The Maid - Reliable? Biodatas

Employers Burnt By Misleading Biodata

MANY employers have been the victims of unreliable biodata provided to them by maid agencies.
Gina D. 51, working mother of four.
In 2006, I applied for a maid who was supposed to be 35 years old as stated in the biodata provided to me. She could pass for 35 from her photograph as well. However, when I picked her up from the agency I was shocked at how much older she looked.
She was definitely in her 50s or even older. I later found out that her hair was actually almost completely white and she had been dyeing it black to cover it up.
When I confronted my agency, they said that maids sometimes lie about their age. They couldn’t have known, they said, as the Indonesian agencies just send them the biodatas and the photos and they distribute that to their customers who make a choice.
As I really needed the help and didn’t want to go through the process of applying for another one, I thought I’d give her a chance.
We tried for a year before I decided to send her back. Because of her age she was very difficult to work with and would answer back frequently.
I can’t confirm if they let her work with someone else but I think she must have left the country as I applied for a check-out memo after deciding to send her back.
Once you apply for a check-out memo, the maid has to leave the country by a certain date and if she hadn’t left I wouldn’t have been able to apply for a replacement maid (which I was able to do).

Stretching the truth: Some agencies falsify biodata to make maids appear bigger and stronger than they actually are.

Susan, homemaker, mother of three.
I once had an underaged maid who lied about her age. In her biodata she had listed down her age as 24 or 25 but when she arrived you could tell she was very young. It turned out that she was only 15 and she didn’t know anything! She told me that the agency asked her to lie about her age or she would not be allowed into the country. I held on to her for as long as I could but in the end she just couldn’t handle the work
Another problem is when they claim to have worked with children before but when they come you can tell that they actually haven’t. I’ve not really sent back many maids before their contract has ended.
The agencies never take responsibility anyway. You tend to just ignore what you read in the biodata because you end up having to train them all over again.
From the biodata you choose a maid based on if you’re happy with her face, and that she’s physically well or can be at home alone and take care of dogs. The agencies are not going to bother checking either if they can actually do what they say.
Once when I was living with my mother-in-law, we had a maid who was three months pregnant when she arrived! We actually confronted the agency about it but they said they weren’t responsible as the maids are supposed to undergo a screening in Indonesia.
I think employers are victims in the sense that this maid had worked for my mother-in-law less than a year, and they said they’d give her another maid but she still had to pay all over again because the local agency wasn’t liable.
CG, KL, working mother of one.
My husband worked in Indonesia for a long time and from what he knew and from what people have told us, we didn’t want to employ a maid from this particular region of Indonesia as they are known to be aggressive. We made sure our agency knew that.
I picked my maid from all the biodata given to me because she fulfilled certain criteria and had completed her Form 5.
When she showed up, however, it turned out that she was from that region we weren’t keen on!
Also despite her biodata saying otherwise, she couldn’t cook. She had a horrible attitude – she was always falling ill and waking up late, probably because she was using the phone till late at night.
So after five months of her behaviour, we decided to send her back. We dropped her off at the agency who later told us she was being sent back to Indonesia.
I never went into her room as I respected her privacy, but when she left I had to. I found that she had been stealing things like money and had vandalised all my antique furniture in her room!
My agency never reimbursed us or even apologised.
Of course, there are agencies who now allow you to interview them (potential maids) over webcam but you can’t really trust that because it could be rehearsed.
I feel very violated and taken advantage of by that maid agency. I think it is the government’s fault really for never having put into place real procedures or ensuring that agencies’ standards are maintained.
Paula S, working mother of two.
In 2004, I applied for a maid to take care of my elderly mother. On both her biodata and her working permit, her age was listed as 25 years old. As she was tall we didn’t question it.
The next year when we were celebrating her birthday, we asked her how old she was going to be and she told us that she was only 19! She said the agency in Indonesia had asked her to lie about her age otherwise she wouldn’t get a job.
We didn’t inform the Malaysian agency so we don’t really know if they knew her real age.
But even if I had known then that she was only 18 when she came, I probably would have still employed her unless it was illegal as she was emotionally mature.
Low W.S. 54, homemaker, mother of three.
About seven or eight years ago, I employed an Indonesian maid. Her biodata was all right – she was 28 and had a husband and kids.
When she got here, though, and started working she was always complaining that she was tired at the end of the day, which didn’t seem right because she was so young. I suspected she was pregnant but didn’t say anything.
There’s supposed to be a screening procedure in Indonesia to make sure the maids aren’t pregnant before they are sent here. But maybe technology was different back then and they didn’t detect it.
However, after working for two months, I confronted her and she admitted that she was pregnant. I took her to a doctor and discovered that she was five months pregnant! So, of course, I sent her back to the agency and got a replacement maid.

