of this is expressed or known.
"I watched all those things", recounts Istiana, an Indonesian domestic worker who has recently come to work in Singapore. "Those signs that say 'cheap price' and 'discount maid'. But these are people," she added.
စင္ကာပူေရာက္ ျမန္မာအိမ္အကူမ်ားနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္လို႔ စံုစမ္းေဖာ္ထုတ္ေန
စင္ကာပူ ႏိုင္ငံသို႔ ေရာက္ရွိေနတဲ့ ျမန္မာ အိမ္အကူ အလုပ္သမားေတြနဲ႔ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားအားလုံး၏ အခက္အခဲမ်ားကုိ ျမန္မာ အစိုးရ အေနျဖင့္ ဘက္ေပါင္းစုံမွ ကူညီေပးသြားမည္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ယေန႔ထုတ္ အစိုးရ သတင္းစာေတြ ေဖာ္ျပထားပါတယ္။
နည္းလမ္း အမ်ဳိးမ်ဳိး၊ ေနထိုင္ခြင့္ ပုံစံအမ်ဳိးမ်ဳိးျဖင့္ စင္ကာပူသို႔ ေရာက္ရွိေနၾကသည့္ အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ား အပါ အ၀င္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ သားအားလုံးကုိ ဥပေဒ ေဘာင္အတြင္းမွ အလုပ္လုပ္ကိုင္ခြင့္ရေရး၊ အခြင့္အေရးမ်ား အျပည့္အ၀ ရေရး အတြက္ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး ၀န္ႀကီး ဌာန က ကူညီေပးသြားမည္ဟု သတင္းစာမ်ား က ေဖာ္ျပ ထားပါတယ္။
အခုလို အစုိးရက ထုတ္ျပန္လာခဲ့ရတာက စင္ကာပူ ႏိုင္ငံတြင္ အိမ္အကူ အျဖစ္ လုပ္ကိုင္ရန္ ေရာက္ရွိေန
ၾက သည့္ ျမန္မာ၊ ဖိလစ္ပိုင္ႏွင့္ အင္ဒိုနီးရွား ႏိုင္ငံတို႔မွ အမ်ဳိး သမီးမ်ားကုိ ေစ်း၀ယ္ စင္တာမ်ား၌ ပစၥည္းမ်ား၀ယ္ယူႏိုင္ သကဲ့သို႔ ေရာင္း ခ်ေနမႈမ်ားကုိ အယ္လ္ဂ်ာဇီးယား သတင္းဌာနက ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ ရက္ပိုင္းအတြင္းက ေရးသား ေဖာ္ျပခဲ့ၿပီးေနာက္ပိုင္း ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ထိုသတင္းသည္ ကမာၻတ၀ွမ္း ျပန္႔ႏွံ႔သြားၿပီး သက္ဆိုင္ရာ ႏိုင္ငံ အစိုးရမ်ား ကလည္း ထိုလုပ္အေပၚ ကန္႔ကြက္ေနၾကပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာသံ႐ံုးကေတာ့ မေန႔က ေၾကညာခ်က္ ထုတ္ျပန္ကာ ျမန္မာ အိမ္ေဖာ္မ်ား ေရာင္း ကုန္ပစၥည္းကဲ့သို႔ ကုန္တုိက္တခုမွာ ေရာင္းစားေနၾကတယ္ဆုိတဲ့ ကိစၥကုိ စံုစမ္းသြားမွာျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ သိရပါတယ္။
Ref:Irrawaddy.org.news
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New rules for hiring Myanmar maids cover minimum monthly wage, day off
PUBLISHED ON MAR 24, 2014 8:15 AM
Retiree Dorice Cheong, 58, interviewing potential Myanmar maid Thin Waddy, 23, on Skype at a maid agency. Myanmar maids are the fastest growing group of domestic workers here. -- PHOTO: LIM YAOHUI FOR THE STRAITS TIMES
Ref;https://www.anisya.com/2014/03/new-rules-for-hiring-myanmar-maids-cover-minimum-monthly-wage-day-off/
Hiring Maid Singapore: Cost of Employing Maid
Update on 26th Feb 2013: As announced by the Financial Minister on 25th Feb 2013, the foreign domestic workers levy for families with dependent will be lowered to $120 from current level of $170. The new policy will take effect from March 2013 onward. Families with children below age 12, elderly parents or family members with disability will be able to enjoy this new benefits.
