These maids are getting out of control!

Maids are in the news again. Maids in Singapore are a hardworking bunch. Many of them have to wake up at 5:00am and work nonstop until after midnight. The first thing they do in the morning is wash the car. They do this every day, even if the car has been unused since the previous day and is still sparkling.

We sometimes hear of a maid who isn’t given enough food. As cheap as food is here, some maids only get one or two slices of bread a day. Fortunately, they can sometimes get a bit of extra food from a neighbor’s maid.

Quite a few maids fall to their death each year while cleaning windows. The government has tried to teach employers how to safeguard their maids, but they still keep splattering on the pavement. I suspect many of them lean out too far because they are terrified at what might happen if they miss a spot. Many employers abuse their maids for the slightest reasons. And the abuse is not a simple slap or punch as you might expect. An informal SORRI survey of newspaper accounts over the last twelve years suggests that the most common forms of maid abuse are:

Beating her with a bamboo pole, broomstick, clothes hanger, or cooking spoon

Smashing her head into the wall

Scalding her with boiling water

Burning her with a hot clothes iron

For some reason, pinching her breasts is also a popular form of abuse.

Once in a while an employer (usually a woman) goes to jail for maid abuse, sometimes for several weeks, but these punishments are very light compared to those meted out for other offenses. I am sure many more instances of maid abuse never become public because the maid is paid to keep quiet, or she is too terrified or ignorant to take action. Some maids are sent home before they even earn enough to repay the loans they took to come here, thus going home in worse financial shape than the poverty that drove them to come here in the first place, simply because they were cursed with a lousy employer.

There has been talk of making it mandatory for employers to give their maids one day off every week. Predictably, most of the talk from the street opposes the idea. Some complain because they need their maids every day to take care of elderly parents, young children, or invalids. But many are more concerned that their maids will get into trouble by getting boyfriends, getting pregnant, or doing part time work. The thinking seems to be "I'm not paying her to have a life, I'm paying her to work."

To these people I'd like to say:

Your maid was a human being long before she became "your" maid. Her time off (if any) is hers. If she wants companionship on her day off that's her choice. If she gets pregnant she'll be on the next flight home, so it won't be your problem. If you're worried about the expense of sending her back and replacing her, that's the risk you agreed to when you took her. And Singaporeans tend to admire ambitious go getters of the non-maid variety, so why is it so bad if a maid wants to earn extra money? They didn't come here because they want to care for your family, they came to make money to support theirs.

In addition to giving maids tests to determine whether they are suitable to work here as maids, we should test would-be employers to determine whether they are worthy of having a maid.

Bank speaks Plain English

OCBC Bank announced that they have adopted the Plain English approach. They will begin using simple language instead of legalese for their contracts with customers.

When I was in law school twenty five years ago we were taught to draft documents in Plain English. For example, instead of writing “cease and desist” we would write “stop.” I thought that was a good idea. When you’re charging a client a princely sum to draft a document it is only fair that said client should be able to peruse and comprehend said document, regardless of the cranial capacity and level of intellect of the aforesaid client. As a young attorney I began using simple language in my documents and turned them over to the senior partner for his approval. He would take out his red pen and change all my “stop”s to “cease and desist”s.

If OCBC can get these past their legal department it will be a welcome change.

SIA to launch low-cost carrier

That was the exact headline from today’s ST. And welcome news it is. I have often thought it would be wonderful to fly non-stop to the US and speed up the miserably long flight I make every year, but SIA’s current flights that go direct to New York have no economy class whatsoever!

It makes good business sense. Let the highly profitable airline take only high-paying business and first class passengers, and start a budget airline for regular people who don’t have $10,000 to spend on a single ticket.

The new airline would focus on medium and long haul flights. Most Singaporeans have done the usual holidays in the region – Bali, Phuket, Hong Kong, etc. This might help them get to more distant destinations, without paying SIA’s usual pricey rates.

There are other synergies as well. Instead of firing their Singapore Girls when they get pregnant, or develop crow’s feet, they could simply redeploy them to the low-end side of the operation.

Singapore Biennale

There has been some controversy surrounding the recent Singapore Biennale, aside from the removal/shutdown/censoring/call-it-what-you-will of the installation piece with the gay porn. It concerns the attendance figures of the event.

