[Herald Interview] Why Hong Kong's foreign domestic worker policy shouldn't be model for Korea

While the 98 Filipina caregivers in Seoul city’s pilot program are protected under South Korea’s Labor Standards Act, Act on the Employment Improvement of Domestic Workers and statutory minimum wage, some government officials have been talking about making the project more like Hong Kong’s foreign domestic helper scheme.

Some have said Korea should follow Hong Kong’s model and exclude foreign domestic workers from the minimum wage. Foreign caregivers here could be hired through direct contracts with Korean households, they say.

As an ex-colony and special administrative region, Hong Kong has not independently ratified any International Labor Organization or UN human rights conventions.

However, in Korea, excluding foreign caregivers from the minimum wage would violate a number of the 32 ILO and UN human rights conventions in force here -- including ILO Convention C111, which prohibits all forms of discrimination in employment and occupation.

In Hong Kong, the minimum wage of HK$40 ($5.15) per hour, equating to a monthly salary of HK$6,933 ($890) for a 40-hour workweek, applies to all workers – except foreign domestic workers.

By comparison, in Korea, the minimum wage is 2.06 million won ($1,467) a month for a 40-hour workweek, despite Hong Kong being the most expensive city in the world, while Seoul is the 32nd-most, according to consulting firm Mercer’s 2024 cost of living data.

But in Hong Kong, the 356,231 foreign domestic workers are set a separate minimum allowable wage, 22 percent lower, at just HK$4,990 a month.

“The argument is that, because we’re live-in domestic workers … they say it’s ‘hard’ to calculate our working hours because the whole day, our employer is working, so, I don’t know, maybe they think that if they’re away, we’re not working,” said Shiela Tebia-Bonifacio, a Filipina domestic worker in Hong Kong for 18 years and head of a migrant women’s organization there.

“But that’s also insane because we’re working at home. We do all the household chores, like going to market -- you know, everything.”

According to Princeton University sociologist Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, Hong Kong’s policy of legally binding live-in foreign domestic workers to their employers as sponsors, while removing the workers from basic state protections like the statutory minimum wage and international labor laws, subjects them to the arbitrary authority of their employer.

The “employer’s word is virtually law,” and “allows them to indiscriminately dominate domestic workers,” as in Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia and the Middle East’s kafala system, the professor explains in her book, “Unfree: Migrant Domestic Work in Arab States.”

Hong Kong already averages one of the longest workweeks globally at 42 hours, according to 2018 data compiled by Hong Kong’s Legislative Council Secretariat. But migrant domestic workers work a brutal 57 to 128.6 percent more than that -- at least 66-96 hours a week -- according to data in a Mission for Migrant Workers May 2017 report.

Per day, sixty percent of them reported working 11-16 hours, while 40 percent reported working more than 16 hours a day, six days a week.

This means that foreign domestic workers can be paid as little as HK$13 an hour, despite an April Oxfam study finding that Hong Kong residents must earn at least HK$61.50 an hour to meet basic needs.

Some foreign domestic workers are not given food at all -- only allotted a food allowance.

“And the (government’s minimum) food allowance is not even livable,” she said. It breaks down to HK$41.20 a day, which is only enough to buy a few packs of noodles.

Korea should not follow Hong Kong’s foreign domestic helper policy as a model, Tebia-Bonifacio stressed, as doing so it would risk undermining basic labor and human rights.

Drawing from five decades of the policy, she detailed its detrimental effects on people’s lives: from keeping foreign domestic workers trapped in cycles of poverty and insecurity, to the often-overlooked tensions between parents and domestic workers that alter relations in the family and shape children as they grow up.

Bound servitude

In Hong Kong, the government binds foreign domestic workers to their employers as visa sponsors, giving the families they work for control over workers' wages, work hours, freedom to change jobs, immigration status, housing, food and personal safety.

One way this arrangement constricts workers’ lives is through the “two-week rule.” Foreign domestic workers must leave the territory within 14 days if their employer decides to terminate their contract -- no matter the reason -- even if the worker wishes to find an employer with better working conditions.

“There’s no job security. Anytime, my employer, if they’re not satisfied, they can terminate my contract,“ said Tebia-Bonifacio.

As foreign domestic workers’ visa status is tied to their employer and not transferrable, in the best case, if the worker finds another employer within those two weeks, she is still required to fly back to the Philippines to wait 1.5-2 months without pay for her visa to be processed.

In worse cases, a “terminated” worker must return to the Philippines and apply for a job all over again via a recruitment agency. Filipino domestic workers typically have to pay $1,672-$2,795 in miscellaneous fees to get placed with an employer, according to May figures from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration.

