Scott Stiles, the founder of the Fair Employment Foundation discusses the importance of enhancing and protecting the rights of domestic workers
In the What Matters To Me series, a Generation T honouree describes what they do, why they do it, and why it matters
Almost ten million people work in domestic roles in Asia-Pacific, according to the International Labour Organisation, yet forced labour and debt bondage run rampant in the domestic worker community. Limited recruitment options abroad mean jobs outside the workers’ home country often come with extortionate recruitment fees.
“The recruitment system is broken,” says Scott Stiles, the founder of the Fair Employment Foundation. After realising the problems the industry faces, Stiles decided to take action. He teamed up with Tammy Baltz, a volunteer with the Hong Kong NGO Help for Domestic Workers, to eliminate recruitment fees and transfer the job placement fee from the domestic worker to their employer. Since the foundation began in 2014, it has seen recruitment fees in the city drop from US$2,000 (HK$15,500) to US$700 (HK$5,425) in 2020, and Stiles predicts fees will disappear within five years.
Our Fair Hiring Pledge programme educates employers [of domestic workers] about hiring and ethical management within their home. After one of our first sessions, there was a woman who told me: “I had 16 domestic workers before one actually finished their whole contract, but after sitting through that session, I realise that actually, I was using unethical agencies whose incentives were not to find me a good worker, and I think that I wasn’t doing a very good job at managing.” She had a negative perception of the [domestic worker] community that was changed by our session.
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