The Biennale supposedly drew over 900,000 visitors to its various venues, including the Singapore Art Museum. Over 700,000 “visitors” were passing by public displays, a highly suspect figure. SAM itself drew about 740,000 in all of 2009. The world renowned Venice Biennale drew a measley 375,000 during six months in 2009, according to the Straits Times. The paper further states that about 196,000 attended SAM, the National Museum, the highly publicized Merlion Hotel exhibit, and the Old Kallang Airport location during the two month run.

Dividing 740,000 by 12, let’s say SAM would have had about 62,000 visitors a month, or 124,000 during the entire event. Take that from 196,000 and you get 72,000. I assume the National Museum also gets several thousand visitors in a normal month, and the Merlion Hotel exhibit had so much hype it no doubt lured many thousands of curiousity seekers. Which leaves just a few for the Old Kallang Airport.

I joined the extended family for an afternoon at OKA during the Biennale. It was a weekend afternoon, billed as “Family Day,” yet the place was not crowded by any measurement. Cherisse made three kites, a couple of badges, and a cardboard house at the kiddie art area. I ventured into a few of the buildings to see the “professional” art. And what did I see?

There was one space (a good art critic doesn’t use words like “room,” we prefer “space”) containing the contents of a Chinese provision shop. Lots of plastic buckets, porcelain bowls with roosters painted on them, feather dusters, etc. I guess this was for the benefit of any local or tourist who never ventured into such a shop in Chinatown. Pointless. Another room (I mean space) was filled with huge paper tubes representing who knows what. There was a very fake looking German barn with some real live boys in lederhosen lounging on the hay, which might have qualified as child porn in some places.

I have done a few installation and performance art pieces during my high school and university days, and my idea of art encompasses more than the traditional still life/portrait/landscape kind of thing. But I have to say this was the worst art exhibition I have ever seen, and a few of my friends felt the same way. The best part was a large space (there I go again – damn, I’m good!) filled with hundreds of drawings by local primary school students.

Forget the incredibly misleading numbers, this event was an unpopular fiasco. And I don’t mean to belittle the organizers, the people helping the tykes make their kites, or the primary schoolers. I just hope they do a better job next time.

I'll drink to that...

I was in a bookstore this afternoon. Actually, it’s more of a stationery shop as it sells more school supplies and school assessment materials than books. I won’t mention the name, but let’s just say it’s quite a popular chain.

Anyway, they had a large selection of board games. Alongside Monopoly and Cluedo I was shocked to see a game called Drinking Roulette, another called Shots and Ladders, and two other drinking games. I had the impression that they catered mostly to the primary school market, but it seems they have something for the university crowd as well.

I know it when I see it

An artist had an installation on display at the Singapore Art Museum, but something was missing, namely, a number of gay pornographic magazines that had been part of the exhibit. Said magazines had been removed by SAM, allegedly without the knowledge or consent of the artist. While SAM may have had some legal concerns, the artist could have been consulted.

Kudos to Straits Times columnist Ong Sor Fern for her courageous stand. She not only lashed out at the museum, she compared their actions to vandalism! Actually, she said it was “tantamount to an act of vandalism,” and further qualified her statement with a “to me”. Still, pretty gutsy. Whether her comparison is accurate or not, I don’t expect anyone at SAM to be caned like Michael Fay or Ollie Fricker.

I recall seeing some X-rated art in China (okay, it was actually Taiwan), where the galleries containing the “offending” images had been cordoned off and warning signs displayed. Pretty liberal, eh?

I gotta wonder whether it was the gay part of the porn that set off the censors. Perhaps Ms. Ong or fellow intrepid columnist Andy Ho would like to look into that. What with Yale hooking up with NUS with the understanding that discussions on campus will be free as befits a liberal arts college, perhaps the times they are a-changin’.

Driving for exercise

Homeowners near MacRitchie Reservoir are having problems with joggers parking their cars in front of their homes, sometimes blocking their driveway and causing them to park far from their own homes. This is due to the public parking lot charging for what was until recently free parking.

Here’s how it works. The joggers get into their cars, pay for petrol, maybe even pay ERP charges, drive to the reservoir, and park in the surrounding neighbourhood because they are too cheap to pay for parking at the reservoir itself.

What is the point of driving your car so you can go jogging? Why not jog to the nearest park? Don’t they have sidewalks in their own neighbourhoods?