Ah the trouble with MAIDS in Vietnam

Maid trouble in Vietnam

The day before Vietnam celebrated the 30^th anniversary of Liberation Day, or Unification Day (when the North Vietnamese Army took control of South Vietnam and sent the U.S. military fleeing), I sat in a pizza restaurant in Hanoi with two late 20-something Vietnamese women, discussing the trouble with maids. 

Both girls live with their families, and their parents employ household help. Neither is married – they both enjoy their jobs and want to wait a bit before tying the knot. It isn’t because they fear they can't balance work and family, like women in the U.S. and Japan, where there isn’t easily affordable childcare. Here in Vietnam, most women can go back to work right after having a baby because it is easy to get a poor girl from the countryside to work as a maid. It costs twenty or thirty dollars a month.

If the idea of household help seems anathema to an egalitarian Communist society, one of my lunch companions explained that hiring maids was common during French colonial rule, but the practice disappeared from 1975 to 1995, “when everyone was poor.”  Many Vietnamese are richer now, society is no longer egalitarian, it's increasingly un-Communist, and household help is back in fashion.

And so is complaining about maids. When I brought up the topic to other Vietnamese friends, they all nodded their heads in agreement. And Vietnamese-language newspapers (so I am told because I can't read them) are full of stories about maid scandals, maids who can’t cook, who can’t clean, who don’t understand basic hygiene, who don’t know how to use city appliances like dishwashers, and who steal everything from money to employers’ husbands.  One of my lunch mates’ work colleagues, a business reporter, calls her nanny from work to tell her not to steal her child’s food. 

At first, these complaints seemed to me like middle class whining.  But when you think about it, bringing naïve, untrained and uneducated and poorly paid girls into city homes is a recipe for trouble.  Putting a young girl who has grown up living with only her father and brothers in close quarters with a strange man…that seems another situation that could easily end up in tears.  One of my lunch companions told me about one friend’s maid who innocently confessed to her employer, “every time your husband comes home I can’t help but start blushing.”

Socialist Vietnam teaches its citizens that they are “masters of society," explained another Vietnamese reporter-friend. So when Masters find themselves in subservient positions like maid or cook, that can't be easy on the ego.... especially the North Vietnamese, who are, many say, more “proud” than the practical, business-minded Southerners.

Egos aside, the broader issue is that women’s continued participation in the workforce here depends on poor women working in their homes. 

Vietnam is way ahead of other Asian countries in this respect, especially Japan and Korea – which are richer, but didn‘t have socialist policies specifically aimed at gender equality to counteract age-old Confucian beliefs about women’s position being subservient to husbands and sons. 

Women in Vietnam – according to statistics I compared from various UN and other websites --  make up 47% of the workforce and 26% of the National Assembly representatives  ((in China 21.8%. of lower house members are women.  Forget Japan – according to a 2003 stat, women hold 35 out of the lower house’s 480 seats ….that’s a little more than 7 percent) I have pasted more comparative stats below.

Either grandparents become babysitters, or parents hire maids.   

You’d think there'd be a huge market for maid training firms.  I asked my two pizza lunch mates if there are companies or state run agencies that regulate the industry. They both shook their heads and said the only professional household-help-training agency is aimed at foreigners.

It's one agency -- run by a New Zealand expat in Hanoi who retired from the explosives industry and now runs Maid in Vietnam Co. Ltd., "the first licensed organization to train housemaids for foreign families in Vietnam." (www.maidinvietnam.com)

Mike Langrish-Smith says he started the company after his wife told him to stop whining about the lack of properly trained help in Vietnam.  Especially compared to other countries that have a plentiful supply of reliable and satisfactory domestic help. Women from the Philippines are the world’s top producer of domestic help, and are respected for their hard work, reliability, honesty, English language ability. The Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia are the four main suppliers of households help, says Langrish-Smith.

Vietnam is catching up   -  the government is boosting its labor exports and Langrish-Smith says there are some Vietnamese firms who sign up Vietnamese girls, and export them –  at times inadvertently into prostitution.   But Langrish-Smith only trains his staff to work for foreigners living in Vietnam, for various reasons.

