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Our non-profit blog was inspired by a Filipina domestic from the Middle East who left her newborn baby – with placenta still attached – in the Bahrain Gulf Air airplane toilet - upon landing in Manila, read her story here http://filipina-nannies-caregivers.blogspot.ca/2013/05/this-blog-was-inspired-by-filipina.htm . Her despair and desperation inspired this blog to gather all possible stories in order to help, to inform and to empower all Filipina nannies, caregivers and maids -- to liberate themselves from abuses of all forms: physical, rape, verbal, exploitation, overtime working without pay.... Send us your stories. Stay anonymous - if you like. (No one can afford to deny this matter anymore). Write in Tagalog, or your dialect, or English, or French, or any language. ALL nannies, caregivers and domestic maids are welcome, send your stories to mangococonutmay1@gmail.com
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Canada’s modern-day slaves
Nov 9th, 2012
by Krystle Alarcon
http://www.vancouverobserver.com/life/canada%E2%80%99s-modern-day-slaves-filipina-nannies
Jane Macaraeg, a quiet former honour student in her late 20s, was raised by maids in the Philippines and never thought she would tend to children herself one day.
She tore her wrist tendons when she pulled out a child from behind a deep freezer while on contract as a nanny for a BC household. Instead of being thanked for saving the child from injury while hurting herself, her employer reprimanded her.
She tore her wrist tendons when she pulled out a child from behind a deep freezer while on contract as a nanny for a BC household. Instead of being thanked for saving the child from injury while hurting herself, her employer reprimanded her.
"She told me I should've just left him there," Macaraeg said. "I thought: 'If he electrocuted himself, she would have blamed me even more'."
Macaraeg is one of thousands of nannies who have to jump through hoops before gaining a shot at the ultimate prize—a new life in Canada.
She was recruited though the Live-in Caregiver Program, a stream of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) designed to fill labour shortages in Canada. A recently released report by labour lawyer Fay Faraday in Ontario revealed that the legal structure of the TFWP sets up migrant workers for abuse.
Faraday recognizes that only live-in caregivers in the low-skilled category of the TFWP have access to permanent residency in Canada, a perk that makes it seem like they’re better off.
But caregivers are also prone to abuse just like all other migrant workers, she argues, as they are also tied to their employer and thus cannot change jobs if mistreated.
A report by the Toronto Star noted that several caregivers complained of “being forced to work 12 to 15 hour days without overtime, days off or even minimum wage”.
Even if they do get minimum wage, they answer to their employers’ beck and call 24 hours a day, as they are forced to live with them. They are only paid for eight hours worth of work. Considering the only recently-augmented minimum wage of BC at $10.25, that amounts to $4.64 per hour including taxes and rest time.
Ai Li Lim, who represents nannies in legal battles with the West Coast Domestic Workers Association, said, most caregivers and employers do not keep track of the overtime. Still, the live-in requirement creates a power relationship that’s hard to avoid. “Would a caregiver be able to say that she is not going to pick up the crying baby at 3 a.m. in the morning because it is personal time?”
The caregivers are also forced to pay for their own boarding with their meagre salaries. In BC, employers are allowed to charge up to $325 for the room.
In other provinces, they are better off. In Quebec, it's free. In Ontario, the pay deduction for rent cannot exceed $85.25, according to Farraday’s report.
For employers, the Live-in Caregiver Program is much more affordable than a daycare program—even middle-class families can benefit from it. A live-in nanny costs around $1200 to $1600 per month while daycare in BC can cost up to $1500.
Farraday’s 120-page paper, entitled “Made In Canada: How the Law Constructs Migrant Workers’ Insecurity”, looked particularly at low-skilled workers’ conditions. She interviewed about a hundred migrant workers from four streams: the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program, the Live-in Caregiver Program and two categories of the Pilot Project for Occupations Requiring Lower Levels of Formal Training, through which migrant workers become “permanently temporary”, Farraday said.
Live-in caregivers at risk
She pointed out that the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) is “highly gendered and racialized” compared to the other streams—up to 95 per cent of caregivers are women from the Philippines.
In fact, out of 39,120 caregivers recruited to the LCP in Canada in 2009, 35,290 were from the Philippines, representing 90 per cent. But Farraday noted that Filipina caregivers come from all over the world and that not all directly travel from the Philippines to Canada.
“They are here on time-limited permits, which can actually be quite lengthy,” she said. The caregivers’ contracts stipulate that they fulfill 24 months or 3,900 hours of work in the span of four years to apply for residency—after which they can sponsor their families to join them in Canada.
For employers, the Live-in Caregiver Program is much more affordable than a daycare program—even middle-class families can benefit from it. A live-in nanny costs around $1200 to $1600 per month while daycare in BC can cost up to $1500.
Farraday’s 120-page paper, entitled “Made In Canada: How the Law Constructs Migrant Workers’ Insecurity”, looked particularly at low-skilled workers’ conditions. She interviewed about a hundred migrant workers from four streams: the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program, the Live-in Caregiver Program and two categories of the Pilot Project for Occupations Requiring Lower Levels of Formal Training, through which migrant workers become “permanently temporary”, Farraday said.
Live-in caregivers at risk
She pointed out that the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) is “highly gendered and racialized” compared to the other streams—up to 95 per cent of caregivers are women from the Philippines.
In fact, out of 39,120 caregivers recruited to the LCP in Canada in 2009, 35,290 were from the Philippines, representing 90 per cent. But Farraday noted that Filipina caregivers come from all over the world and that not all directly travel from the Philippines to Canada.
“They are here on time-limited permits, which can actually be quite lengthy,” she said. The caregivers’ contracts stipulate that they fulfill 24 months or 3,900 hours of work in the span of four years to apply for residency—after which they can sponsor their families to join them in Canada.
The processing time to get their permanent status takes up to two years, which means caregivers are separated from their own children for an average of seven years.
Lim said that live-in caregivers are uniquely vulnerable because of that glimmering promise of permanent residency in Canada.
“(The women) are unwilling or unable to sometimes seek recourse because they feel that if they do so, they would be jeopardizing their immigration status,” she said.
Labour lawyer Ai Li Lim defends abused nannies with the West Coast Domestic Workers Association
That was precisely why Ria and Jane Macaraeg put up with unpaid overtime, fulfilled tasks beyond their contract and suffered physical and emotional pain from the job. They are a Vancouver-based mother and daughter duo whose names have been changed to protect them against retribution from their employers.
“I’m taking care of two kids, but they want the house to be tidy and clean, as if there’s no kid at all. I feel like a slave… I’m doing everything,” Ria, the mother, said.
“Everything” means cooking, doing laundry, washing cars and trimming lawns—household chores that are not included in nannies' contracts.
Ria actually made a list of all the overtime work, hoping that her employers would pay for it.
They never did. And she’ll never get it back. The Employment Standards Act of Canada allows workers to collect only the last six months worth of back pay.
The live-in requirement creates an ongoing sense of obligation and reinforces the entitlement of the employer to do as they please.
“It is the whole privacy of the home thing, where people don’t think about the Employment Standards Branch breaking into a private home to see what’s going on in there,” Lim said.
After almost six years in the Live-in Caregiver Program, Ria learned to toughen up.
“Just try not to let them enslave you too much. If they take advantage of you, answer back at least,” she said.
She’s still on the waiting list to get her permanent residency, even if she completed her contract two years ago. Ria believes that single women with no children tend to get status faster because her daughter, who came two years later than her, already has her residency.
Her daughter, Jane, didn't want to follow in her mother’s footsteps by jumping from employer to employer. She stuck it out with her first and only employer for 24 straight months. Ria, meanwhile, had switched employers three times so her contract was reset, meaning that some of the time she worked was not accounted for.
But Jane stuck it out—even when her work was not compensated at all. "Everytime she travelled for her summer and Christmas vacations, I didn't get paid," she said. "For two years I put up with that."
She lamented about the permanent tendinitis she developed on her wrist the day she pulled out the eldest from behind a freezer while she was taking care of his sibling, a baby and their friends on top of that. When the employer found out, she said Jane should have left him there.
“She twisted her wrist!” Ria said, wide-eyed and flustered. “And then the employer got mad at her, she said my daughter should have just left her son there. Well, that’s fine with her because she’s the mother. But we’re the nanny…what if something happened?” she said.
Tendinitis was the least of Ria’s injuries. Over the course of her contracts, she developed gallstones, plantar fasciitis and carpal tunnel which she thinks she got from all the stressful situations—which she described as both physical and emotional—because she tended to the needs of other people’s kids while she was unable to see her own.
They elbow each other and laugh off the pain together as Ria goes through her slew of injuries. “It’s bittersweet,” she said chuckling, “because as I suffer here, at least I can put my kids through school in the Philippines.”
Overqualified nannies
A former teacher with a bachelor’s degree in Food and Science nutrition, Macaraeg speaks uncomfortably in English—a skill she said she lost because of the isolated work in her employers’ homes, which is ironic considering she moved to Canada.
She’s not the only caregiver who lost her skills through the Live-in Caregiver Program—one study found that 63 per cent of LCP applicants held a bachelors degree or higher. Under their temporary permits, migrant workers are not allowed to pursue any form of education.
Despite all the troubles, Ria is a willing caregiver who does it “out of heart".
She just wishes she got paid more. She recently looked after a hyperactive child while replacing her friend for an appointment. She described him as a “worm”, the type who “never sits down”.
“I almost died. Those two hours were like two weeks. I said, ‘How do you put up with that?’ And we get paid minimum wage.
“It’s not because of the workload that you stop. It’s eight dollars an hour. Now it’s $10.25. That’s still not enough. I have so many bills…so many bills in the Philippines and here,” she said.
In her 2009 report, independent researcher and activist Salimah who completed her doctoral studies on Filipina women who migrate to Canada said caregivers are more prone to reprisal because their status and future depend on their employers. She cited incidents of verbal, physical and sexual abuse, unlivable housing conditions and the confiscation of important documents such as passports, good referral letters or records of employment (ROE).