This equates to five to eight months' salary based on the Philippines’ monthly GNI per capita last year, according to its National Economic and Development Authority.

Filipino domestic workers usually have to borrow money to pay the fees. “It took the women an average of 10 months to repay their loans and earn back the money spent on their migration,” states the 2016 report, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place.”

“Once you get terminated, then you need another visa for the new employer. That’s terrible and actually it’s very discriminatory. … Why has it become a crime to change employers?” Tebia-Bonifacio said.

‘Permanently temporary’

In Hong Kong, the cycle of poor working conditions and abuse motivating workers to change employers has paradoxically led the government to penalize the workers.

In recent years it has denied new work visas to workers who “prematurely” terminate their contracts, based on its claim that they are “job-hopping“-- a practice slammed as “racist and discriminatory” by the Hong Kong Federation of Asian Domestic Workers Unions last year.

As Tebia-Bonifacio puts it, “…We’re not going to ‘job-hop’ if the conditions, if our conditions at our employers are good. We would not change employers if we received a better salary, or if we were treated human. We would stay with our employer if they did not physically abuse us."

“But if they physically abuse us and it’s life-threatening, do we not have a choice? Do we not have a right to transfer or to look for a better employer?”

Tebia-Bonifacio has spent nearly half her life working in Hong Kong, and her mother also worked there for over a decade. Yet while all other foreign national residents are eligible to apply for permanent residency after seven years, foreign domestic workers are excluded, making them also ineligible for naturalization.

Hong Kong’s immigration rules lock foreign domestic workers into the vulnerable status of being “permanently temporary,” despite their essential work in the territory’s households and presence in society for more than a half-century, according to University of Pittsburgh anthropologist Nicole Constable.

Conflicts between workers, women

While some Korean officials advocate bringing in foreign caregivers as a strategy to encourage more local women to work, this is not what has happened in Hong Kong.

Women‘s labor participation in the territory has remained at around 50 percent since 1993, lower than Korea’s 59 percent over the same period, according to Hong Kong Women‘s Commission and World Bank data.

The share of Hong Kong women who have suffered career interruptions -- 30 percent -- is also nearly double that of Korean women, at 16.7 percent, according to data from Hong Kong's Women’s Foundation and Statistics Korea.

Meanwhile, the ways in which the Hong Kong government treats migrant domestic workers have generated conflicts in society over the years.

Hong Kong was classified this year as a “super-aged society” by the OECD, but Tebia-Bonifacio says that most families won‘t hire local or mainland care workers since their salaries are significantly higher.

“What’s shocking about it is we are doing the same work,” attending to the daily needs of elderly employers, changing their diapers, bringing them to the hospital – everything except injecting medication, she said.

“But the migrant domestic workers are paid less than those caregivers.”

She noted that while it has recently introduced various other types of professional care workers, the government still officially refers to foreign domestic workers as “helpers,” a “degrading term” that she says reproduces a stereotype that their work is “a very low job,” of little value.

Tebia-Bonifacio added that the way foreign domestic workers are assumed simply to substitute upper- or middle-class Hong Kong women in the household has actually complicated relations within families.

“In my own experience, my employer got jealous of me because the kids were closer to me than to them,” she recalled when her former employer admitted to lashing out at Tebia-Bonifacio because her daughter always asked for “Shiela” instead of “Mom.”

“I explained it like, ‘What do you expect? We are there for your family when they’re born. You’re a working mom. You’re a working dad. So, in the morning, the only time you see them is at breakfast. And then, sometimes you are not in Hong Kong. You are on your business trip. The kids actually, literally grow up with us!’”

Right to care

Yangsook Kim, assistant professor of sociology at Florida Atlantic University, cautions about policies that introduce low-wage foreign women to replace the care and domestic labor of local women.

Such policies “homogenize” women and preserve “the gender status quo,” by keeping care and domestic work the exclusive responsibility of women in general, and a menial responsibility at that – one assumed to be dealt with “at the lowest cost possible.”

“Ultimately I would argue that it doesn‘t help women at all in the long term,” Kim told The Korea Herald.

“The thing about care (is) it’s work. However, you also need to think about the ‘right to care,’” she said.

Instead of framing care as simply a task to be solved in the cheapest way possible, Korea’s women, men, everyone -- Kim stressed -- need to demand their right to spend time with their families, to be moms and dads for their children, not to be exploited by their workplaces, to personal time, to work-life balance.

As South Korea debates whether a foreign caregiver program is right for the country, this piece is the second of two to offer an in-depth look into the effects of Hong Kong’s migrant domestic worker policy, through the life of a Filipina domestic worker in the territory. --Ed.