From Suspension of Maid Export To Maidless Society

What an interesting development from our neighbour that they have decided to suspend exporting maids to us simply based on the recent incidents affecting their citizens. I'm referring to the latest news reported under 'Jakarta suspends maid service' reported by Amy Chiew / Online Published on 26/06/2009. (http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/NST/Friday/Frontpage/20090626095603/Article/index_html)

First of all, I suspect this is just a political play by some quarters in Indonesia.

Secondly, the statistic released from some sources that there were 1,000 maid abuse cases annually in Malaysia out of the 300,000 documented Indonesian maids in the country, and this is actually a small figure and should consider quite an achievement for Malaysian since maintaining good relationship in a confined space like condominium is truly not an easy task especially the maid and the employer comes from different social background and hardly know each other before employment.

Malaysian should now rethink its labour requirement now with a wake up call from Indonesian government that we shouldn't rely on foreign workers forever.

We should start to pool our resources together to overcome the crisis in a long term basis. We should clean our home/house, do our laundry, buy our daily needs; baby sitting or daycare for kids, and other general services by sharing among all the house owners in the vicinity than individually employing maid where the social problems are not easy to learn and adjusted, and it's complicated. Government should be working closely with the community in an organized way so that services for each households are subsidized and possibly a specialized quality service company can be established to serve the needs of the public.

Malaysia is still very much stuck with the economic model based on low labour cost, and it means we have to rely on Indonesia heavily on its supply, especially in plantation sector. It's unfortunate that Indonesia happens to be our competitor at the same time. The security threat is obvious and not logical to believe that brotherhood would work when conflict flares up. We can recall at the recent years of events and we know very well that we can only trust ourselves and has to be totally independent from our 'unstable' neighbour, no matter how 'cheap' the offer is. The crisis has highlighted our vulnerability of our econmy and country strength, not only that, it's the insult of our dignity by our insensitive neighbour that really hurts.

Our country should study the living styles and habits in other more advanced and developed countries where labour cost is high, and employing domestic maid is definitely not for every one. We should therefore learn one thing or two by studying how to handle their daily chores, and the answer should not be far from us.

The Government should orchestrate the change.

Change the way we live and work now will be the key to high earning, quality environment in foreseeable future.