An employer Ria worked for in Langley for three years refused to give her her ROE and a good referral after because she left on short notice when they did not pay her for overtime work. Ria needs the ROE so she can obtain an open work permit—which will allow her to work in other industries since she has completed her LCP contract.
Farraday said low-wage workers in general tend not to complain to the authorities over employment violations until after they quit and find work elsewhere. Adding temporary status to their conditions makes them even more docile.
“If they complain about their working conditions or their living conditions, they risk not only losing their jobs but also becoming homeless,” she said.
Another concern for Faraday for all migrant workers entering through the low-skilled categories is that their work permits tie them to a specific employer for the duration of their contract, an aspect that debilitates workers’ mobility. She recommends that work permits be designated to an industry or a province.
Valiani describes the promise for permanent residency at the end of a caregivers’ contract as a “carrot and stick” situation – and it is not always guaranteed. Valiani found that barely half—only 53 per cent—of caregivers actually gain residency, considering retention rates between 2003 to 2007.
Ultimately, Farraday does not agree with temporary labour as a solution to Canada’s shortage of workers—that workers should be coming to Canada as permanent residents upon arrival.
“Temporary migration must not be permitted to facilitate, institutionalize and normalize a second-tier, low-wage/low-rights “guest worker” program, and Canada’s dependence on temporary migration must be reversed,” she stated in the report.
“This is not just a case of one bad apple here, one bad apple there,” Faraday said.
“It’s important to recognize that these horror stories would keep coming forward because we’ve created a system that leaves the workers open to exploitation.”
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Read More:
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The country is going down the same path with its program for foreign nannies which brought over 59,000 caregivers to Canada in the last decade.
The Live-in Caregiver Program seems like a sweet deal. Participants are fast-tracked through Canada’s backlogged immigration system with the promise of permanent residency after working 24 months as a nanny.
Over 8,200 British Columbians became permanent residents through the program in the past seven years—but it comes at a too high of a personal and political cost.
On the personal front, nannies face labour exploitation, years away from family, and isolation.
Dinah Estigoy, a former nanny from the Philippines knows how bad it is. She spent two and a half years caring for four children and doing all the household chores for $5 an hour—well below B.C.’s $8 an hour minimum wage. Some days she worked 16 hours without overtime.
Caregivers have little recourse against unfair employers. The long delays in issuing work permits create disincentives to leave an unfair employer. Waiting for a new permit means lost income, a longer wait for residency, and potential deportation. Many nannies decide to stick it out and take the abuse.
Loneliness is also a constant companion for caregivers who leave their families behind. Government funds for foreign workers are scarce, so there’s little help for nannies trying to connect to their new communities.
Labour standards
On the political front, Canada’s foreign caregiver programs offends both international conventions on rights and its own citizens.
Other countries have started to mobilize around the rights of migrant workers like nannies.
The convention requires states to apply national laws about hours, rates and work conditions equally to migrant and domestic workers. Not one Western country has signed on. As a country that relies heavily on foreign workers and embraces multiculturalism, Canada should jump at the chance to enhance the rights of migrants.
While the Canadian government might be able to overlook international conventions, it can’t ignore the political mobilization of its citizens.
It was citizens, not the courts or international bodies, who got the ball rolling on the head tax apology. Former Vancouver East MP Margaret Mitchell brought up head tax repayment on behalf of two constituents in 1984. The movement became a national campaign spearheaded by the Chinese Canadian National Council.
Pressure for change
The same momentum for change is starting to build for Canada’s foreign nanny program – particularly within the Filipino community as more than 90 per cent of nannies migrate from the Philippines. Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney held a roundtable with Vancouver’s Filipino community two weeks ago and there are hints that changes to the program are being considered.
It’s about time because of the sheer number of people affected by the program, with nearly 35,000 caregivers and their families becoming permanent residents in the past six years. They are just a small part of the fast-growing Filipino community in Canada, which is set to become a political and social force in Canada. The Philippines is now Canada’s top source for immigrants and temporary workers.
“That is the one thing that will unite the Filipino community because everyone is attached to at least one caregiver,” said Maria Javier, Executive Director of Vancouver’s Multicultural Helping House.
Solutions proposed by advocates and community members include: scrapping the live-in requirement, allowing families to come immediately, speeding up the work permit process and; granting immediate conditional permanent residency.
These proposals are important and would help improve the quality of life for caregivers in Canada, but they don’t address the underlying reason why Canada has allowed these injustices to go on for so long.
Of course, there are good employers, but the system makes exploitation too easy. Even with a good employer, nannies are separated from their own children and face inequitable access to settlement services.
Foreign nannies and caregivers may seem like a good way to do child care on the cheap, but Canada needs to start reading the small print.
It’s like mother always said: If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
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LIST OF 50 ARTICLES - MUST-READ
SEE LINKS BELOW
Nanny Abuse
Winner 2005 Amnesty International Media Award
Finalist, Canadian Association of Journalists, Investigative Reporting Award, 2006
By Susan McClelland
The Walrus
March 2005
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LIST OF 50 ARTICLES - MUST-READ - Click on the title and it will connect you to the full article
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Some, like Lettie Capinpin, say they were poorly treated by those employers. "I worked them for 12 to 13 hours a day, without my overtime pay," she said.
The Filipino Women's Centre helps nannies when they need to escape from bad employers. It says the women are supposed to get overtime and a private room. Many don't.
"Many report to us that they're sleeping where the furnace is," said Cecilia Diocson of the National Alliance of Philippine Women in Canada.
Diocson says Canada is using Filipina women as cheap labour to solve its childcare shortage. She wants Ottawa to scrap the 'live in' requirement. She says that's what makes workers so vulnerable to abuse.
"Deep inside they don't want to be in their employers' home because they feel jailed, or in prison, because they just want to get out after their eight hours of work. But because of the mandatory live in [requirement] they can't. So for me, it's a violation of [their] human rights. They need to have mobility. They want to live where they want to live."
More than 90 per cent of Canada's domestic workers come from the Philippines and there are now 800 caregiver schools in the impoverished country.
Temporary workers are the country's biggest export. Most of their earnings are sent home to support their families.
But recent complaints about the Live-in Caregiver Program prompted the Philippines Congress to launch its own investigation.
Canadian Immigration Minister Joe Volpe has heard an earful of complaints as well. "Whether the [Live-in Care Program] would stay as it is, or with minor or major considerations, or overhaul it or eliminate the program all together, we haven't come to a final analysis yet," he said.
Capinpin, who is now in a position to sponsor her family to come to Canada, wants the program changed so more women don't end up like her. "I'm still jobless, so I'm wondering what is happening to my children, because I was the only one who supports them."
A decision on the future of the Live-in Care Program is expected by the summer.
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Artist Barbara Kruger appended this pithy caption to a photo of a 1950's housewife wielding a magnifying glass. Well, goodbye to all that. Yesterday's (truly) desperate housewife, suffocating under a mountain of laundry and suburban ennui, is today's manic working mother, striving to balance home and family obligations without falling off the corporate ladder. Yet, to turn the magnifying glass on millions of homes in prosperous nations is to discover something rather more unsettling than expanding colonies of dust bunnies or rings around the toilet bowl. The world has indeed become smaller, but the ones cleaning up after it are, increasingly, millions of poor women who have left behind their homes and families in far-off lands to care for ours.
What prompted me to look more closely at a phenomenon so vast and unprecedented that it now strikes me as shocking never to have seen it addressed in any editorial on globalization was a slim, new book by Vancouver-based writer Crisanta Sampang. Sampang was born in the Philippines and worked as a nanny/housekeeper in Singapore from 1984-88, before immigrating to Canada to take a similar job. In Maid in Singapore, she writes that hers "is a story not of one person, but of countless others like me, who had left both hearth and home in the hope of finding a better life abroad." Like a million Filipinos a year, 70 percent of them women, she saw migrant work as her ticket out of poverty. What she left behind remained a secret for more than twenty years.
On a recent sunny afternoon, I join Sampang at a Filipino restaurant on the west side of Vancouver. It's the weekend and the direct-to-the-Philippines courier service across the street is crammed with women sending home the remittances that sustain their families. With more than eight million citizens working abroad, some ten percent of the population, foreign remittances are the Philippines' largest source of income, bringing in upwards of US$8 billion a year. Through nannies, housekeepers, nurses and home support workers, the country's primary export is something rarely identified as a global commodity: care.
In Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, co-editors Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild sum up the "feminization of migration" in startling terms.
They offer a theory on the way modern life-workaholic, narcissistic, cut off from the obligations and supports of community-is affecting the emotional landscape. "It's as if the wealthy parts of the world are running short on precious emotional and sexual resources and have had to turn to poorer regions for fresh supplies."
The restaurant where I meet Sampang is full of nannies and former nannies, but she may be the first of their lot to publish a memoir. "It's a niche subject and no real domestic worker has written on it except The Nanny Diaries," says the very petite Sampang. She suspects the nanny diarists were fakes. They write in "this gossipy American way," she says, "looking down on their employers. I didn't look up to my employers, but I didn't think I was better, either."
On the rare occasion that magazines like Vogue write about the hidden world of domestic workers, it is inevitably from the employers' point of view: the secret jealousies of an ambitious Gucci-clad mother confronted by a nanny who bonds more closely to the children than either of the parents do (and, even more galling, may be younger and thinner than she). Or it's in the form of deliciously scandalous novels like the bestselling Diaries, wherein the caretaker (a graduate student on her way up and out, since no one would stay in such a job) exposes the comically dysfunctional lives of Manhattan's über-rich.
Sampang's memoir is about as far from that perspective as Vancouver is from her rural farming village. Her story begins with the suicide of Imelda, a desperate 23-year-old Filipina domestic who had lost her job. Imelda's parents had borrowed money to pay an agency to bring her to Singapore; if she was unsuccessful they could lose their farm. Imelda's suicide-later echoed by the suicide of a Filipina domestic working in Canada-is the most extreme response to a situation characterized, Sampang writes, by "isolation and lack of emotional support."