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Maid To Fit The Bill

For most people who are seeking to hire foreign maids, the biodata is their first introduction to their potential employee. However, the information it contains has proven to be not as truthful as it should be.
WITH her mother’s worsening health, Marie Gomez has no choice but to hire a foreign maid to help care for her. But after hearing numerous hair-raising stories about maids from hell, Gomez is being extra careful in the selection process.
“It is definitely not easy when you only have a stack of biodata to base your selection on. There is no guarantee that all the information submitted is true,” she says.
Even the pictures provided with the biodata raise doubts.
“The prospective domestic workers claim to be of average weight but they look really frail and scrawny in the pictures,” relates Gomez.
“I thought I had found one who looks strong and sturdy enough to look after my mother and help lift her if needed, but then I realised that her picture was stretched sideways to make her look bigger than she really is. In fact she is as scrawny as the rest.”

Age limit: The rule, according to the last memorandum of understanding between Malaysia and Indonesia, is that Indonesian domestic workers who are selected for work in Malaysia must be at least 21 years old and no more than 45. – Filepic

Falsification of biodata, including for their official documents, among foreign domestic workers is more rampant than we realise.
Chan G. from Kuala Lumpur likens selecting a maid from a biodata to buying a lottery ticket.
Says the working mother of one, “I picked my maid from all the biodata given to me because she fulfilled certain criteria and had completed her secondary schooling. When she showed up, however, she was nothing like what she claimed to be.”
Despite her biodata saying otherwise, she could not cook and her attitude was bad, she adds.
“She rang up a phone bill of RM1,400 at my house. She was completely disloyal and unreliable. We discovered later on that she was entertaining people at our home when we were not around as weird people began showing up at our doorstep. When I confronted her about her attitude three or four months after she came to us, she told me that she had not wanted to be a maid but had wanted to work at a factory instead. So we decided to send her back to the agent who promised to send her back to Indonesia.”
A few months after her maid left, says Chan, she started receiving threatening messages from her.
“I learnt later that she was not sent back to Indonesia and is now working for a new employer in Malaysia. My agency never reimbursed us or even apologised,” she says, adding that she will never hire a full-time maid again after her experience.
The biodata is basically a resume for the maid. It contains information about the identity, age and experience of the maid and other details such as their working preferences, willingness to handle pork, take care of dogs or care for the elderly.
“In many situations, however, this information is made up by the agents to make the maids more marketable,” says Migrant Care Malaysia country director Alex Wong.
Many employers keep mum when their domestic workers fail to live up to their biodata or when they find discrepancies in the information provided because “returning” them will cost money.
Employers would have to pay an additional “exchange” fee of between RM,1000 and RM3,000 for a replacement maid, or start the process all over again, forking out the standard fee of RM8,000 as required when one seeks to hire a foreign maid.
Wong alleges that this has created a “business” where some agencies sell their migrant workers to different employers after they are found wanting and sent back by their original employer.
Malaysian Association of Foreign Maid Agencies (Papa) president Alwi Bavutty views this claim as rubbish but concedes that many foreign domestic workers who are sent to Malaysia, especially those from Indonesia, do falsify their personal details when applying for their passport and visa.
“But there is not much we can do because they are supposed to be screened before they come over,” he says.
Maid agency director Datuk Raja Zulkepley Dahalan agrees, stressing that the biodata is a necessary evil because it provides an insight of the maid’s background for employers.
“It is for employers to choose according to their specification. Once they agree, they have to pay the Indonesian agent a 10% deposit to secure the biodata or to book the domestic worker.

Raja Zulkepley: ‘The biodata is a necessary evil because it provides an insight of the maid’s background’

