Indentured Servitude, Hong Kong-Style

Sitting on a picnic blanket in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park with fellow Indonesian domestic workers on a Sunday in October, 34-year-old Arida is holding back tears. Moneylenders have demanded she turn over almost all her HK$3,740 ($483) monthly salary to pay debts totaling more than $5,000 that she incurred finding a job, she says. When she stopped paying in July after labor advocates told her that fees she had been charged are illegal in Hong Kong, debt collectors harassed her and the family that employs her as a live-in helper. “This loan will be impossible to repay,” Arida says, giving only her first name for fear of losing her job. “I fear this will never go away.”

Thousands of women in Hong Kong with similar stories, most from Indonesia and the Philippines, are working off debt by turning over almost all their pay for months to loan companies and agencies that place them with families, according to interviews with a dozen workers, four nonprofit groups that handle complaints, and academic researchers. The moneylenders, part of Hong Kong’s shadow-banking system, are helping circumvent laws intended to protect the women, they say. “Employment agencies are in collusion with moneylenders and with employers, and they’re all in it to save money or make money at the cost of domestic workers,” says Holly Allan, founder of the nonprofit Helpers for Domestic Helpers, which received more than 5,000 complaints last year. “It is definitely indentured servitude, modern-day slavery.”