A long held secret
Though it begins on a tragic note, Sampang's account of the profession is largely positive, even light-hearted. She describes the employers who warmly welcomed her into their family and didn't object when she began writing about them in features for the Straits Times, her first foray into writing. She chronicles the way other domestics found love in the arms of migrant construction workers (or in one another's), touching briefly on the consequences for marriages back home.
Smart, attractive and confident, Sampang flourished in Singapore and Canada. She was not among the abused, the runaways, or the victims of sexual assault-fates that prey upon the particular vulnerabilities of workers in private homes. "I was living in a bubble with good employers, good people," she says. "And I didn't have much experience with abused nannies. But I heard things."
What she heard ran the gamut from those who didn't get time off to those that didn't get enough to eat. "I heard stories that their dogs were better fed than the domestic." In Canada, where many Filipinas who arrive under the federal Live-In Caregiver Program and have university degrees, there are reports of 16-hour works days, withheld pay, the subcontracting of their services, physical and sexual abuse, even forced captivity. Many keep silent for fear of losing their jobs.
At the table next to us, a Filipina toddler in a pink jumpsuit samples from her mother's plate.
Watching the little girl, I am reminded of Sampang's secret. By the time she left the Philippines in 1984, she had separated from her alcoholic husband and was struggling to support three daughters; aged seven, five, and two. Desperate to find work abroad, she did not declare her children. Later, when the opportunity arose to go to Canada-where the Live-In Caregiver Program allows domestic workers to apply for citizenship after two years-she did the same. After all, a domestic worker in Canada makes about the same per month that the average Filipino earns in a year-roughly $1000 US.
It was not until her book was published in Singapore last fall-hitting the Singapore Times bestseller list within two weeks-that her partner of ten years, writer Daniel Wood, read it and learned of the children. "He was blindsided," she says. But he understood her reasons. "It has made us closer. It was a great relief because now I can talk about my children."
This, then, is the hidden cost of the global trade in mothering-a cost that has become, in the words of Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, a "dark child's burden." An estimated 30 percent of Filipino children, some 8 million, live in households where at least one parent works abroad. In three Asian countries-the Philippines, Indonesia and Sri Lanka-women are the majority of migrant workers and most are mothers.
'Working for everyone'
"My children 'understand,'" says Sampang, curling her fingers into quotation marks, "but it's still not good enough. I thought they would be better off growing up with my mother, but apparently not."
The middle daughter dropped out of college at eighteen to marry a merchant marine after becoming pregnant. "I asked her why she got married so young," says Sampang. "She cried and said there was a hole in her life that cannot be filled. Now she is married and has a family to fill the hole."
The effect of migration on families is a "two-edged sword," Sampang says. Working abroad enabled her to buy her mother a house and property and send one of each of her brothers' children to college with the understanding that they will help their siblings. "A Filipino nanny is not working for herself only, she's working for everyone, first and foremost her children, then other family members."
But children who grow up with absentee parents show higher delinquency rates and often experience "reunification issues" after years of living apart. A cultural upheaval has taken place as parents compensate for their absence with money and gifts. "In the Philippines, every teenager has a cell phone, an iPod," says Sampang. "Everyone wants the latest fashion. It's become a western culture of materialism, as if the local is not good enough."
She sees an ingrained "colonial mentality" extending back to the Spanish and American occupations of the Philippines; a mentality that says "white skin is better," in which "everyone wants to leave." It is as if centuries of dependence on wealthier nations have created a crisis of faith in their own culture and country. A survey of children of Filipino migrant workers found that 60 percent want to leave. "They leave because they think life is better outside-and life is better," says Sampang. "There is so much poverty."
Sampang has made a good life for herself, working in television and film, exploring options that would have been unthinkable back home. Like most female migrant workers, she has settled abroad, visiting the Philippines for several weeks a year. Her, and the millions like her, epitomize the adaptable workforce praised by free market economists. They have made tough decisions that may just be their best options in the global economy.
But why are these women forced to make such wrenching decisions, essentially abandoning their families in order to save them? What creates the conditions that compel them to leave?
The disturbing answer is that entire countries have become dependent on the incomes of migrant workers in order to service the foreign debts owed to international lenders like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. These loans have, to a remarkable degree, been handed to corrupt leaders with few or no controls. It would almost appear that the lenders crave the kind of power these massive debts afford them, from lucrative interest payments to the ability to dictate economic and social policy.
The term "crony capitalism" was first coined to describe Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who counted among his personal friends Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. In 1972, Marcos pronounced martial law; two years later he enacted the first government policies in support of overseas migrant work. Such policies have since evolved from a stop-gap measure to a permanent economic survival strategy.
"We are not asking for debt forgiveness; we are asking for justice. We are asking the creditors to repent and debt cancellation would be a symbol of that repentance," said Archbishop Alberto Ramento of the Philippine Independent Church, in an interview in 1998. The IMF and World Bank, he said, had given loans to the Marcos regime despite knowledge of its corruption. "We are paying for the shoes of Imelda Marcos," he said.
A 'war' for dignity
Structural readjustment loans have required governments like the Philippines to cut funding to education, health and social services, exacerbating poverty and perpetuating the export of labour. Yet, the influx of foreign capital has not been used for development that might create the kind of society where women like Crisanta Sampang and her daughters can achieve their potential. Education has become focused on exportable skills, with doctors studying to be nurses in order to emigrate. Debt payments now account for nearly 70 percent of the Philippines' government expenditures. Spending on social services shrank from 35 percent of the budget in 2000 to 23 percent in 2004, sowing the seeds for greater social instability and extremism-and, of course, more migration.
The same factors lurk behind the growth of sex tourism-another form of "women's work," one with a long history linked to the American military presence in the Philippines. A friend who worked for an American high-tech company located at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines described the peeler bars and brothels that have sprung up around it to service US troops. One of his colleagues, an overweight middle-manager in his fifties, had found several Filipina "girlfriends" there, some as young as fourteen.
The kitchens and cradles of suburbia can seem a long way from the slums and brothels of the Third World, but they are linked by economic policies with far-reaching consequences. Somebody's mother, so attentive to the needs of her employers, listens to the voices of her children through the crackle of a long-distance connection. She notes how they have grown and changed, how they have become, through years of separation, almost strangers. Then she hangs up the phone as another voice, someone else's child or parent, calls her name.
Vancouver writer Deborah Campbell is the author of This Heated Place.
Join Crisanta Sampang and hear her story at the Canadian launch of Maid in Singapore on Thursday, March 30, 2006, at Fireside Books, 2652 Arbutus Street in Vancouver, from 7 to 9 PM.![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png)
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- Life
- domestic workers
- Filipina domestic workers
- Filipina workers Canada
- Live-in Caregiver Program
- Temporary Foreign Worker Program
Filipina nanny testifies at human trafficking trial
Franco Orr, wife Nicole Huen allegedly brought Leticia Sarmiento to Canada illegally
Posted: Jun 5, 2013 11:49 AM PT
Last Updated: Jun 5, 2013 7:00 PM PT
VIDEO http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2013/06/05/bc-nanny-human-trafficking.html
A Filipina nanny testified in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver on
Wednesday she wouldn’t have come to Canada if she had known what the
working conditions here would be like.
Franco Orr and his wife Nicole Huen are on trial for human trafficking charges arising from allegations they brought Leticia Sarmiento to Canada illegally and forced her to work in domestic servitude for several years.
On Wednesday, Sarmiento testified working conditions were much better when she worked for the couple in Hong Kong — she had two cellular phones, didn’t have to cover her own expenses and often took the children on outings alone.
Franco Orr and his wife Nicole Huen are on trial for human trafficking charges arising from allegations they brought Leticia Sarmiento to Canada illegally and forced her to work in domestic servitude for several years.
On Wednesday, Sarmiento testified working conditions were much better when she worked for the couple in Hong Kong — she had two cellular phones, didn’t have to cover her own expenses and often took the children on outings alone.
Franco Orr and his wife Nicole Huen are accused of not paying a nanny for four years of work. (Jonathan Hayward/Canadian Press)
But
Sarmiento claims once the family moved to Canada, she was only allowed
to call the Philippines once a month, had to pay for her own toiletries
and was never allowed to take the children out on her own.
She testified Huen told her, “I am your master. I am paying you. You are to obey whatever I tell you.”
Sarmiento says Orr forced her to wash dishes by hand because the dishwasher was too expensive to use, and the couple forbade her from talking to other nannies while on family outings.
Sarmiento has looked after other peoples' children for most of her adult life, including in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Hong Kong.
Last week, she told the court she was tricked into coming to B.C. with the young family on the promise she'd work for two years before becoming a permanent resident.
Sarmiento, who has three children of her own in the Philippines, alleges she was forced to work two years straight with no days off, no overtime pay and no access to her passport.
The couple has pleaded not guilty, but if they are convicted they could face a maximum fine of $1 million, life in prison, or both.
She testified Huen told her, “I am your master. I am paying you. You are to obey whatever I tell you.”
Sarmiento says Orr forced her to wash dishes by hand because the dishwasher was too expensive to use, and the couple forbade her from talking to other nannies while on family outings.
Sarmiento has looked after other peoples' children for most of her adult life, including in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Hong Kong.
Last week, she told the court she was tricked into coming to B.C. with the young family on the promise she'd work for two years before becoming a permanent resident.
Sarmiento, who has three children of her own in the Philippines, alleges she was forced to work two years straight with no days off, no overtime pay and no access to her passport.
The couple has pleaded not guilty, but if they are convicted they could face a maximum fine of $1 million, life in prison, or both.
