Hardest hit over unemployment

She had been working with her foreign firm for over a decade, but she was laid off as her colleague, who is a local Chinese, was chosen in her stead. With the territory’s economy still struggling, more and more Filipino workers—domestic workers or otherwise—are losing their jobs as they become first casualties in recent days.

Though it is not openly admitted, local employers have their own methods of deciding who to layoff and who to retain. Here, it is illegal to make preference to employing or retaining workers, but some could get away with it. In recent days, worker’s nationality—as mentioned above, health condition or even physical appearance—has become the preference of employers to hire workers.

The worker I mentioned had been laid off and she and her family are Hong Kong residents. She and her ailing husband have been living and working with their children who grew up here and had already adapted to the territory’s way of life. But unlike in old days, when her husband was still employed before he fell ill, their condition was better.

When she was told that her contract would not be renewed by February 2009; and that she needed to find a job, what came to mind was how would she be able to send her teenage children to school, support her family’s basic needs and to take care of her ailing husband suffering from diabetes and undergoing regular medication? Not having any job to deal with all these problems would be tremendously difficult.

Apart from Filipino Hong Kong residents who lose their jobs over local residents, there is an emerging pattern in which Filipina domestic workers lose their jobs: their contracts are either prematurely terminated or would not be renewed for reasons of their illness. Some employers would not openly admit it this; however, employers who intend not to renew their workers contract openly told their workers as they decline to take responsibility over their ailing workers.

This is what a friend of mine and herself is a cancer patient is presently experiencing. After serving her employer for six years, she was told that they are no longer renewing her contract because they no longer require her service. Her employer, however, openly admitted they would not want to take responsibility over her for reasons of her health. Thus, she needs to find a new employer before her contract expires in February

Under the law here, it is illegal to terminate workers for reasons of illness; and that employers have had obligations to ensure their workers are given adequate treatment until the duration of their contract. But the concerns that the ailing workers would be facing is not whether or not they could get their contracts renewed, but what would happen to them if they returns home and lose their job.

Losing a job would mean losing benefit of cheap health and medical care here. In Hong Kong, having a Hong Kong Identification Card, an employer and a working contract, a worker needing medication, for instance cancer, a patient would only pay HKD60 (Php365) for a blood test; and HKD80 (Php 486) for Chemotherapy—which is done every three weeks.

But in our country though, a patient would have to pay about Php25,000 per session for the cheapest Chemotherapy.

Therefore, for a domestic worker suffering from cancer to lose her job and to return home would be suicide. They would face the risk of dying for lack of medication. Also, not only she could not afford to pay for her medication she would also have to endure difficulties of being an unemployed. Thus in reality, domestic workers who are cancer patients, work no longer because of the money they could earn and sent home, but also a matter of life and death.

Unfortunately though, the Philippine Consulate here are aware of the plight of the domestic workers suffering from serious illness; however, so far there have not been any concrete intervention from their end on how they should be able to deal with this concerns. For now, workers have had to depend on the Hong Kong government’s subsidized health care to look after them because our own government has failed them.

Their illness are also aggravated by stress and the exhausting work that they do, but the government whose rhetoric calls them Bagong Bayani (Modern Heroes), if not Super Maids, in reality forgotten, if not neglected them. Our fellow Filipinos here, some may be your own relatives, have had to survive supporting their families back home, and to struggle life and death for their own survival as well.