Giedre tyttö Leijonakaupungista

Modern Slavery

Since the beginning of the year 2004 there were over 100 cases of Indonesian maids dying by falling out through the windows while cleaning them. The official explanation goes that these women usually come from rural areas, so they are unfamiliar with the dangers of city living. Nobody questions their employers that ask them to clean the windows from outside. The solution for this problem is to put minimal age requirements for foreigh maids to 25 years, also require them to have some kind of schooling.

While we were looking for an apartment, I was shocked to see, lets say, 3 bedroom and 1 maid room apartments, where the "maid room" was 2m x 1.5m dark room with no windows. Was a living person supposed to be crammed in this storage place?

There are stories all over in the papers and elsewhere about employers that treat their maids completely inhumanly. There's a heated discussion in Expat Leijonakaupunki website, whether maids should be allowed to read or watch TV, since that may affect their desire to work. These women get maybe 400-600 SD (200-300 eur) a month, they have no holiday, no time off, no evenings out, nothing...

There's 2 security guys that sit downstairs of our apartment house. They push the door opening button and make "face-control" in general. One of them works at night, another during the day. 6.30am to 6.30 pm or 6.30pm to 6.30 am. No weekends off (don't know about holiday..), they're there all the time.

Kaitsu has been working 3 weekends in a row (last weekend also on Sunday, don't even mention the weekend when he worked 22 hours in one go) and it starts to be likely that he'll have to work this Saturday too. Although we started planning our trip to Malaysia and Kaitsu started talking about having this weekend off 2 weeks ago. The job comes first, the customer is right... There's basically no way we can plan any of our free time. It s..ks.

There's another guy coming with whom Kaitsu will share work from next week on. I hope it will start being more humane... So disappointing about the weekend if we have to cancel our trip...

Posted by gkligyte at September 9, 2004 10:50 AM