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Canada failing foreign nannies
http://thethunderbird.ca/2009/04/08/canada-failing-foreign-nannies/
By Rebecca teBrake
Canada is heading for another stain on its human rights record. Nearly three years ago Prime Minister Stephen Harper had to apologize for placing a head tax on Chinese immigrants, calling the government’s actions a “grave injustice.”The country is going down the same path with its program for foreign nannies which brought over 59,000 caregivers to Canada in the last decade.
The Live-in Caregiver Program seems like a sweet deal. Participants are fast-tracked through Canada’s backlogged immigration system with the promise of permanent residency after working 24 months as a nanny.
Nannies like Nelisa Asuncion (left) and Dinah Estigoy (right) are waiting for change
On the personal front, nannies face labour exploitation, years away from family, and isolation.
Dinah Estigoy, a former nanny from the Philippines knows how bad it is. She spent two and a half years caring for four children and doing all the household chores for $5 an hour—well below B.C.’s $8 an hour minimum wage. Some days she worked 16 hours without overtime.
Caregivers have little recourse against unfair employers. The long delays in issuing work permits create disincentives to leave an unfair employer. Waiting for a new permit means lost income, a longer wait for residency, and potential deportation. Many nannies decide to stick it out and take the abuse.
Loneliness is also a constant companion for caregivers who leave their families behind. Government funds for foreign workers are scarce, so there’s little help for nannies trying to connect to their new communities.
Labour standards
On the political front, Canada’s foreign caregiver programs offends both international conventions on rights and its own citizens.
Canada signed the United Nations (UN) Charter of Human Rights, which is supposed to protect fair working conditions and pay. However, the Canadian government leaves the exact labour standards to the provinces. Workers in British Columbia have the right to collect overtime after eight hours and to 32 consecutive hours off once a week.
Other countries have started to mobilize around the rights of migrant workers like nannies.
Twenty-two countries, including the Philippines, signed the UN Convention on the Rights of Migrants and their Families.
The convention requires states to apply national laws about hours, rates and work conditions equally to migrant and domestic workers. Not one Western country has signed on. As a country that relies heavily on foreign workers and embraces multiculturalism, Canada should jump at the chance to enhance the rights of migrants.
While the Canadian government might be able to overlook international conventions, it can’t ignore the political mobilization of its citizens.
It was citizens, not the courts or international bodies, who got the ball rolling on the head tax apology. Former Vancouver East MP Margaret Mitchell brought up head tax repayment on behalf of two constituents in 1984. The movement became a national campaign spearheaded by the Chinese Canadian National Council.
Pressure for change
The same momentum for change is starting to build for Canada’s foreign nanny program – particularly within the Filipino community as more than 90 per cent of nannies migrate from the Philippines. Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney held a roundtable with Vancouver’s Filipino community two weeks ago and there are hints that changes to the program are being considered.
It’s about time because of the sheer number of people affected by the program, with nearly 35,000 caregivers and their families becoming permanent residents in the past six years. They are just a small part of the fast-growing Filipino community in Canada, which is set to become a political and social force in Canada. The Philippines is now Canada’s top source for immigrants and temporary workers.
Eighteen per cent of Canada’s Filipinos live in Metro Vancouver according to the 2006 Census. In New Democrat MP Don Davies’ riding of Vancouver-Kingsway 11 per cent of the residents are Filipino. As his party’s Deputy Critic for Citizenship and Immigration, Davies has been advocating for reform.
Canada's foreign caregiver program, like its nannies, is worn out.
Solutions proposed by advocates and community members include: scrapping the live-in requirement, allowing families to come immediately, speeding up the work permit process and; granting immediate conditional permanent residency.
These proposals are important and would help improve the quality of life for caregivers in Canada, but they don’t address the underlying reason why Canada has allowed these injustices to go on for so long.
Foreign nannies and caregivers for the elderly are filling the gaps left by Canada’s patchwork child care and home health care “systems.”
Of course, there are good employers, but the system makes exploitation too easy. Even with a good employer, nannies are separated from their own children and face inequitable access to settlement services.
In finding substitute care for children and the elderly, we face another legacy of an unjust immigration program. Children and caregivers deserve better – as do Canadians.
Foreign nannies and caregivers may seem like a good way to do child care on the cheap, but Canada needs to start reading the small print.
It’s like mother always said: If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
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LIST OF 50 ARTICLES - MUST-READ
SEE LINKS BELOW
Nanny Abuse
Winner 2005 Amnesty International Media Award
Finalist, Canadian Association of Journalists, Investigative Reporting Award, 2006
By Susan McClelland
The Walrus
March 2005
Sometimes
when you are driving by a park you'll catch a glimpse of brown-skinned
women weighted with the responsibility of caring for white-skinned
children. Their own governments are happy to see them go—better to
export poverty than perpetuate it at home. And Ottawa, forever lacking a
national child-care policy, has been only too willing to tap into this
vast pool of cheap, desperate labour—after all, our baby boomers needed
the help. But now the nannies to the country's richest generation are
demanding a quicker route to citizenship and protection from abusive
employers. Will they receive it?
Flickering
candles cast a pale glow on the tiny, dark-haired woman kneeling in
front of a small statue of the Virgin. "God give me strength," Kristina
murmurs in front of the makeshift altar, her thumb moving unconsciously
through a rosary dangling from her right hand. "Hail Mary, full of
grace," she continues as a door slams shut down the hall. Her prayers
interrupted, she turns on a bare overhead light revealing the gray
concrete walls of her tiny room in the basement of a mansion in central
Vancouver.
Moving
to her bed, she sits with her back against the cold wall, draws her
knees to her chest, closes her eyes and runs through her chores for the
next day—get the five kids to and from school, take the youngest to the
doctor, clean six bedrooms, do four loads of laundry, and prepare a
casserole dinner for eight. "God," she begins praying again, "just help
me get everything done."
She
tries to sleep, but the whir of the furnace just a few feet from her
bed keeps her awake and finally she reaches for a half-finished blanket
of red, yellow, and blue wool and knits late into the night. Kristina,
twenty-six, came to Canada in 1999 under Ottawa's controversial Live-in
Caregiver Program, an initiative that has lured tens of thousands of
women to Canada from impoverished countries over the last twenty-five
years. As so many in the developing world have done before them, these
young women left, or, more accurately, were forced to leave, the
security of family for the promise of a more prosperous life in the
West. If years of hardship can be endured after their arrival, they may
even reach their ultimate goal and be given citizenship and the right to
rescue their relatives from poverty by bringing them to Canada.
Unlike
wealthy foreigners who can purchase Canadian passports simply by making
an investment in Canada or highly educated immigrants who receive
landed immigrant status on arrival, women like Kristina are told to line
up at Canada's back door. They will not be given landed
status—essentially citizenship—on arrival and will be admitted only if
they agree to work for a minimum of two years as live-in nannies. On the
surface that may not seem so bad: two years of servitude in exchange
for a Canadian passport. Even the low wages—about $700 a month after
room and board—may seem adequate to many. And besides, don't nannies eat
the same meals, watch television, and go on vacations with the families
they're living with?
Many
are no doubt happy doing just that, but after more than two decades in
operation, according to politicians on both sides of the House of
Commons, the Live-in program has a darker side, one that has exploited
impoverished women from around the globe and must be reformed. It has
now come under formal scrutiny by Citizenship and Immigration Canada,
and several studies cast a disturbing light on the baby boomers—the
richest generation in Canadian history—who employed most of the women.
During a period when individual rights were enshrined in law, and women,
finally freed from the kitchen and the nursery, entered the workforce
in numbers almost equalling their male counterparts, many of the nannies
were suffering physical and mental abuse at the hands of the very
people they had liberated from the routine drudgery of family life.
An
advertisement placed by an Internet auction house in the Montreal
Gazette in 2003 is an extreme case, but underscores both the
vulnerability of the nannies and the contempt in which they are often
held. The auctioneers wanted to offer up the services of three nannies
to the highest bidder, generating a heated debate on the floor of the
House of Commons where politicians called for a drastic overhaul of the
Live-in program. At the same time, many nannies came forward with
stories of abuse, and crushingly long hours of work with very little
pay.
Others
compared attempts to auction the women to a more painful time in
history. "Foreign domestic workers have become Canada's modern-day
slaves," says Evelyn Calugay of PINAY, a Montreal-based advocacy group
for Filipina women. "I would call it trafficking in humans."
Such
public demonstrations of outrage are rare. Many nannies suffer quietly
in isolation, often cowed into silence by employers who threaten them
with deportation and calls to the police.
Kristina, for one, had no one to turn to when her employer refused to pay her nearly $3,000 in back pay. There
was more to this debt than money owed for work done. She would soon be
eligible for landed-immigrant status. If granted, it would allow her to
find employment other than as a live-in nanny and move her a step closer
to bringing family members to Canada—one of the main reasons she came
to this country in the first place. But federal immigration authorities
wanted $1,500 to process her application—money she didn't have. "My
employer couldn't pay me, the person she trusted to care for her
children," she laments. "But she could afford to pay the swimming pool
clean and stock her bar full of liquor."
In
1993, 57 percent of workers in the Caregiver Program were from the
Philippines. That figure rose to 93 percent by 2002, an increase that
can largely be attributed to the complementary relationship between
Ottawa's determination to find a source of cheap labour to provide
daycare, and the Philippines' draconian labour export policy, a
controversial government initiative under which Filipinos are encouraged
to work overseas and send money home.
The
export of impoverished Filipinos to richer countries began in the 1970s
as Manila looked for ways to reduce unemployment and diversify the
economy beyond rice and sugar-cane farming. Banks were encouraged to
loan individuals money to go abroad, and fly-by-night employment
agencies promoting foreign contacts soon opened in cities and villages
across the country. Today females are the principal export, and in 1998
Filipinas working abroad sent almost $8 billion home.
