Video of an employer berating her Filipino domestic worker for giving her son a chocolate cookie has gone viral.
According to Ysabril Salvador, who first posted the video to her Facebook page on Saturday, the outburst happened inside the play area of the Tin Chung Court housing estate in Tin Shui Wai at about 5:45pm on Friday.
Two five-minute clips of the argument have together accumulated at least 400,000 views and been shared more than 4,000 times on Facebook, and begins with the employer picking up a discarded cookie wrapper and yelling incredulously: “It’s chocolate! And I won’t give him the sweet biscuits!”
While the domestic worker holds onto her employer’s young son, the employer can be seen yelling and pointing at her.
“Show me the house rules! I show you on day one! One of the rules [is] you cannot give him any food without my permission! Especially the snacks!”
The employer then says she doesn’t want her son to spoil his appetite by giving him snacks, and suggested that’s why he wasn’t eating.
“You’re the problem maker! Now I understand!”
She then demands the domestic worker tell list all the snacks she had given her son, before accusing her of lying.
Throughout the ordeal, the domestic worker appears to respond to her employer’s questions, though her answers are inaudible.
In a second video, the domestic worker can be seen wiping her eyes as the employer continues to yell and point at her.
While netizens conceded the domestic worker was in the wrong if she’d given the child snacks against the mother’s wishes, most considered the scene that unfolded entirely out of proportion.
One commenter writing in Filipino said: “There may be rules, or maybe the child is allergic, maybe that’s why the employer was angry. It must be health-related, although the employer’s approach is wrong. The Pinay also did something wrong by not following the rules of her employer. But what the Chinese woman did was wrong.”
Another Filipino domestic worker commented: “This is why when I first entered the house of my boss, I told them if they had rules, I had rules too. My rules include not shouting. When they raise their voice at me, so does mine.”
Commenters writing in Chinese jokingly dubbed the employer “Empress Dowager” or “her Royal Highness,” while another person said “she shouldn’t have yelled, there are a lot of children in that park and she scared them.”
This is hardly the first time a domestic worker has been filmed being publicly berated by a Hongkonger. In May, a woman in Tseung Kwan O unleashed a torrent of abuse at a domestic worker who was looking after two dogs and a child in a stroller, claiming the woman wasn’t minding the dogs’ behavior.
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