She claimed that her employer kicked her and beat her with a vacuum cleaner rod. She said that she was given only one bottle of water a day to minimise toilet breaks, was forced to sleep on the floor and became emaciated for lack of food.
On Tuesday, a court here agreed, vindicating Erwiana Sulistyaningsih, a domestic servant from Indonesia, by finding her former employer, Law Wan-tung, guilty of 18 charges, The New York Times reports. They included inflicting “grievous bodily harm,” assault and failure to pay wages. Ms. Law, 44, now awaits sentencing at the end of this month. She faces up to seven years’ imprisonment.
“To employers in Hong Kong, I hope they will start treating migrant workers as workers and human beings and stop treating us like slaves,” Erwiana told reporters after the verdict, reading a statement in English. “Because as human beings, we all have equal rights.”
Erwiana’s trial was closely watched in Hong Kong, where more than 300,000 domestic servants, mostly from Indonesia and the Philippines, work for expatriates and native residents. By Hong Kong law, they live as second-class citizens, earning a small fraction of the minimum wage and being forced to live with their employers, often in tiny apartments. At times, as human rights groups have documented, they endure physical and emotional abuse, including sexual assault.
Despite the conditions, a minimum salary of just over $500 a month, plus food and an annual plane ticket home, is enough to attract many women to Hong Kong to cook, clean, and look after children and the elderly. They are eager to escape the grinding poverty in their native countries.
For Erwiana, the home she left was in central Java, in Indonesia, where she returned in January 2014 for medical treatment after working for eight months for Law, barely able to walk and with bruises on her body. The photos from the hospital ignited outrage, and Ms. Law was arrested. She pleaded not guilty to the assault charges.
On Tuesday, Erwiana spoke to reporters in the basement of a Methodist church, just two blocks from where two other Indonesian women — both former domestic workers — were brutally killed in October, in a case that highlighted the yawning wealth and class divides in Hong Kong. A British banker, Rurik George Caton Jutting, has been charged with the killings and awaits trial.
During Erwiana’s trial, which lasted more than two weeks, she recounted in great detail the abuse Law meted out to her. At one point, according to an account of the trial in The South China Morning Post, Law shoved a vacuum cleaner rod into Erwiana’s mouth and twisted it, cutting her lips. In another instance, Law stripped Erwiana of her clothes in the wintertime, splashed cold water on her and pointed a blowing fan at her, according to the newspaper.
She testified that Law fed her a diet of bread and rice. The judge found Erwiana’s testimony credible, the newspaper reported.
“The Labor Department will not tolerate unlawful acts of employers and will take stringent enforcement and prosecution actions against employers who fail to comply with the labor law,” the department said in a statement emailed to reporters.
Roseann Rife, a researcher for Amnesty International in Hong Kong, said that the Hong Kong government should change rules requiring domestic workers to live with their employers and end a rule requiring the women to leave Hong Kong within 14 days of having their contracts terminated unless they can find another job. Both rules make it easier to mistreat the workers, she said.
By being forced to live with their employers, many domestic workers are on call 24 hours a day. An Amnesty International report published in November 2013 found that Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong worked an average of 17 hours a day, with many not receiving the one day off a week they are entitled to by law.
In Erwiana’s case, she testified that she was forced to stay up all night working and was allowed to rest only in the afternoon.
Still, the conviction may help spur more domestic workers to speak out when they are abused by their employers, Rife said in a telephone interview.
“The tragedy is that we know that this is a widespread problem, and it just hasn’t been getting the attention, and there haven’t been nearly enough prosecutions,” Rife said. “Hopefully this will encourage more migrant domestic workers to step forward.(Punch)