While
the Philippines' economy improved with the inflow of foreign earnings,
Ottawa in turn could boast that it had provided the baby boomers with a
program to help them raise their families while allowing both spouses to
work. "The Philippines has generated this new hero," says Audrey
Macklin, a law professor at the University of Toronto and former member
of the Immigration and Refugee Board. "The Filipina woman is seen as the
migrant worker who is lifting their country out of poverty. In Canada,
the Filipina woman is seen as the domestic worker who has come to the
family's rescue."
Filipina
women have paid a heavy price in the process, and Denis Coderre, the
former minister of citizenship and immigration, set the tone for the
review of the Caregiver Program in the wake of the controversial
auctioning of the nannies in Montreal, saying "using the Internet for
slavery is revolting." As part of the reassessment, Citizenship and
Immigration is conducting a series of consultations with
employment-agency officials and domestic-worker associations, and will
send their recommendations to the minister of immigration later this
year. "We know women in the program report being abused," admits
Immigration spokesperson Maria Iadinardi. "It's upsetting to hear that
employers threaten these women with deportation if they don't do what
they're told."
Equally
disturbing is what happens to many domestic workers when they finish
the Caregiver Program and achieve permanent residence status. Many,
without access to education and retraining, continue to work as low-paid
nannies, and the cycle of abuse continues. Even more troubling: a
recent study by the Philippine Women's Centre of British Columbia
suggests that a growing number of nannies are working part-time as
prostitutes so they can pay off bank loans and debts to unscrupulous
immigration consultants. "Canada has designed a program to have a
continuous supply of cheap labour," says filmmaker Florchita Bautista,
whose 1999 documentary When Strangers Reunite follows the lives of three
Filipina domestic workers who came to Canada. "The poverty these women
so desperately tried to pull themselves and their children out of is
only being transferred from one country to another."
A
crowing rooster announces the rising of the sun over the tiny farm that
Kristina's parents own in the countryside outside of Cebu, a financial
centre and popular tourist destination in the southern Philippines. As
she does almost every day, Kristina's younger sister, Jan, rose early to
feed the cows and goats before sitting down to a breakfast of rice and
fish. This day would be different. After kneeling in prayer with her
mother, Jan left on an hour-long walk along a dirt road to catch the bus
that will take her into Cebu to register for university. Four hours
later, as the bus finally approached the city, she watched the densely
green landscape slowly turn urban, with posh new hotels and tourist
cottages lining the white sand beaches. In the evening, wealthy
foreigners jam the city's discotheques, restaurants, and shops selling
diving gear and beach wear. Jan hurries by these places. On her family's
$500 annual income she can't afford to shop there anyway. But there are
other businesses she visits that tourists never enter. Simple signs
made from cardboard and paint and others of flashy neon, hang above
these makeshift shops, enticing young people with information about
immigration, passports, and overseas employment. Jan knows these
businesses only too well. When she finishes university she will be
pressured by her family to find a job abroad.
"My
parents have been telling Jan that she will be responsible to pay for
our brothers to go to university," says Kristina. "And my parents told
me when I was in elementary school that I would be responsible for Jan's
education." At first Kristina resisted, and when she finished high
school she took a college secretarial course. But for more than two
years the only employment she could find was with a trucking company
that paid only $100 a month—not nearly enough to help with the family's
expenses, let alone pay for Jan's education.
So,
finally, she found herself in an employment agency in Cebu. For a fee
of $3,600, they would place Kristina in a good home in Hong Kong. But at
the last minute, an aunt—who had become a mail-order bride and married a
Canadian—called from BC to say that she could help find Kristina a
position in Canada. There was only one problem. To get the job, she
would have to borrow $500 from friends to pay for a six-month vocational
training course in Cebu. She would learn how to use a microwave,
vacuum, change a baby's diaper, and do laundry.
"My aunt said I would earn really good money in Canada, so I worked hard to be accepted into the Live-in Caregiver Program," said Kristina. "My aunt also said that Canada was heaven."
Kristina
knew if she didn't go to Canada, she wouldn't be able to make enough
money to support her family. "My friends and I would roll our eyes when
we walked by a house with a new roof and a TV satellite dish," recalls
Kristina. "We knew the parents had children working abroad. How else
could anyone afford fancy things like microwave ovens and dishwashers?"
Kristina
doesn't want Jan to make the same mistake she did and is warning her
not to come. With good reason. Her first assignment in Canada involved
caring for a two-year-old girl in Victoria and looked promising. But
within a month, Kristina was nearly raped when the child's grandfather,
dressed only in his underwear and stinking of rum and marijuana, barged
into the family's recreation room where she slept. He retreated after
she threatened to break a window with a lamp, but came back later that
night and tried to re-enter the room.
Her
frantic screams finally alerted the man's wife, who told him to sober
up and go to bed. It took her eight months to find a new employer, and
every day until she left he would whisper menacingly into her ear about
having sex with her. "I felt completely vulnerable," she says. "I didn't
know what my rights were in Canada and I thought if I called the police
they would blame me. It was hell."
If
these poorly paid nannies in the Live-in Caregiver Program are
modern-day slaves as critics charge, their masters were the baby
boomers, and their children, the so-called Generation X. A study for
Status of Women Canada done in 2000 concluded that the typical profile
of those employing the nannies was a married couple, age thirty-five, working in the private sector, with two kids and household earnings of more than $100,000.
Many
couples employing the nannies believe they are doing them a favour. One
month's salary, after all, is more than most would earn in a year in
their impoverished home countries. And then there is landed-immigrant
status, something they would likely never achieve under standard
immigration rules. But critics charge that employers and the government
are perpetuating a myth by claiming that women from the developing world
do well by coming to Canada. "I am not surprised that most Canadians
don't get what is going on here," says Zahra Dhanani, an immigration and
human-rights lawyer and former board member for Intercede, a
Toronto-based advocacy group for the rights of domestic workers. "The
men and women who fought to liberate women over the last century fought
to liberate white women. The women's movement was not thinking of women
of colour. They don't want to jeopardize the rights they have attained
by standing up for groups that are still oppressed. It's easier to live
in denial than identify with other peoples' struggles."
In
fact, a study in 2000 conducted by Intercede concluded from nearly 100
interviews with women working under the Live-in Caregiver Program, that
nearly all had suffered some form of abuse, including rape, sexual
harassment, and threats of deportation. "Because these women were not
born here, it somehow legitimates a different kind of treatment being
applied to them," says Macklin. "Neither the government or individual
employers feel accountable for that. Canadians feel in some way that
they are not responsible for elevating these women to some position of
equality."
Not
recognizing the exploitation that impoverished women face in the West
has resulted in the nannies becoming commodities that employers,
employment agencies and governments are cashing in on. "There is so much
money being made off the backs of foreign women," says Cecilia Diocson,
founder and former chair of the Philippine Women's Centre of BC, a
Vancouver-based organization. "Employers save money by not having to pay
child-care fees or having one spouse leave the workforce, employment
agencies make domestic workers pay astronomical amounts to pursue their
dreams of better lives in the West, and governments like the Philippines
deal with the poor and unemployed by sending them abroad."
When
Michael and Rachael had twins at thirty-seven they needed help
immediately. A neighbour in their wealthy suburb north of Toronto,
recommended the couple hire a nanny through the Live-in Caregiver
Program. Within six months of applying, Caroline, a native of Cusco,
Peru, knocked at their door. Caroline had lost her job, and with her
family facing eviction from their apartment, decided to leave her
six-year-old son behind with her husband and come to Canada. The new
employers soon experienced the troubled world of the foreign domestic
worker when Caroline introduced Rachael to other nannies in a nearby
park who told her stories of maltreatment and abuse. "At first I didn't
believe what I was hearing because I just couldn't imagine employers
dehumanizing the women looking after their children," says Rachael. "But
then I saw the behaviour for myself when some of the employers at the
park ordered their nannies around like servants."
They
also became embroiled in Caroline's legal problems. Since completing
the mandatory two years of employment under the program, Caroline waited
over a year for her immigration papers to be processed. At one point,
Michael, a lawyer, tried to expedite Caroline's application but to no
avail. As a result, she ended up being apart from her son for more than
three years. "The entire experience with Caroline has really opened my
eyes to the injustice that goes on in the playgrounds of our
communities," says Rachael. "It is so disheartening to watch Caroline
care for my kids when I think that in Peru there is a child with no
mother. The Live-in Program takes advantage of the desperation of people
like Caroline."
"Stupid!
You are stupid!" the seven-year-old boy screamed at Maria, his nanny.
Maria shook her head in response. "Please don't say such things," she
admonished, in her thick Mexican accent. "It's wrong to call people
stupid." Just as she said this, she looked over at the doorway where
Jake's mother was watching the altercation unfold in the kitchen. "I
don't want you telling Jake what he can and can't do," she yelled.
Maria,
twenty-eight, had been a live-in caregiver for less than two months at
their home in Burlington, just west of Toronto, where she cared for Jake
and his two older siblings. It wasn't just the kids who were abusive.
Jake's mother was hostile toward her almost from the outset. She even
accused Maria of lying about being able to drive a car and forced her
into the driver's seat of the family's new sedan and ordered her out
onto a busy highway. "I thought I was going to kill us all, including
the kids in the back seat," says Maria. "It was night, and I was
petrified."
Maria
started work at sun-up and often didn't finish until the kids were
bathed and asleep. When she did have time for herself, there was no
place for her to escape. She wasn't allowed to watch TV or soak in the
bath after a long day. She contacted the Toronto-based employment agency
that had arranged the job but received little sympathy. "The agency
told me I should work every Friday night for free," says Maria.
"Everything I said, the agency took my employer's side. I decided right
then to find a new employer and a new agency." Furious when Maria gave
notice, her family held back $600 of her salary and began taping her
phone calls, including one she made seeking legal advice. They also
threatened to write a letter to immigration officials saying that Maria
would not be a suitable Canadian citizen.
