THERE is an urgent need for a recreational centre with proper facilities for Hongkong's 100,000 domestic workers, the support group United Migrant Workers said yesterday.
But many good ideas from the Government and concerned individuals have languished because ''nobody who can ever helps'', according to the group's spokesman.
''What is needed is dedicated people with dedicated wallets, but a prime problem is that you cannot get anybody to actually do anything,'' he said.
The warning came as the thousands of off-duty maids who gather in and around Statue Square in Central, added their voices to the call for shelter and organised activities.
While the workers themselves called for an alternative to the ''humiliation'' of gathering on dirty pavements, social workers said the numbers of women flooding into the territory from the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and other Asian countries was putting a tremendous strain on emergency facilities.
One social worker said: ''These women need somewhere decent to go when they are turned out in the middle of the night by their employers or find themselves stranded because their agent turns out to be fraudulent.
''There are so many victims and there are certainly not adequate facilities.'' Yesterday domestic helpers who gathered in the Chater Road area condemned it as dirty, crowded, noisy and boring. But all responded: ''What else can we do? There is nowhere else for us to go.'' They were excited by the proposal to turn an abandoned Western hospital into a refuge and recreation centre and urged the Government to back such plans.