“Most of the payment goes to the Indonesian agent. Our profit is only around RM630 per maid and we have to pay for our office expenses and staff,” he says.
Wong attributes the problem to the hiring system in place.
“True, currently the biodata is the only way that employers can check out the candidates but what you see on paper is often not what you get,” he says.
This has led to numerous cases of maids running away because they are not willing to handle dogs or pork, although their biodata clearly states otherwise.
“Malaysian employers need to be smart ‘consumers’ when they deal with the agencies instead of acting desperately and giving in to all the demands of the agents when they don’t do anything other than provide the biodata,” stresses Wong.
They need to ensure that the domestic workers they receive are trained. In Indonesia, for example, the regulation is that they get 200 hours of training. There are agencies who do not follow the regulation but they claim they do.
Malaysian agents are also supposed to “retrain” the maids they receive before dispatching them to the employer to ensure that they are able to do the work they have been hired for. Unfortunately, this is not a regulation in Malaysia.
Wong highlights that there are many Indonesian domestic workers who are lured to Malaysia to work as factory workers or shop assistants.
“Some even have it stated in their employment contract but when they get here, they are forced to become domestic workers because that is a more lucrative market. This causes a lot of bad blood between the employers and domestic workers,” he says.
Tenaganita programme coordinator Aegile Fernandez concurs, saying that many are sweet-talked into working abroad.
“They are promised lots of money and a better life to come to Malaysia. Some are promised other jobs – like work in a restaurant – but when they arrive they are forced to be maids.
“But they are bound to the agency because they have either spent a lot of money or owe the agency money for the ‘expenses’ to come to Malaysia. Some are even threatened with prostitution,” she says.
Wong believes that many Malaysian agents are colluding with their overseas counterparts to falsify the biodata and other documents of the foreign maids.
The most common “lie” is the age of the prospective domestic worker.
This is well demonstrated by the recent case of the underage maid who torched her employer’s sister’s home in Terengganu after he decided to send her back to Indonesia.
Early investigations revealed that she had gained entry with a proper but allegedly falsified document, which listed a fake name and birth date.
While the police were baffled about how she manipulated her personal details, anyone with a foreign maid at home or those who have gone through the experience of hiring one will vouch that this is part and parcel of the process of hiring a foreign maid.
The rule, according to the last memorandum of understanding (MOU) between Malaysia and Indonesia (we are currently in the midst of negotiations on a new one), is that Indonesian domestic workers who are selected for work in Malaysia must be at least 21 years old and no more than 45.
However, industry insiders say that the accepted average minimum age for Indonesian maids in Malaysia is 18, which is the minimum age allowed for Indonesians to work abroad.
The situation is that in most areas in Indonesia, registration of citizens is not strict while the control system is loose, so there are many abuses.
Most of the poor in rural villages don’t even bother to register their newborn babies for birth certificates or get proper identification papers (ID) when they come of age, he says.
“Many only do it when they want to work as a migrant or domestic worker. They are then assisted by their sponsors, who help process their paperwork to create their identity and get their ID for the purpose of applying for a passport and visa.
“To get a passport, the documentation requirement is more stringent but with a small payment, the process can be made easier and faster,” Wong says.
This is a common practice in Indonesia, he adds, and this is common knowledge among Malaysian agents who use it to their advantage.
“Many Malaysian agents just accept whatever documents and whoever the Indonesian agents send over to them without question. When problems arise, they pass the blame and responsibility back to the Indonesian agents.”
Alwy denies this, stressing that most of the time the minors get through our immigration gates because the documents are genuine.
“It is difficult for us to verify if the data is true or not. If it is accepted by the Indonesian authorities, we should accept it. We do have our own measures to check this; we will interview the candidates to ascertain their real age when we suspect that they are younger than they claim,” he says.
Fernandez warns employers who are landed with an underaged maid to report the case to the authorities.
“If you suspect that a maid is young, send her back and report the agency to the authorities. It is illegal to bring in underaged maids; it could surmount to human trafficking,” she says.
These underaged domestic workers are usually not able to handle the work or the conditions of the work, being isolated from other people and, more often than not, having no means of communication with their families back home.
“They do not have the maturity yet at that age to handle their emotions, what more when they are alone in a strange country. That is why some of them ‘explode’ and take revenge on their employers,” she cautions, citing the case of a 16-year-old Indonesian maid who stabbed her employer’s mother to death in Kuantan in 2008 after she allegedly got tired of the old lady’s nagging and scolding.
Employers really need to keep in mind that these underaged maids are basically still children, she adds.
“At 14 to 16 years old, for example, a girl is young and still wants to have fun. Many do not want to spend their days cooped up doing long hours of housework.”

Both Sources: The Star

The Maid - Yes Or No, They Are Our Daughters, Too

Escaping Hard Labour: Maids In Malaysia Return 

David Boyle and Mom Kunthear

Photo by: Sovan Philong

A group of Cambodian workers are trained at VC Manpower office in Phnom Penh’s Sen Sok district last August before departing for Malaysia.

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If the recruitment agencies want to go legit they
have  to stop providing loans, it’s as simple as that

One week after they arrived at a maid training centre in Malaysia last year, two teenage Cambodian girls say their intake of recruits, fed up with working conditions, tied their instructor to a chair and fled the premises.

