The Philippine Consulate in Hong Kong issued a notice to the city’s domestic helper employment agencies stating that its citizens working in the SAR will be banned from window cleaning from Oct. 15 onwards.
In a citywide announcement made earlier in the month, the consulate’s labour attaché Jalilo Dela Torre said that the new term will come into effect in employment contracts for Filipino domestic helpers across Hong Kong, reports Oriental Daily.
The move came following multiple domestic helpers falling to their deaths while cleaning the outside of windows in high-rises over the last few years. It has attracted mixed reactions from organisations involved with domestic workers in Hong Kong.
Officer at the Hong Kong Federation of Asian Domestic Workers Unions, Tang Kin-wah, welcomes the news and thinks the move is “appropriate”, the paper said.
However, Joan Tsui Hiu-tung, convenor of the Support Group for Hong Kong Employers with Foreign Domestic Helpers, began a campaign urging employers to write to Chief Executive CY Leung to complain about the ban. “Today they add [the term of] not cleaning windows; tomorrow they don’t make the tea; a 5kg bag of rice, [they’d say] it’s too heavy to carry,” she told the paper.
Liu Sau-lan of Technic Employment Service Centre, a local domestic helper agency, was quoted in the paper as saying, “If the Philippines adds this ban today and another ban tomorrow, other countries would follow suit – and helpers end up not doing anything.”
