Another pressure on the pockets

If you are a working woman, and you have no choice but to rely on a maid in order to be able to keep on working out of the house, this news will send chills down your spine.

Indonesian maids may soon cost more
By ANDREA FILMER

GEORGE TOWN: Maid fees have skyrocketed in the past year and there seems to be no end in sight.

Association of Foreign Housemaids Agencies (Papa) president Datuk Raja Zulkepley Dahalan warned that employers may soon have to fork out up to RM8,000 to hire an Indonesian maid.

Maid agencies currently charge RM7,500 for each maid brought in from Indonesia compared with the RM6,000 fee charged early last year.

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Now, if your maid walks out of you in the middle of the night, it will hurt your pockets more than before.

A month ago, my neighbour who lives opposite my house had a rude shock when she left her maid alone for only 10 minutes while she went out to pick up her son from tuition.

The recalcitrant girl just walked out of the house without bothering to take any of her personal belongings with her and disappeared under the cover of darkness. This is such a common behaviour among Indonesian maids that you have to admire their supreme confidence in getting away uncaught and probably a few years down the road, they'll be eligible to vote in our general elections.

RM7,500 upfront is no small sum to hire an Indonesian maid these days, and it seems that the higher up the agency fees go, the lower down the quality of maids they supply to desperate employers.

Do we complain enough? Do we take a stand like how some people boycott Petronas gas stations to show our displeasure at the recent fuel price hike?

Or are Indonesian maid employers a different category of consumers who are too desperate for help that they will take this expensive risk and suffer in silence if they had been soundly played out?

And do we just accept that our government is not working hard enough to provide viable alternatives for the suffering employers?

Oh, I forgot. We Malaysians are famous for passively accepting bad governance from our ruling government. What to do, right?