Wella's Story: To Employ or Not to Employ?

“To Employ or Not to Employ a Foreign Domestic Worker?”

That was the exact question that Madam Chang had in her mind when she was almost 9 months pregnant with her second child back. Her first child was barely 6 and her husband was busy flying in and out of the country on business trips that saw him away for twice a month and up to a week for each trip.

Madam Chang recounted, “It took me quite a while to finally go ahead with employing a foreign domestic worker even though my husband had always been in full support of the idea. He felt that it would be a good idea for me to have a helper in the house to help take care of my daughter and household chores while I was waiting for my second daughter to come along. For me, I initially felt apprehensive about the idea of having a stranger come live in our house and the idea of developing a working relationship and trusting someone outside the family with your child and housework was did not really go down very well with me.”

Madam Chang also mentioned, that back then, language was something that she worried about too because communicating with a foreign domestic worker would mean that she had to speak English. This was a language that was not the mother-tongue of the Taiwan-born Singaporean housewife.

Each year more than 150,000 FDWs are employed here in Singapore and they come from mainly Indonesia and the Philippines.

If you are a pondering about whether or not to employ a foreign domestic worker, you should keep in mind that the decision should be considered seriously. If you are looking for a helper to take care of your young child or elderly folk, there are other feasible alternatives such as childcare centres and homes for the elderly.

Apart from having the means and power to employ a foreign domestic worker, you should also take into consideration that a fair amount of effort from both sides is needed to cultivate a good working relationship between you and your foreign domestic worker.

A good working relationship between employer and the foreign domestic worker would greatly reduce miscommunication and misunderstandings that may lead to disputes.
Many of the foreign domestic workers may come form the rural areas of their home countries and working in the city would be something difficult for them initially. They may have problems with understanding and communicating with you. This is one big problem that both employer and employee face and more often than not, misunderstandings and miscommunication often results in the employer choosing to make hasty transfers of the foreign domestic workers or worse still, send them back to their agencies.

Madam Hong, who had just recently employed a foreign domestic worker, shared with me that her new helper had problems learning how to use modern household appliances such as the stove, washing machine, dish dryer and even the microwave oven. It was a trying period for both herself and her new foreign domestic worker as they both tried to establish a working relationship. But Madam Hong had this to say at the end of the day:

As employers, I feel that we should at least be reasonable and allow them a period of time, maybe a couple of months to adjust to the new working environment. I think it is unfair to expect them to be able to pick up your household habits and learn how to work (the) various household appliances immediately. In this aspect, the employer must be tolerant and patient, especially if there was a language barrier in the first place.

Madam Hong’s patience and tolerant attitude is most certainly what new foreign domestic workers would hope to encounter when they meet their new employers.

However, are Singaporean employers patient and tolerant enough? Just how willing are we to put in that extra effort to cultivate an ideal working relationship with our foreign domestic workers?


So at the end of the day, the question “To employ or not to employ a foreign domestic worker?” should really have been, “Can I or can I not make the working relationship work?”