Thursday, June 25, 2009

75% Malaysian mongrels?

On 27 November 2008 I posted Some people shouldn’t have maids! where I said ‘Unfortunately some Malaysians cannot handle hired domestic help in a civilised manner.’ I also mentioned my unfortunate personal experience.

Yesterday my matey Dean Johns penned Refugees from reality for Malaysiakini.

Now, tell me why I wasn’t surprised or shocked when he revealed that in a recent survey conducted by the Star, 75% of Malaysians (in a sampling of 769 respondents) ‘expressed the opinion that maids should not be given a day off every week.’

Of course I wasn’t surprised or shocked because I was reminded of an a$$-h*le relative of mine who uttered 'Chee harng ay larng – ee larng ay yau chuoi chnea' – and if you want to know what those really nasty words mean, please refer to my last year’s post Some people shouldn’t have maids!

My cousin and his family weren’t uniquely nasty – they belong to the c^&t!$h 75% of Malaysians.

On 15 August 2007 I posted Are some Malaysian employers mongrels?, where I lamented the terrible way we Malaysians treated foreign maids.

Then I wrote: Irene Fernandez, director of Tenaganita, a migrant workers rights group based in Malaysia, said such incidents were ‘happening too often’. She accused the Malaysian and Indonesian governments of being indifferent to the plight of Indonesian maids who were getting a raw deal compared with Filipino domestic helpers.

Today Malaysiakini published Abuse of maids threatens to harm bilateral ties where it reported that a ‘senior Indonesian diplomat warned that such incidents could hurt bilateral ties unless Malaysia protects Indonesian workers.’

Can it be that, following Irene Fernandez’ contemptuous remarks, the Indonesian government has finally woken up to the plight of its citizens working as maids here?

Or, is it merely the current Indonesian presidential political campaign, which makes it obligatory for politicians south of the equator to brandish the Sang Merah Putih while threatening Malaysia over the maid abuse issue, but with the pretend-anger to be forgotten once its presidential election is over …

… thus justifying Irene Fernandez’s contempt some 2 years ago.

And it’s not just Indon maids who received our worst – in 2006 I posted a case of a 15-year old Cambodian sweetie who was physically abused – see Maid Abuse Again!

Hey, brothers and sisters - People become maids because they have no choice – they need to earn a living, even if the Malaysian job is menial, mean and bloody mafulat.

Of course some have taken the plunge to become prostitutes (or sex workers, as Australians seek to dignify the prostitutes’ circumstances), but not everyone (say, a wife of a poor farmer in Bali and the mother of 3 kids left at home) would want to be a sex worker ... though one wonders, after seeing and hearing of the draconian abuse they received from Malaysian employers, whether they would be better off as sex workers.

In Are some Malaysian employers mongrels? I wrote that we need to ask ourselves: what sort of abuses would have driven some of these maids, working in a strange land for pittance, to such desperate measures to escape their employers?

But equally important, we need to ask ourselves: what sort of people are we Malaysians to treat our servants so cruelly as if we are some medieval feudal lords with sway of death or life over our 'slaves'?

Which section of our Constitution is on chattel?

Are we no better than plain mongrels - pariah dogs - to ill-treat a maid in such a draconian way because she so happened to be a foreigner who is financially at our mercy?


Related: 1st World but with Z-th World mentality! where Singaporeans are equally a$$h*les like us.

14 comments:

  1. agree agree....

    wat to do, malaysians are truly asians and majority prefer to own maid aka slave such that it's some kind of show-off power and wealth...

    ---

    some of these slave owners abuse probably to vent frustration as they have with their slaves' "distant" cousins, i guess...

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  2. Well, Indonesia!!!! Is it Okay for your citizens to come & stay in our country illegally, making money and sometime turned robbers and murderers killing our people in Malaysia...?? How many Malaysians entered Indonesia to rob & kill? ...and do you know the statistics about Indonesian criminals in Malaysia..?? Don't simply talk you Indon culprits....

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  3. Hear hear , ICE - LIMITED EDITION spoke my thoughts . They entered Malaysia illegally rob , house break , rape and murder and take the next boat out back to Indonesia with their loots and remain low for a few months , while the police here are still trying to find out who these criminals are . Next they change their passports with a new inentity ( getting new passports is so easy for these jokers complete with new identity ) and take the next boat back to Malaysia for their "job" . So even if the polis have their names , with their new "names" mana ada problem ?