Now,
after years of complaints, politicians may finally be getting ready to
help the nannies. Groups supporting the women want changes in two
critical areas. Cecilia Diocson recently told the Citizenship and
Immigration Canada task force that is investigating the program that, in
addition to abolishing the live-in requirement, she wants nannies'
salaries raised so that the women can support themselves. Diocson argued
that the requirement forcing foreign domestic employees to work for two
years before they can apply for permanent residency is grossly unfair.
Like others addressing the committee, Diocson maintains that since there
is a scarcity of Canadians willing to do this kind of work, nannies
should be accepted as skilled labourers. "These women," says Diocson,
"should receive permanent residency upon landing in Canada like any
other class of immigrants whose work is seen as necessary to the
economy."
Under
the current immigration system, foreigners are assessed and awarded
points for educational achievement, work experience, and employment
potential. The more points an individual has, the greater likelihood
they will be accepted under the skilled-labourer class. Women in the
Live-in Caregiver Program, however, can rarely acquire enough points to
be considered under these rules. "Domestic workers aren't seen as worthy
of coming into the country like everyone else, so they must use the
Live-in Caregiver Program instead," says Louise Langevin, a law
professor at Quebec's Université Laval and co-author of Trafficking in
Women in Canada. "The program amounts to back-door immigration."
Once
the review of the program is completed, the findings will be forwarded
to Immigration Minister Judy Sgro. Sgro has been heavily criticized by
opposition politicians who claim she fast-tracked the approval for a
Romanian stripper working on her re-election campaign, allowing her to
stay in Canada under another dubious immigration policy that encourages
women in desperate economic situations to come to Canada to work in
strip clubs. According to documents obtained under the Access to
Information Act by a Vancouver lawyer, Human Resources Development
Canada was told that many of the dancers, brought in to fill labour
shortages, would be forced into prostitution at clubs controlled by
criminal gangs. And at one point in 1998, Immigration Canada officials
warned Human Resources in a memo that they were "extremely hesitant to
send women into this profession." Even so, Foreign Affairs Minister
Pierre Pettigrew, who was then human resources minister, approved the
program.
Finally,
after days of heated exchanges in the House of Commons late last year,
the government announced that the women would no longer be imported as
dancers. The same kind of pressure is now mounting on the Live-in
Caregiver Program. "There have been similar problems with both the
live-in program and the exotic-dancer program," says Bill Siksay, NDP
Citizenship and Immigration critic. "The live-in program has been an
important aspect of child care in Canada for many years, but it has also
been a source of exploitation of foreign women. The live-in component
has been especially problematic and I would urge the government to
review this requirement."
It
would be months before Kristina finally escaped her abusive Vancouver
employer. With the help of a kindly lawyer she managed to get the $3,000
in back pay owed to her, and was finally able to apply for landed
immigrant status and find her own place to live. She now rents a
two-bedroom, subsidized apartment in downtown Vancouver, furnished with a
couch, end tables, computer, TV, and nativity figures.
Kristina
also gave birth to a baby daughter, who coos happily in a playpen in
the corner. The baby's father is the son of a domestic worker who came
to Canada after being left behind in the Philippines for fifteen years
while his mother worked in Canada.
He
has trouble holding down a job and has a gambling problem. As a result,
she has decided to raise her daughter on her own—a move that has been
criticized by some of her Roman Catholic friends. She blames the
father's money and job problems on the fact that he was apart from his
mother for so many years. "I can really see the impact the separation
had on him," says Kristina. "He's lost and I don't want my daughter to
grow up with that kind of uncertainty."
When
she arrived in Canada, she was not aware that she was part of the
exodus of women from poor nations. But Kristina now plans to tell her
daughter about everything she has been through. "People in the
Philippines are in denial," she says. "It's like the money Filipinas
earn in the West washes away the sacrifices and misery. I want my sister
Jan and daughter to be aware of the struggles of the Filipina women in
Canada and in the Philippines." If any good can come out of her
experience, she hopes it is that her sister and daughter can avoid the
ordeal she has been through.
It
will help if Ottawa finally reforms its Live-in Program, and allows
impoverished women from around the world to enter Canada through the
front door.
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Domestic Workers Worldwide Abused,
Need Protection: Report
Abuses also occurring in Canada, says worker advocacy group
Created: January 22, 2013 Last Updated: January 22, 2013
Domestic workers around the world face
physical, financial, and emotional abuse on the job due to a lack of
rights and protection, a new study has found.
The UN-sponsored research, released by the International Labour Organization, says the nearly 53 million domestic workers around the world, most of whom are women, are often exposed to abuse on the job such as overwork, economic exploitation, and even rape and physical abuse.
Not included in this figure are 7 million children under 16 who labour as domestic workers and are at risk of to many of the same abuses.
Domestic worker abuse is also common in Canada, says Ai Li Lim, executive director and staff lawyer for Vancouver-based advocacy group West Coast Domestic Workers Association.
“A lot of the issues that domestic workers face that were raised in the report are the same problems that clients in our office see or experience,” Lim told The Epoch Times, adding that Canada’s Live-in Caregiver Program is particularly prone to abuse.
“You can imagine if you were living [in the same home as] your boss, what your bargaining power would be, and your ability to bargain around your working conditions.”
The report notes that domestic work—such as child, elder, and patient care, housecleaning, and cooking—is predominantly carried out by migrants or members of historically disadvantaged groups.
The nature of the work, which takes place in private homes, means that domestic workers are less visible than other workers, making them more vulnerable to abusive practices.
Canada is home to approximately 73,000 domestic workers (95 percent are women from the Philippines), who primarily enter the country via the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP).
One of the requirements of the program is that the domestic workers—who need to be qualified to provide care for children, elderly persons, or persons with disabilities—must live in the household of their employer.
The program only allows participants to apply for permanent residence after working for two years as live-in caregivers.
Lim says that because workers are tied to the same employer while they wait to apply for permanent residence they are completely dependent on that employer and hesitate to complain or report abuse or exploitation.
“Their potential permanent residence status and their immigration status are absolutely tied to this employer,” she says. “So if they lose their job it definitely impacts their immigration status and their ability to remain and work in Canada.”
According to a separate report prepared for the Metcalf Foundation on migrant worker’s insecurity in Canada, due to LCP workers’ living arrangements, many gradually end up being “on-call” 24-hours a day, allowing the line between work and off-work hours to be increasingly blurred or manipulated.
The Metcalf report notes that since 2000, the number of migrant workers employed in Canada has more than tripled, especially among low-wage, low-skilled workers in sectors such as caregiving, agriculture, hospitality, food services, construction, and tourism.
In 2006 for the first time, the number of temporary foreign workers entering Canada exceeded the number of economic immigrants who were granted permanent resident status, and this trend has continued.
The report says a “critical and urgent public discussion” must take place to ensure that temporary workers rights abuses do not become “normalized,” and points out that the narrative in current policies tend to encourage discrimination.
“To the extent that laws construct workers as “temporary,” “foreign” and “unskilled,” they likewise devalue the real contributions of these workers to the functioning of our economy and communities and construct the workers as “other,” as “not us,” as persons outside the community to whom we need not be accountable,” reads the report.
Lim says if domestic work was more valued, it would be reflected in Canadian law and immigration policies.
“Live-in caregiving work and domestic work is valuable work,” she says. “Predominately women who come to Canada are helping to raise Canadian families—why don’t you just give them permanent residence status immediately?”
The ILO’s Convention189 was ratified in 2012 and will come into effect in September. Canada, however, has not yet joined and has been criticized for trying to weaken and impede adoption of the convention. Uruguay, the Philippines, Mauritius, Italy, Paraguay, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Colombia have all ratified the convention.
The convention is equal to an international treaty, and compels signatory nations to take steps to ensure fair labour standards for domestic workers and protect them from abuse. Countries that violate the terms of the treaty would face international sanctions.
Human Resources and Skills Development Canada has said that the federal government would need agreement from all provinces and territories before ratification could proceed.
“Canada often prides itself on being at the forefront of human rights and protecting people who are most vulnerable,” says Lim.
“Not ratifying this treaty sends a strong message to all live-in caregivers that the government does not protect them or promote the best interests of people who come into Canada and are in affect raising Canadian families.”
The Epoch Times publishes in 35 countries and in 21 languages. S
================================The UN-sponsored research, released by the International Labour Organization, says the nearly 53 million domestic workers around the world, most of whom are women, are often exposed to abuse on the job such as overwork, economic exploitation, and even rape and physical abuse.
Not included in this figure are 7 million children under 16 who labour as domestic workers and are at risk of to many of the same abuses.
Domestic worker abuse is also common in Canada, says Ai Li Lim, executive director and staff lawyer for Vancouver-based advocacy group West Coast Domestic Workers Association.
“A lot of the issues that domestic workers face that were raised in the report are the same problems that clients in our office see or experience,” Lim told The Epoch Times, adding that Canada’s Live-in Caregiver Program is particularly prone to abuse.
“You can imagine if you were living [in the same home as] your boss, what your bargaining power would be, and your ability to bargain around your working conditions.”
The report notes that domestic work—such as child, elder, and patient care, housecleaning, and cooking—is predominantly carried out by migrants or members of historically disadvantaged groups.
The nature of the work, which takes place in private homes, means that domestic workers are less visible than other workers, making them more vulnerable to abusive practices.
Domestic Workers Dependent Employer
Canada is home to approximately 73,000 domestic workers (95 percent are women from the Philippines), who primarily enter the country via the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP).
One of the requirements of the program is that the domestic workers—who need to be qualified to provide care for children, elderly persons, or persons with disabilities—must live in the household of their employer.
The program only allows participants to apply for permanent residence after working for two years as live-in caregivers.
A lot of the issues that domestic workers face that were raised in the report are the same problems that clients in our office see or experience.
— Ai Li Lim, West Coast Domestic Workers Association
Lim says that because workers are tied to the same employer while they wait to apply for permanent residence they are completely dependent on that employer and hesitate to complain or report abuse or exploitation.