1.Cost of Hiring Maid - Maid Agency Fee or service fee
This can range from $0 to $2000. It is important for you to check with your maid agency or domestic helper agency what the agent fee or service fee covers.
The maid agency fees: The maid agency fee may or may not cover the following:
1. Registration and overseas recruitment fee of the foreign domestic helper
2. Arrival ticket for the maid
3. Medical checkup expense of the maid
4. Administrative Fee for application of work permit and other documentation
5. Fee related to entry test and safety awareness course
6. Fetching of the maid from airport
7. Medical insurance
8. Security bond (Please read further about this)
It is therefore important to ask maid agency what maid agency fee covers before engaging their service.
2.Cost of Hiring Maid - Personal Accident Insurance and security bond
If these services are not included in the agent fee, you have to look for an insurance company and pay the amount accordingly.
As an employer, you need to purchase personal accident insurance for your foreign domestic workers, minimum sum insured will be $40,000.
All employers of foreign domestic workers need to have a security bond with the work pass division of the Ministry of Manpower (MOM). Under the bond, employers are required to put a deposit of $5000 in the form of a Banker's or Insurance Guarantee. In the event that the foreign domestic workers disappear, or are pregnant and you fail to repatriate the maid, your $5000 deposit will be forfeited.
To avoid paying the $5000 cash and minimize the risk, you can purchase insurance from some insurers like NTUC Income. Under the terms in some insurance plans, when the maid runs away, you only need pay $250 and the insurer will pay the remaining $4750.
Some insurers like NTUC income will have a plan that combines personal accident insurance and security bond; cost of this plan may be about $256.80.
3.Cost of Hiring Maid - Performance Bond
This is only relevant if you are hiring a Filipino maid, you need to furnish a bond of $7000 to the Philippines Embassy in Singapore. You can purchase an insurance plan from insurer. This may cost you about $71.69.
4.Cost of Hiring Maid - Placement Fee
This may not be necessary if you are hiring Indonesian maid.
This may range from 2 months of salary to a few thousands, depending on the agency you employed. If you pay the placement fee, you can deduct it from the maid's monthly salary.
5. Cost of Hiring Maid - Settling-in Program
This may cost you $75 if your foreign domestic worker is working in Singapore for the first time. This sometimes is included in the agent fee or service fee.
6. Cost of Hiring Maid - Employers'orientation program
If you are hiring maid for the first time, you may need to attend the orientation program unless you have valid reason. This can cost you $20 or $30. This sometimes is included in the service fee or agent fee.
7. Cost of Hiring Maid - Others Upfront Cost
You may also need to purchase bed, mattress, bed sheet, pillow and blanket if you do not have these items for your maid. As an employer, you have to provide these items to the maid.
8. Cost of Hiring Maid - Monthly Salary
- Indonesian maid: $450 and above
- Filipino maid: $500 and above
- Myanmar maid: $450 and above
9. Cost of Hiring Maid - Foreign Domestic Worker Levy
You need a pay a monthly foreign domestic worker levy of $265 through arrangement of GIRO.
If you meet condition for concession of foreign domestic worker levy, you only need to pay $120 monthly. You can read this under the common question below for the conditions for the foreign domestic worker levy concession.
10.Cost of Hiring Maid - Food and toiletry
As an employer, you are supposed to provide food for the foreign domestic worker. If you do not cook, you have to give maid some cash to buy her own meals. It may be recommended that you pay for the basic toiletry such as shampoo, toothpaste and tooth brush for the maid, but this is not compulsory unless you and your maid agree to it in the contract.
11. Cost of Hiring Maid - Medical expenses
As an employer, you have to pay all medical expenses of your maid. This is the reason why it is important for you to have the personal accident insurance plan.
12. Cost of Hiring Maid - Air Ticket
You need to pay the transportation fee for the repatriation of the maid upon cancellation of the work permit.
Common Questions about Cost of Hiring A maid
Question 1: How do I know whether I am eligible for the foreign domestic worker levy concession?
Answer: The employer is eligible for the levy concession if he or she satisfies one of the conditions stated below:
Condition A:
- the employer or spouse has a child who is a Singapore citizen below 12 years old and is living with him or her; or
- the employer or spouse has a grandchild who is a Singapore citizen below 12 years old and is living with him or her.
Condition B:
- the employer or spouse is a Singapore citizen who is 65 years old and above; or
- the employer or spouse is a Singapore citizen and the other party is a Singapore Permanent Resident aged 65 years old or above and both are living together.
