I'm very much in agreement with the letter in today's the Star - tele-working to solve the maid issue. In fact, most of us working parents do not really need a maid if we can have flexible time and work-condition or if we can have local home nursing service that we can depend on to take care of our children and elderly.
The government should also do more to help it's people by perhaps training our own citizen to be professional nurse and house helpers. After all getting a Indonesian maid nowadays is not as easy and cheap as it used to be. So we might as well spend the money to train our locals and recognize Nursing (Child and Elderly) and house helpers as careers/skilled jobs.
Imagine our young locals from rural areas come to town to work as handphone sellers, cleaning lady, coffee shop assistants, etc and earning RM450-500. That is the same wage we are paying our imported maid plus approx RM 1,500 for their documents and not forgetting the free lodging and food. While our locals who are paid the same salary have to pay house rents, bus fare & own food for the same or almost the same workload.
Isn't it wonderful if we can pay our own people to do the job rather than being too dependant on imported work-force and at the same time we are also creating more job opportunities for our own people.
Before this can be realised of course we need to educate our own people to accept Home Nursing as a career so that it will not be looked down and thought as less glamourous job by our own society.
Well, that's my opinion as I actually need helpers at home to deal with the house work so that I can have some rest and more time with the kids and also someone to care/assist my parents. Other that I'm pretty happy with whatever arrangement I have now.
Wednesday July 1, 2009
Why not try tele-working?
WHENEVER we hear of maids being abused, there will be a knee-jerk reaction by many parties.
I think, instead of “fire-fighting”, the Government should look into the reasons why we need maids, and who are the ones needing the maids. A majority of them are working parents with young children or elderly to care for.
There has been suggestion of setting up day-care centres at offices. While it is a noble idea, it doesn’t work if you have school-going children as you need someone to pick them up from school and send them to their tuition or extra classes in the afternoon.
Since most offices are away from homes, it is not practical to send the kids to day-care centres in offices when they need to go to schools near their homes.
While there are transportation and transit services available, the cost could be too high for a family with three to four school-going children. Having a maid is still a cheaper option.
Most of the households that require maids are working couples. To reduce their dependency on maids, why not allow workers to tele-work? You can do video conferencing, Skype, email, etcetra from home and get your work done. While the children are in school, one can still go to the office for team meetings or meeting clients.
If your child goes to a typical Sekolah Kebangsaan and Sekolah Agama like mine, they will be in school from 7.30am to 1.30pm, then 2.30pm to 5.30pm. That is a lot of time for one to do work (housework and office work) at home or outside. You can still continue your work after 5.30pm if you need to after picking up the children from afternoon classes.
Such an arrangement will reduce our dependancy on maids because at least one parent is at home to handle housework and child-minding, and at the same time, there is no (or little) loss of income for the household.
I wish our Government and corporate organisations would realise the many benefits of allowing their workers to tele-work. Having a parent at home with the children is better than having a foreigner whom you barely trust to take care of your most prized possessions, your children. And for the employer, there will be no loss of manpower since the employee still has to achieve the goals set by the company.
If countries like the United States, Britain, Sweden have done it, why can’t we? This is the same question that I and a few friends asked our HR manager in our company 10 years ago. I have also been involved in various dialogues with NGOs on teleworking for the past eight years since I started my business from home. But until now, we have yet to see it being implemented effectively.
I urge the Government and related parties to seriously consider allowing and implementing the tele-working policy for the benefit of all of us, espcially our future generation.
DAYANG LILY ABANG MUAS,
Shah Alam, Selangor.