“Their potential permanent residence status and their immigration status are absolutely tied to this employer,” she says. “So if they lose their job it definitely impacts their immigration status and their ability to remain and work in Canada.”
According to a separate report prepared for the Metcalf Foundation on migrant worker’s insecurity in Canada, due to LCP workers’ living arrangements, many gradually end up being “on-call” 24-hours a day, allowing the line between work and off-work hours to be increasingly blurred or manipulated.
Shift to Temporary Workers
The Metcalf report notes that since 2000, the number of migrant workers employed in Canada has more than tripled, especially among low-wage, low-skilled workers in sectors such as caregiving, agriculture, hospitality, food services, construction, and tourism.
In 2006 for the first time, the number of temporary foreign workers entering Canada exceeded the number of economic immigrants who were granted permanent resident status, and this trend has continued.
The report says a “critical and urgent public discussion” must take place to ensure that temporary workers rights abuses do not become “normalized,” and points out that the narrative in current policies tend to encourage discrimination.
“To the extent that laws construct workers as “temporary,” “foreign” and “unskilled,” they likewise devalue the real contributions of these workers to the functioning of our economy and communities and construct the workers as “other,” as “not us,” as persons outside the community to whom we need not be accountable,” reads the report.
Lim says if domestic work was more valued, it would be reflected in Canadian law and immigration policies.
“Live-in caregiving work and domestic work is valuable work,” she says. “Predominately women who come to Canada are helping to raise Canadian families—why don’t you just give them permanent residence status immediately?”
Canada yet to Ratify Labour Standards Treaty
In 2011, the International Labour Organization held a Domestic Workers Convention in Geneva that aimed to set labour standards for domestic workers, who are excluded in most countries from labour laws that regulate working time, minimum income, and basic employee protections.The ILO’s Convention189 was ratified in 2012 and will come into effect in September. Canada, however, has not yet joined and has been criticized for trying to weaken and impede adoption of the convention. Uruguay, the Philippines, Mauritius, Italy, Paraguay, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Colombia have all ratified the convention.
The convention is equal to an international treaty, and compels signatory nations to take steps to ensure fair labour standards for domestic workers and protect them from abuse. Countries that violate the terms of the treaty would face international sanctions.
Human Resources and Skills Development Canada has said that the federal government would need agreement from all provinces and territories before ratification could proceed.
“Canada often prides itself on being at the forefront of human rights and protecting people who are most vulnerable,” says Lim.
“Not ratifying this treaty sends a strong message to all live-in caregivers that the government does not protect them or promote the best interests of people who come into Canada and are in affect raising Canadian families.”
The Epoch Times publishes in 35 countries and in 21 languages. S
LIST OF 50 ARTICLES - MUST-READ - Click on the title and it will connect you to the full article
live-in caregivers
6 May 2013
Article, Hamilton Spectator,
15 March 2013
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21 May 2012
Article, Toronto Star
15 December 2011
Article, Toronto Star,
15 December 2011
Article, Atlas Medialive-in caregivers
27 February 2011
Article, Winnipeg Free Press,
13 December 2009
Article, Canadian Press,
11 December 2009
Article, CanWest News Service==========================================================
Advocates call for changes to Ottawa's 'nanny' program
Last Updated: Friday, March 25, 2005 | 8:41 PM ET
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2005/03/25/nannines050325.html
The Department of Immigration and the Philippines Congress are now investigating Canada's Live-in Caregiver Program - which provides thousands of Canadian households with nannies - after claims the program violates those workers' human rights.
In most cases, women who want to emigrate to Canada come as nannies and live with their Canadian employers.
Some, like Lettie Capinpin, say they were poorly treated by those employers. "I worked them for 12 to 13 hours a day, without my overtime pay," she said.
Capinpin stayed in the basement of her employers' mansion and cared for their three children six days a week. Even though her employers violated her contract, "I just remain silent. I didn't complain."
Filipino Woman training to be a nanny in the Philippines.
The Filipino Women's Centre helps nannies when they need to escape from bad employers. It says the women are supposed to get overtime and a private room. Many don't.
"Many report to us that they're sleeping where the furnace is," said Cecilia Diocson of the National Alliance of Philippine Women in Canada.
Diocson says Canada is using Filipina women as cheap labour to solve its childcare shortage. She wants Ottawa to scrap the 'live in' requirement. She says that's what makes workers so vulnerable to abuse.
"Deep inside they don't want to be in their employers' home because they feel jailed, or in prison, because they just want to get out after their eight hours of work. But because of the mandatory live in [requirement] they can't. So for me, it's a violation of [their] human rights. They need to have mobility. They want to live where they want to live."
More than 90 per cent of Canada's domestic workers come from the Philippines and there are now 800 caregiver schools in the impoverished country.
Temporary workers are the country's biggest export. Most of their earnings are sent home to support their families.
But recent complaints about the Live-in Caregiver Program prompted the Philippines Congress to launch its own investigation.
Canadian Immigration Minister Joe Volpe has heard an earful of complaints as well. "Whether the [Live-in Care Program] would stay as it is, or with minor or major considerations, or overhaul it or eliminate the program all together, we haven't come to a final analysis yet," he said.
Capinpin, who is now in a position to sponsor her family to come to Canada, wants the program changed so more women don't end up like her. "I'm still jobless, so I'm wondering what is happening to my children, because I was the only one who supports them."
A decision on the future of the Live-in Care Program is expected by the summer.
=============================================================
A Global Nanny's Story
The Philippines exports caregivers, stripping its own families of mothers. Crisanta Sampang knows the cost.
"It's a small world…but not if you have to clean it."
What prompted me to look more closely at a phenomenon so vast and unprecedented that it now strikes me as shocking never to have seen it addressed in any editorial on globalization was a slim, new book by Vancouver-based writer Crisanta Sampang. Sampang was born in the Philippines and worked as a nanny/housekeeper in Singapore from 1984-88, before immigrating to Canada to take a similar job. In Maid in Singapore, she writes that hers "is a story not of one person, but of countless others like me, who had left both hearth and home in the hope of finding a better life abroad." Like a million Filipinos a year, 70 percent of them women, she saw migrant work as her ticket out of poverty. What she left behind remained a secret for more than twenty years.
'Love' for hire
On a recent sunny afternoon, I join Sampang at a Filipino restaurant on the west side of Vancouver. It's the weekend and the direct-to-the-Philippines courier service across the street is crammed with women sending home the remittances that sustain their families. With more than eight million citizens working abroad, some ten percent of the population, foreign remittances are the Philippines' largest source of income, bringing in upwards of US$8 billion a year. Through nannies, housekeepers, nurses and home support workers, the country's primary export is something rarely identified as a global commodity: care.
In Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, co-editors Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild sum up the "feminization of migration" in startling terms.
"The lifestyles of the First World are made possible by a global transfer of the services associated with a wife's traditional role-child care, homemaking and sex-from poor countries to rich ones…Today, while still relying on Third World countries for agricultural and industrial labor, the wealthy countries also seek to extract something harder to measure and quantify, something that can look very much like love."
They offer a theory on the way modern life-workaholic, narcissistic, cut off from the obligations and supports of community-is affecting the emotional landscape. "It's as if the wealthy parts of the world are running short on precious emotional and sexual resources and have had to turn to poorer regions for fresh supplies."
The restaurant where I meet Sampang is full of nannies and former nannies, but she may be the first of their lot to publish a memoir. "It's a niche subject and no real domestic worker has written on it except The Nanny Diaries," says the very petite Sampang. She suspects the nanny diarists were fakes. They write in "this gossipy American way," she says, "looking down on their employers. I didn't look up to my employers, but I didn't think I was better, either."
On the rare occasion that magazines like Vogue write about the hidden world of domestic workers, it is inevitably from the employers' point of view: the secret jealousies of an ambitious Gucci-clad mother confronted by a nanny who bonds more closely to the children than either of the parents do (and, even more galling, may be younger and thinner than she). Or it's in the form of deliciously scandalous novels like the bestselling Diaries, wherein the caretaker (a graduate student on her way up and out, since no one would stay in such a job) exposes the comically dysfunctional lives of Manhattan's über-rich.
Sampang's memoir is about as far from that perspective as Vancouver is from her rural farming village. Her story begins with the suicide of Imelda, a desperate 23-year-old Filipina domestic who had lost her job. Imelda's parents had borrowed money to pay an agency to bring her to Singapore; if she was unsuccessful they could lose their farm. Imelda's suicide-later echoed by the suicide of a Filipina domestic working in Canada-is the most extreme response to a situation characterized, Sampang writes, by "isolation and lack of emotional support."
A long held secret
Though it begins on a tragic note, Sampang's account of the profession is largely positive, even light-hearted. She describes the employers who warmly welcomed her into their family and didn't object when she began writing about them in features for the Straits Times, her first foray into writing. She chronicles the way other domestics found love in the arms of migrant construction workers (or in one another's), touching briefly on the consequences for marriages back home.
Smart, attractive and confident, Sampang flourished in Singapore and Canada. She was not among the abused, the runaways, or the victims of sexual assault-fates that prey upon the particular vulnerabilities of workers in private homes. "I was living in a bubble with good employers, good people," she says. "And I didn't have much experience with abused nannies. But I heard things."
What she heard ran the gamut from those who didn't get time off to those that didn't get enough to eat. "I heard stories that their dogs were better fed than the domestic." In Canada, where many Filipinas who arrive under the federal Live-In Caregiver Program and have university degrees, there are reports of 16-hour works days, withheld pay, the subcontracting of their services, physical and sexual abuse, even forced captivity. Many keep silent for fear of losing their jobs.
At the table next to us, a Filipina toddler in a pink jumpsuit samples from her mother's plate.
Watching the little girl, I am reminded of Sampang's secret. By the time she left the Philippines in 1984, she had separated from her alcoholic husband and was struggling to support three daughters; aged seven, five, and two. Desperate to find work abroad, she did not declare her children. Later, when the opportunity arose to go to Canada-where the Live-In Caregiver Program allows domestic workers to apply for citizenship after two years-she did the same. After all, a domestic worker in Canada makes about the same per month that the average Filipino earns in a year-roughly $1000 US.
