HONG KONG -- It's a sunny Sunday morning in Hong Kong, a perfect day for a picnic in one of the city's parks, the gathering spots for thousands of Filipina and Indonesian women enjoying their lone day off from jobs as domestic helpers.

Clustered in small groups, they sit on benches, on low walls, on newspapers on the ground. They are chatting, eating, sharing photographs of their families, writing letters. One group sits in a circle singing hymns from homemade songbooks.

Like almost all the other women hanging out in Statue Square, Jocelyn Sanchez, 45, works as a domestic helper for a Hong Kong family. She has worked for the same Chinese family since she left the Philippines eight years ago.

"My employers are so good, they treat me like family. The children love me," she says. She has loved and cared for two children, a girl age 8 and a boy of 4, since babyhood.

Her own daughter, aged 3 when her mother left home, has only had a mother's love from long distance. Now 11, she lives with her father and grandparents in a rural community in the Philippines. She sees her mother twice a year.

Sanchez is cheerful by nature, but her eyes grow sad when she speaks of her family. She explains that she and her husband, a farmer, cannot earn enough at home. Working here, she is able to send 10,000 pesos ($178) home each month.

There are 216,860 foreign domestic helpers working in Hong Kong. The 126,560 domestics from the Philippines are part of an army of 7.4 million Filipino workers around the world, who sent back $7.2 billion to their country in 2002. According to the Philippines Bureau of Labor and Employment, this remittance was 8.6 percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product.

Sanchez's day is typical. It begins at 5 a.m. when she gets up to prepare breakfast for the family. She does the cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, laundry, ironing and babysitting, finishing around 10:00 p.m. She receives the minimum wage of $420 per month, in addition to her tiny room and meals.

She is among the lucky ones.

Venita (not her real name) has been less fortunate. The 24-year-old came from Sri Lanka last September to work for an Indian family in Hong Kong. The husband and wife and their 1-year-old child live in a three-story house and own two cars. Theirs is a distinctly upper-class lifestyle in Hong Kong.

"They never call me my name, they always call me maid," Venita says. "The madam, she always angry. If for one minute I have no work, she don't like. At 10 o'clock at night I have to start ironing and work until I'm finished."

Despite their spacious home, Venita was made to sleep on the floor in a room used as an office. In addition to the chores Sanchez does, Venita was expected to clean the big house, wash both cars twice a week, look after the garden, and watch the baby at all times. At night, she slept with a device in her ear so she could hear the baby if he cried.

For all this, her employers paid her less than half the minimum wage and granted her one day off each month, in violation of local labor laws.

"They never call me my name, they always call me maid," Venita said. "The madam, she always angry. If for one minute I have no work, she don't like. At 10 at night I have to start ironing and work until I'm finished."

When the couple went off on vacation, leaving Venita in the house with no food or money, she decided she'd had enough. Guided by a cousin who also works for a family, she found her way to an organization called Helpers for Domestic Helpers, which assisted her in filing a case against her employers.

"We have a 75-80 percent success rate if a case goes to court," says Holly Carlos Allan, manager of the support group that provides free counseling and paralegal services for domestic helpers. She sees 40 to 50 new cases each month of abuse, wrongful termination, non-payment and immigration or police problems.

From her perspective, there are serious flaws in a system that lures hundreds of thousands of women to work far from their families to jobs that are demanding and often demeaning, for low wages, with few legal protections. Many have been trained as teachers, nurses, or engineers, but they can earn five to 10 times more as overseas domestic helpers.

"It starts from their home country," says Allan. "They have to pay exorbitant agency fees to get a job in Hong Kong. It can cost from HKD10,000 to HKD12,000 ($1,200-$1,500) to get a job. If they don't have it, they're forced to sign a loan agreement. These are illegal fees, and there are no receipts."

Once overseas, the workers are desperate to keep their jobs in order to repay the loans, and those who fall victim to cruel or unfair employers may endure prolonged mistreatment.

The workers have no one to turn to except volunteer organizations, like the Helpers and some others linked to local religious groups. The home country's consulate rarely gets involved, and in some cases, seems to be part of the problem.

Allan has seen cases of near starvation, of physical and sexual abuse, and of wrongful accusations of criminal conduct. She says police tend to treat the victim as the offender in such cases, unless there is strong evidence that the employer is guilty of abuse.

The workers have no one to turn to except the volunteer organizations, like the Helpers and several others linked to local religious groups. The home country's consulate rarely gets involved, and in some cases, seems to be part of the problem.

"The job description of the labor attaché is to find markets for our workers," says Gi Estrada, an officer of the Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants. "If you want to fight for the rights of the workers it's
contradictory."

Estrada says that Filipino workers are better organized than others and thus better protected in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia, such as Japan and Taiwan. Organizations like his work to inform them of their rights and fight abuse. Indonesian workers are more readily subject to exploitation in Hong Kong, he says.

The number of Indonesian domestic helpers was up to 81,030 by the end of last year, a number that has steadily increased from just over 10,000 in 1994. Indonesian workers are typically paid just HKD2,000 ($260) per month, in violation of local law.

Like the Philippines, Indonesia benefits hugely from remittances from overseas workers, with some 4 million workers sending $2.8 billion home in 2002. Yet the country has no laws to protect its migrant workers, Estrada says.

According to U.N. figures, remittances from migrant workers to their home countries in Asia totaled $80 billion in 2002, more than the total for foreign direct investment. But not everyone agrees that the benefits are worth the price.

"There's a huge social cost to the Philippines," says Allan. "Mothers leave their young children, there are many broken families, husbands turn to other women, children turn to drugs and leave school."

There's a huge personal cost to the workers as well. Delia Castro, 36, is from the same region of the Philippines as Sanchez. She has been working in Hong Kong for seven years, sending almost all her money home to her mother, her brothers and sisters and their children.

Castro is lively and attractive, but unmarried; she says she hopes to meet someone and have her own children someday. But so far, she says, "My priority is my family. I have a poor family and they need my help. I spent all my mind and effort to my family and I forgot my heart."






Contributed by Kathleen Hwang, UPI Correspondent. Reprinted with permission from United Press International.

To read another Global Envision article about the faces of globalization, see Faces of Globalization: Factory vs. Farm.