Condition C:
- the employer or spouse has a parent or parent-in-law, grandparent or grandparent-in-law who is a Singaporean and aged 65 or above and is living together with the employer or
- the employer is a Singapore Citizen and has a parent, parent-in-law, grandparent or grandparent-in-law who is a Singapore Permanent Resident aged 65 years old or above. The parent, parent-in-law, grandparent, grandparent-in-law must live with the employer.
Question 2: Can I claim tax relief for maid levy?
Answer: You can claim tax relief if you meet the following conditions:
- you are a married woman and has elected for separate assessment; or
- you are married and your husband is not resident in Singapore; or
- you are separated or divorced or widowed and living with your unmarried child for whom you can claim child relief
Question 3: If the domestic helper needs to return to her home country before contract expires, do I need to pay her return air ticket?
Answer: Yes. You are responsible for the maid's return air ticket, unless you have certain different agreement with your employment agency.
Question 4: Do I need to pay to renew the maid's passport?
Answer: This depends on the nationality of the maid. For maid from Indonesia, Embassy of Indonesia makes a rule that the employer needs to pay for all the fee relating to passport renewal.
In general, many employers choose to pay for all the relevant costs associated with the passport renewal.
Ref:http://www.babyment.com/infantcare.php?infant=Hiring-Maid-Singapore:-Cost-of-Employing-Maid
ႏိုင္ငံျခားအလုုပ္သမားေလးေတြ အေရးေပၚအကူအညီလိုုရင္ ၂၄နာရီေခၚလုုိ႔ရတဲ့ဖုုန္းလိုုင္း...
Need help? Call HOME's 24-hour hotline 1800-7-977-977
Ref:http://www.babyment.com/infantcare.php?infant=Hiring-Maid-Singapore:-Cost-of-Employing-Maid
ႏိုင္ငံျခားအလုုပ္သမားေလးေတြ အေရးေပၚအကူအညီလိုုရင္ ၂၄နာရီေခၚလုုိ႔ရတဲ့ဖုုန္းလိုုင္း...
Need help? Call HOME's 24-hour hotline 1800-7-977-977
43% of Employment Agencies found with no infringement for MOM Cluster Audits
View all posts in Anisya Blog
Posted on 8 Apr 2014
Posted on 8 Apr 2014
Update from Ministry of Manpower on audit checks with Employment Agencies.
So far, the Ministry of Manpower has conducted three cluster audit operations. 43% of EAs audited as part of these operations were found with no infringements. The results of the cluster audits are listed below:
2 The last audit operation, which was conducted in May and June 2013, involved 55 EAs situated in the Katong area. The most common infringement was of EAs failing to issue receipts to FDWs from whom they collected agency fees. We would like to clarify that issuing receipts is necessary regardless whether your EA collected the fees, directly from the FDW or indirectly through third parties. The maximum penalty for failing to issue receipts is a fine of $1,000 and, for repeat offenders, is a fine of $2,000 and/or imprisonment of up to 6 months. The table below shows the top five infringements found during the last audit operation.
S/No.
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Infringement Details
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Percentage of EAs found with Non-Compliance
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i
| Failure to issue itemized receipt for fees received, whether directly or indirectly, to FDW |
48%
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ii
| Failure to furnish FDW’s employment history to potential employers and obtain written acknowledgement from the employer |
35%
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iii
| Failure to ensure that EA Personnel names and/or registration numbers are inserted in all communication channels that the EA personnel is involved |
30%
|
iv
| Failure to issue Registration Cards which are in line with MOM’s requirements to EA’s registered key appointment holders and staff |
22%
|
v
| Failure to obtain written authorization prior to carrying out work pass transactions |
22%
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Hotlines and Useful contacts
Back to Frequently Asked Questions by FDWs Back to
Dear Workers,
Here is a compiled list of hotlines that you can contact on various relevant domestic worker issues.
Aidha (Financial education and business school for Women):
www.aidha.org
Number: 6884 9938
www.aidha.org
Number: 6884 9938
TWC2 – Transient Workers Count 2 (Advocacy group for Migrant Workers) :
www.twc2.org.sg
Number: 1800 888 1515
www.twc2.org.sg
Number: 1800 888 1515
Foreign Domestic Worker Association for Social Support and Training
http://www.fast.org.sg/
Number: 65091535
http://www.fast.org.sg/
Number: 65091535
Credit@Ko Nge
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