The girls say they had been forced to work from 7am to 5pm with just a three-minute lunch break, performing a monotonous training programme before going home to study English before bed.

Their instructor, they say, had devised a spirit-crushing regime, making the girls wash every floor, surface and utensil in the centre, then wash the same items again for days on end.

“I wondered why the office was small, yet my boss ordered me to clean it again and again,” says Soy, who has requested her real name be concealed.

“The trainer did not hit me, they just blamed me. I could not endure working in the office so much.”

Soy and two other girls with her were under the minimum legal working age in Cambodia – 18-years-old – and well below the required 21 to work in Malaysia, according to photocopies of their birth certificates obtained from the rights group Licadho and seen by The Post.

The documents show the girls were aged between 15 and 16 at the time of departure – an assertion that the company that sent them there, Ung Rithy Group Co Ltd, strongly denies.

Outside the offices of the labour company Soy says her, and 12 other trainees, found themselves stranded with no idea where they were, no passports and no way of calling home.

Stumbling upon a church, the girls say they took refuge and began a long process involving the anti-human trafficking group Tenaganita, the Cambodian embassy in Malaysia and a lawyer who ultimately would lead to the repatriation of the three girls while their other colleagues were sent back to work.

Conditions like those described by the girls echo a recurring theme documented in a litany of complaints filed to rights groups and police by women working in Cambodia’s labour-recruitment industry.

Aegile Fernandez, anti-human trafficking coordinator of Tenaganita, says her organisation has rescued 55 Cambodian women and girls from abusive conditions at different firms since April last year, at least 20 of whom were underage.

But Fernandez says these efforts have been hamstrung by an alarming aspect of what she has been told by the Cambodian embassy in Malaysia is government policy.

“The embassy tells us that it is a policy of the Cambodian government that the [rescued] girls must be sent back to the agency,” she says.

“From our experience once the victims go back to the agency, they are abused by the agency and then they are re-trafficked back to Malaysia.”

The Cambodian embassy was repeatedly called to confirm or deny that it advocated such a policy but officials did not make themselves available for comment.

Koy Kuong, spokesman for Cambodia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, denies any such policy exists.

“In principle the embassy has to cooperate with the company to repatriate them back to Cambodia, not to send them back to the company for further employment,” he said.

“The Cambodian embassy in Malaysia, after rescuing them from the abusive places, cooperates with the respective country in order to repatriate them to their homes in Cambodia.”

Under no circumstances, he says, should a worker who is underage or who has allegedly been subjected to abuse be returned to the organisation which sent them to work, even if the company has paid for the return ticket.

“When they are repatriated into Cambodia the social affairs department or anti-human trafficking police take them back to their provinces,” he said.

When Soy and the girls arrived back in Phnom Penh on June 16, 2010, staff members from both rights group Licadho and Ung Rithy Group were waiting to pick them up.

Both sought to take custody of the girls.

Licadho argues that as underage workers sent to Malaysia by Ung Rithy Group, they could not be sent back to the very firm that had recruited the girls in the first place.

Company denials
However Ung Seang Rithy, president of Ung Rithy Group, denied yesterday the girls were underage while employed by her company.

“My company has never had even one underage worker, so the organisation has to find the evidence for me to show that my company has underage girls,” she said.

“I don’t accept workers into our company if there are not parents proclaiming in front of us that their children are aged 21, and we have the documents that express that from the authorities.”

It is a claim An Bunhak, the director of the Association of Cambodian Recruitment Agencies, backs up.

“I do not accept that they were underage because we have the documents to prove that the girls are of enough age,” he said, arguing it was the parents who provided identity documents verifying their ages – a claim the girls dispute.

Those documents could not be forwarded yesterday because his office was closed for Khmer New Year, he said.

An Bunhak also says that because Ung Rithy Group paid for the girls’ travel, a claim he has backed up with copies of their flight itineraries, they rightfully should have been returned to the company.

He alleges the Licadho staffers who were waiting at the airport to pick up the girls did not have appropriate identification, a claim Licadho rejects, leading him to write a letter to authorities accusing Licadho of “kidnapping”.

Both An Bunhak and Ung Seang Rithy also deny the girls escaped abusive conditions but rather became embroiled in near-lethal fights that almost landed them in jail.

Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division says it is ludicrous to suggest that by paying for tickets the company had a justifiable claim to take custody of the girls.

“Their argument that ‘we paid, we have the right to take’ displays a complete lack of understanding from Ung Rithy about human rights,” he said.

