Flying Sand | Spare me the crocodile tears, Hong Kong’s treatment of domestic workers is modern slavery
As tens of thousands of foreign women continue to be shipped to Hong Kong to work, Niall Fraser says it’s time to take responsibility for our actions ... and our cleaning
The definition of insanity, as any self-respecting laboratory rat knows, is to perform the same task over and over again in the expectation that you will achieve a different result.
Humanity, I think we can all agree, is defined as the ability to show compassion, kindness, consideration, sympathy, tolerance, generosity and magnanimity.
Taking the above definitions as read, only a mad and/or bad man or woman could conclude that the treatment of domestic workers by Hong Kong amounts to anything other than inhumane insanity.
Time and again governments – be they of the British pioneers, bent on subjugation and servitude, or post-colonial special administrators for China – have pursued the vulgar plunder of humanity from one poor part of the world after another in search of the cheapest, most compliant and desperate servants.
The minute one group of poor and vulnerable people – overwhelmingly women – which wealthy Hong Kong and other gross domestic-product-rich places deem good for only cleaning, bowing and scraping – show the slightest sign of getting up off their knees, the planning begins to raid another, even more vulnerable part of planet for a new batch of – let’s not sugar-coat it here – slaves.
Christmas blow for domestic helpers in Hong Kong as flights home don’t exist
And why and for what? Because we are too busy working to clean what are among the smallest living spaces on the planet and too exhausted to attend to the children of whom so much is expected but who cannot be expected to lift a dishcloth, dustpan and brush.