First, there is no market of local Vietnamese families needing trained help, even the growing upper and middle classes.   “Most Vietnamese don’t really care so much about quality. The most important thing is price,” Langrish-Smith says, “they really don’t care if they have to keep changing maids every week. They’re probably even happy not to have to pay for that week [the week the maid leaves]”

Langrish-Smith focuses on training maids to cook, clean, and raise kids for the specialized and higher-paying market of Western families living here.   

Here is how he advertises:

“We give the maids training in personal hygiene and health care - (i.e. what are bacteria and why foreigners get sick and they do not)! This is especially important for children, with food preparation and general cleanliness in the house/apartment. They also get basic first aid training and a thorough medical check-up, as the majority have parasites (worms) and many have been found to have Hepatitis and TB. Thereafter they study Child Care, Kitchen Management, Household Safety and Cookery. We then categorise them as "General Housekeepers", "Cooks" and "Nannies."

Langrish-Smith deals with an entirely different class of Vietnamese women – I don’t mean social class, but a group of more motivated individuals.  He says he rejects 80% of the women who come to his agency to apply for a job (that’s 2-3 women a day). He only accepts women who have some education and have already taken it upon themselves to study a foreign language.  Even some of those women realize, soon after training starts, that they don’t want to spend their days sticking their hands down toilets.

Still, foreigners’ maids are, in Vietnamese eyes, different from maids in Vietnamese families. My pizza lunch mates said maids are normally looked down on but those who work for foreigners are seen as having a status job.

Langrish-Smith says he currently has about 100 women on staff – one is even a middle aged but bored wife of a diplomat who works as a Maid In Vietnam cook.

Others are teachers or lawyers who can't find jobs in their own profession and still have to feed their families. Langrish-Smith says they can earn more working for his firm, where hourly rates range from $1 to $2.50 an hour, than they can working for a State-run company. They also get bonuses and health insurance.  Maid In Vietnam does the invoicing, and takes out a portion for training costs and taxes.

Langrish-Smith also said he only hires women from Hanoi, because of legal problems.  If there's trouble with a girl from outside Hanoi, Hanoi police won't deal with it because she isn't a registered Hanoi resident, and the provincial police said they won't deal with it because the crime was committed in Hanoi. 

He says the big problems arise when a Maid in Vietnam maid works for a foreigner who is married to a Vietnamese.   Especially if the wife is South Vietnamese  -- and/or from a lower social class.  A more educated or higher-class Northern woman won’t be happy taking orders from someone she sees as lower in class (then her).  Regional and class tensions can explode over household chores or child-rearing practices.

In some cases the Vietnamese wife of the employer sees the maid as a "potential distraction," says Langrish-Smith, "which opens yet another can of worms!"  Often, a Vietnamese wife might want something done in a Vietnamese way that isn’t taught at Maid In Vietnam training.

Langrish-Smith’s life would be a lot easier if he were operating in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) where, he says, people are “less arrogant” and also 20 years ahead when it comes to understanding service mentality.  But, like many other foreigners in Vietnam, Langrish-Smith prefers the quieter northern capital over the more in-your-face southern metropolis of Saigon.    But he says he does have a license to operate in Ho Chi Minh City and plans to eventually expand the business down south, but for now the existing expat network limits the market for his business. 

_____________

Here are some stats I found on the website of the The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES). "a German non-profit, private educational foundation committed to the concepts and basic values of social democracy."

Japan:  Women form 39.5 per cent of the nation's total workforce. Only 50 per cent of Japanese women are engaged in economy, compared to 77.8 per cent of men. More than one-third of all women workers are part-time employees. Women constitute 67 per cent of the 11 million part-time workers in the country. However, women’s wages are only 62.5 per cent of men's.

China:  The percentage of women's representation in China’s Lower House amounts to 21.8, the second highest among the ASEAN states. Among China's 20 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, there are 18 female governors or vice governors. Women have become part and parcel of economic life in China. However, there are still wide gaps between the female and male labor force. For instance, 49.2 per cent of women participate in the labor force compared to 76.6 per cent for men.

Vietnam: Vietnamese working women constitute about 47 per cent of the workforce in the state sector and 52 per cent in the private sector. Vietnam has become the leading ASEAN country concerning the percentage of  women’s participation in the Lower House (26 per cent). Furthermore, Vietnam has a female Vice President in Nguyen Thi Binh….Still,  women perform about 60 per cent of the agricultural workload while earning only 72 per cent of the average male wage.

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