That the age of the girls remains contested nearly a year after they returned, raises important questions about the arcane lines of responsibility, regulation and monitoring of an industry that propels its recruits, underage or otherwise, into foreign territory.

Labour legislation
As the Cambodian Ministry of Labour prepares a new draft sub-decree to update 1995  legislation regulating the labour-recruitment industry, rights groups have been left in the dark about what shape the legislation will actually take. Only an early draft of the new sub-decree has been released publicly.

If that is any indication of the final form the legislation will take, then key measures that groups such as Licadho, Adhoc and South East Asia Investigations into Social and Humanitarian Activities have called for to effectively regulate the industry will not be included.

One of those, rights groups, such as Licadho and HRW, stress, must be a mechanism to prevent trainees from entering debt bondage.

Upfront loans offered by labour-recruitment firms to poor Cambodian families desperate for some financial relief can be an almost irresistible temptation, one that Soy’s mother says she succumbed to despite harbouring significant concerns about her daughter’s welfare abroad.

Before the girls left Cambodia Soy’s mother, who also wishes not to be identified, said Ung Rithy Group lent her US$1,000 – money the company is alleged to have demanded back along with expenses spent during the girls training after their escape.

“Licadho helped me because if we went to the company I would have to pay US$2,500 to them. I did not pay because Licadho helped us,” she said.
Ung Seang Rithy rejected this claim.

“There are difference cases in which we can use our right to demand [money], but I just want to clarify that the Ung Rithy Company has never asked or demanded the money from those workers,” she said.

Hou Vuthy, deputy general director at the Ministry of Labour, says it is illegal for recruitment firms grant the families of trainees upfront loans, unless the money is a provision to cover expenses related to the girls departure.

“It is illegal if the companies give the money to the trainees, but if the companies give money and don’t demand it back from the workers, it is okay,” he says.

Matthieu Pellerin, a consultant for Licadho, said that before trainees even enter the physical premises, such loans are tantamount to human trafficking.

“It’s a very simple form of debt bondage but it also falls into the definition of trafficking,” he said.

“If the recruitment agencies want to go legit they have to stop providing loans, it’s as simple as that.”

Prosecuting directors of labour firms who engage in unlawful recruitment practices and revoking licences, he says, are crucial first steps that need to be taken if Cambodia is serious about addressing an escalating problem.

According to information that Licadho say they received from the Ministry of Information, 53 minors between the ages of 13 and 17 were rescued from labour-recruitment companies last year.

Of the 53, 16 were rescued from Ung Rithy Group Co Ltd’s Kandal centre, 22 from VC Manpower Co Ltd and seven from Champa Manpower Co Ltd, Licadho says.

Again Ung Seang Rithy denies this allegation, while representatives of Champa Manpower were unaware of the case or unavailable for comment, as were representatives of VC Manpower.

Underage rescues
At a seminar of regional parliamentarians on labour trafficking earlier this month, Chou Bun Eng, Secretary of State at the Ministry of Interior, confirmed 55 underage trainees had been discovered in Cambodian labour-recruitment centres in the past year.

“We arrested eight suspects from the companies and rescued the underage workers and allowed them to return to their parents,” she said.

She was unable to recall the names of those arrested or the companies they had come from.

Eric Meldrum, operations director of South East Asian Investigations in Social and Humanitarian Activities, who works with Cambodian authorities to investigate cases of trafficking in labour recruitment, confirmed police were conducting serious investigations.

“My experience of working with the [anti] human-trafficking police is that they do actually do proper investigations in these cases,” he said, but while he was aware of prosecution in regard to labour trafficking, there had not been many.

And even if judicial authorities and regulatory bodies are able to take concrete action against labour-recruitment companies that act unlawfully in Cambodia, it is no guarantee that the basic rights of workers in Malaysia will be respected, Malaysian Senator Firdaus Haji Abdullah said.

He said Malaysia has been swamped with so many migrant workers, some 1.8 million in 2010, that authorities are simply unable to implement proper regulation of the industry, despite the existence of legislation to do so.

“Put it this way, you have a few bad apples here and there but again I keep on telling you [about] the huge number … I mean when you have 1.8 million people, less than 100 can cause a problem,” he said, referring to reported cases of abuse.

But banning migrant workers, he said, is no solution.
“[If] you stop issuing visas they come illegally. That’s what I’m saying: for every legally registered worker there is another illegal [worker].

“You can sum it up this way: migrant workers are an expanding problem faced with a shrinking solution.”

Source: Phnom Penh Post - Wednesday, April 13, 2011