It was not until her book was published in Singapore last fall-hitting the Singapore Times bestseller list within two weeks-that her partner of ten years, writer Daniel Wood, read it and learned of the children. "He was blindsided," she says. But he understood her reasons. "It has made us closer. It was a great relief because now I can talk about my children."
This, then, is the hidden cost of the global trade in mothering-a cost that has become, in the words of Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, a "dark child's burden." An estimated 30 percent of Filipino children, some 8 million, live in households where at least one parent works abroad. In three Asian countries-the Philippines, Indonesia and Sri Lanka-women are the majority of migrant workers and most are mothers.
'Working for everyone'
"My children 'understand,'" says Sampang, curling her fingers into quotation marks, "but it's still not good enough. I thought they would be better off growing up with my mother, but apparently not."
The middle daughter dropped out of college at eighteen to marry a merchant marine after becoming pregnant. "I asked her why she got married so young," says Sampang. "She cried and said there was a hole in her life that cannot be filled. Now she is married and has a family to fill the hole."
The effect of migration on families is a "two-edged sword," Sampang says. Working abroad enabled her to buy her mother a house and property and send one of each of her brothers' children to college with the understanding that they will help their siblings. "A Filipino nanny is not working for herself only, she's working for everyone, first and foremost her children, then other family members."
But children who grow up with absentee parents show higher delinquency rates and often experience "reunification issues" after years of living apart. A cultural upheaval has taken place as parents compensate for their absence with money and gifts. "In the Philippines, every teenager has a cell phone, an iPod," says Sampang. "Everyone wants the latest fashion. It's become a western culture of materialism, as if the local is not good enough."
She sees an ingrained "colonial mentality" extending back to the Spanish and American occupations of the Philippines; a mentality that says "white skin is better," in which "everyone wants to leave." It is as if centuries of dependence on wealthier nations have created a crisis of faith in their own culture and country. A survey of children of Filipino migrant workers found that 60 percent want to leave. "They leave because they think life is better outside-and life is better," says Sampang. "There is so much poverty."
Sampang has made a good life for herself, working in television and film, exploring options that would have been unthinkable back home. Like most female migrant workers, she has settled abroad, visiting the Philippines for several weeks a year. Her, and the millions like her, epitomize the adaptable workforce praised by free market economists. They have made tough decisions that may just be their best options in the global economy.
Migrant work, dictators' debt
But why are these women forced to make such wrenching decisions, essentially abandoning their families in order to save them? What creates the conditions that compel them to leave?
The disturbing answer is that entire countries have become dependent on the incomes of migrant workers in order to service the foreign debts owed to international lenders like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. These loans have, to a remarkable degree, been handed to corrupt leaders with few or no controls. It would almost appear that the lenders crave the kind of power these massive debts afford them, from lucrative interest payments to the ability to dictate economic and social policy.
Between 1980 and 1999, the Philippines received nine structural adjustment loans from the World Bank. By the time Marcos went into exile in Hawaii following a people's revolution in 1986, half of the government's annual budget was earmarked to service foreign debt. And what did these debts accomplish?
The largest single debt of the Philippines is the Bataan nuclear power station. Constructed for more than $2 billion (all amounts in US dollars) on a fault line at the foot of an active volcano, it was completed in the mid-'80s but never opened due to safety concerns. The plant was built by US multinational Westinghouse, which allegedly paid $80 million in kickbacks to the Marcos government (and which built a similar plant in South Korea for a third the cost). Though Westinghouse eventually paid the Philippines government $100 million to drop charges of fraud, Filipino taxpayers still pay $155,000 a day in interest on the plant. The debt will not be repaid until 2018.
"We are not asking for debt forgiveness; we are asking for justice. We are asking the creditors to repent and debt cancellation would be a symbol of that repentance," said Archbishop Alberto Ramento of the Philippine Independent Church, in an interview in 1998. The IMF and World Bank, he said, had given loans to the Marcos regime despite knowledge of its corruption. "We are paying for the shoes of Imelda Marcos," he said.
A 'war' for dignity
Structural readjustment loans have required governments like the Philippines to cut funding to education, health and social services, exacerbating poverty and perpetuating the export of labour. Yet, the influx of foreign capital has not been used for development that might create the kind of society where women like Crisanta Sampang and her daughters can achieve their potential. Education has become focused on exportable skills, with doctors studying to be nurses in order to emigrate. Debt payments now account for nearly 70 percent of the Philippines' government expenditures. Spending on social services shrank from 35 percent of the budget in 2000 to 23 percent in 2004, sowing the seeds for greater social instability and extremism-and, of course, more migration.
The same factors lurk behind the growth of sex tourism-another form of "women's work," one with a long history linked to the American military presence in the Philippines. A friend who worked for an American high-tech company located at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines described the peeler bars and brothels that have sprung up around it to service US troops. One of his colleagues, an overweight middle-manager in his fifties, had found several Filipina "girlfriends" there, some as young as fourteen.
"Developing countries are fighting a war," said Archbishop Ramento. "We are fighting to live with dignity and we cannot win this war because we do not have the power to win it on the streets of Manila alone. But it can be won in the streets of London and Washington by those who have the power."
The kitchens and cradles of suburbia can seem a long way from the slums and brothels of the Third World, but they are linked by economic policies with far-reaching consequences. Somebody's mother, so attentive to the needs of her employers, listens to the voices of her children through the crackle of a long-distance connection. She notes how they have grown and changed, how they have become, through years of separation, almost strangers. Then she hangs up the phone as another voice, someone else's child or parent, calls her name.
Vancouver writer Deborah Campbell is the author of This Heated Place.
Join Crisanta Sampang and hear her story at the Canadian launch of Maid in Singapore on Thursday, March 30, 2006, at Fireside Books, 2652 Arbutus Street in Vancouver, from 7 to 9 PM.
==========================================
Live-in caregiver who worked four years without pay sues Richmond employer
A live-in caregiver who worked for four years without pay is suing her employer to recover the money she claims she's owed.
Photograph by: Vancouver Sun files , .
METRO VANCOUVER — A live-in caregiver who worked for four years without pay is suing her employer to recover the money she claims she's owed.
Evelyn Yacas worked 16-hour days tending to her employer's elderly mother at a home in Richmond, the B.C. Supreme Court lawsuit states.
Initially from the Philippines, Yacas moved to Canada in 2004 as part of the federal immigration and citizenship ministry's live-in caregiver program.
Yacas was hired by Christine Leung in the fall of 2004, she said, to work from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily. She was to be paid minimum wage, and overtime.
The exception, the lawsuit said, was that she was permitted to work a shorter, eight-hour day on the first day of her menstruation period each month.
Shortly after she was hired, Yacas claims she was "compelled" to sign a blank employment contract that could be renewed every year.
Her court claim said she was never given a copy of the document, but was told the contract would allow Leung to renew her work permit.
Under the terms of that contract, it was agreed Yacas would continue to work until she became a permanent resident, sponsored her family to join her in Canada, or Leung's mother died — whichever came first.
Yacas says the pair agreed that Leung would calculate wages and keep the wages in trust until her family was ready to immigrate from the Philippines and buy a house.
Leung did advance a portion of Yacas' wages so she could travel to see her family and send them funds, the court documents state, but these funds were not gifts and Yacas paid most of them back with interest.
Though she repeatedly asked for a tally of what she was owed, Yacas said Leung ignored her requests, or said she was "too busy" to do the calculations.
Leung's mother died after being diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2008 and her employment was ended.
Yacas said she did not receive a paystub or receipt for the duration of her work. She was, however, issued a tax receipt that listed her annual income in the range of $12,000 to $16,000.
Yacas filed a complaint with the Employment Standards Branch, but it was rejected because it exceeded the time limitation period.
Court documents state Leung's legal counsel sent Yacas a letter notifying the caregiver she no longer has a claim to her wages.
Nothing has been proven in court and Leung has not yet submitted a statement of defence.
© Copyright (c)
Evelyn Yacas worked 16-hour days tending to her employer's elderly mother at a home in Richmond, the B.C. Supreme Court lawsuit states.
Initially from the Philippines, Yacas moved to Canada in 2004 as part of the federal immigration and citizenship ministry's live-in caregiver program.
Yacas was hired by Christine Leung in the fall of 2004, she said, to work from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily. She was to be paid minimum wage, and overtime.
The exception, the lawsuit said, was that she was permitted to work a shorter, eight-hour day on the first day of her menstruation period each month.
Shortly after she was hired, Yacas claims she was "compelled" to sign a blank employment contract that could be renewed every year.
Her court claim said she was never given a copy of the document, but was told the contract would allow Leung to renew her work permit.
Under the terms of that contract, it was agreed Yacas would continue to work until she became a permanent resident, sponsored her family to join her in Canada, or Leung's mother died — whichever came first.
Yacas says the pair agreed that Leung would calculate wages and keep the wages in trust until her family was ready to immigrate from the Philippines and buy a house.
Leung did advance a portion of Yacas' wages so she could travel to see her family and send them funds, the court documents state, but these funds were not gifts and Yacas paid most of them back with interest.
Though she repeatedly asked for a tally of what she was owed, Yacas said Leung ignored her requests, or said she was "too busy" to do the calculations.
Leung's mother died after being diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2008 and her employment was ended.
Yacas said she did not receive a paystub or receipt for the duration of her work. She was, however, issued a tax receipt that listed her annual income in the range of $12,000 to $16,000.
Yacas filed a complaint with the Employment Standards Branch, but it was rejected because it exceeded the time limitation period.
Court documents state Leung's legal counsel sent Yacas a letter notifying the caregiver she no longer has a claim to her wages.
Nothing has been proven in court and Leung has not yet submitted a statement of defence.
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