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  4. KT,
    Rather sad that this has been on for years.
    The trouble with those malaysians is that when they pay the initial fees for the mad, they assume they alraedy own a dog complete choped and signed!Have never come across an employerwho treated their maids with dignity except my in laws .Maybe they were too afraid or too old to whag the poor maid!Had they been younger probably different.
    For a few hundred bucks those poor maids are made to slog hours and heavens forbid if they are not fast learners or slow in their job!
    Well we fcuking malaysians are spoilt rotten that's all.
    Perhaps when we have a reversal and try working for indonesians, then we will experienced their plight.Maybe allow those chinku girls from China and we will see how they cope?My bet is they will have a fight in their hands as chinese maids are really smart and not to be messed with!
    Malaysians tends to bully those maids when they are uneducated !
    The scenerio will never change for indo maids.They tried that with earlier Philipena maids but really they are so highly educated and they know their rights.
    Good that the indo government is kicking arses now!

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  5. What do you expect.

    It is a seed that Malaysian sow for 50 years. Although the country gain independent, but the education still EXACTLY similar to colonisation method : train you how to SERVED, not how to THINK.

    If you learn to think, the government and the education system want to suppress the DANGEROUS thinking mind.

    That's how colonisation work. And that is how Malaysia education work today.

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  6. "Well we fcuking malaysians are spoilt rotten that's all."

    Amin.

    And idiots like Chua Soi Lek exemplify this by coming out with completely retarded statements like (paraphrasing) "maids are needed to enable women to work".

    His blog post on the maid issue would make a good case study on xenophobia.

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  7. Syed Akbar Ali, too, wrote about the Indon maid issue in his blog OutSyed the Box.

    He gives an alternative viewpoint and so is worth a read.

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  8. its time for indonesia, bangladesh, burma and cambodia to disallow workers from coming to Malaysia. that would be perfect.

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  9. We should be saving Billions in foreign exchange being remitted out each month .

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  10. Can somebody kindly do a statical study or survey on how many Indon maids there are in Malaysia .
    How many are abused each month . What is the percentage of those abused versus total number of Indon maids in Malaysia and verses the total foreign maid currently in Malaysia .
    What is the percentage of those that came in and actually worked as maids and not doing other types of jobs .
    How many are actually hired as maids but working in the service sector and industry ?
    How many are also hired as maids but actually manning eatery stalls in hawker centers ?
    How many are also working as masseurs in health centers ?
    How many are involved in criminal activity and caught stealing from the employers ?
    How many who stole from the employers and left the country and came back with a new passport with a new name ?
    How many are involved with other illegal Indonesians in the construction industry and teamed up for criminal activities ?
    How many are actually trained as maids ?
    How many are actually not trained at all to perform household jobs ?
    How many are here just for the sake of running away from their broken homes or husbands ?

    These are many unanswered questions and before we get the statistics , I wouldn't want to jump into conclusion .
    There may be as much as one million Indo maids ( all category )in Malaysia and abused ? you guess is as good as mine . The percentage abused versus those who actually cannot perform household chores or not trained as maids is ??? %

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  11. I agree with chaptokam. I believe we - the people - are not fed the right and accurate information on this issue. We need the statistics to do a thorough analysis, without which we can never make sound conclusions and decisions. We should never rely on assumptions. Whenever problems arise, the government has always said it would conduct thorough studies, but on many occasions it has become just that that - studies. No action, and nothing has improved. So, what study has the government conducted on the maid abuse issue? If the study is done right - and not just long reports devoid of proper statistical analyses - it will surely help to paint a true picture on this issue, and help counter whatever allegations being thrown at us.

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  12. From today's Star....

    Maids run away with RM350
    By ANN TAN

    GEORGE TOWN: A 105-year-old bedridden woman, believed to be one of the oldest persons in Malaysia, and her 86-year-old sister were left to fend for themselves when their two maids ran away yesterday.

    On top of that, the maids – Wati and Halimah – stole RM350 from one of them.

    Kalivanti Devi, 105, and Shanti Devi, 86, were left hungry and thirsty when they realised that their maids had disappeared from their house at Kim Bian Aik Road.

    Shanti’s daughter Geeta Devi, 53, had gone to work while grandson Hemaath Kumar, 21, was out for a job interview and granddaughter Ravitari, 19, was asleep.

    Shanti said: “It was well planned. I paid for the petrol yesterday and they noticed where I kept my money.

    “While one of the maids was giving me a bath, the other one must have taken my money, packed their belongings and placed them at the back door.

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