With the practice on retail and marketing going online nowadays, even employment agencies have caught on the trend and have even considered posting domestic workers as ‘commodities’ for profit.
ALSO READ: Migrant Workers to Get Discounts on Insurance and Remittances
And while this may appear convenient for those looking to hire maids, the said act can be considered incredibly unethical and is a direct violation of human rights in general, as it diminishes a person’s work to a fixed price that may even be seen by their families and the rest of society.
Agency Advertising Maids on Carousell Fined, Has License Revoked in SG
In this regard, an employment agency that posted “insensitive” advertisements for foreign maids on Carousell was fined a total of $78,000 and had its license revoked on Tuesday (30 April), as shared in a report by Yahoo! News Singapore.
The Ministry of Manpower (MOM) noted that the employment agency, identified as SRC Recruitment, was slapped with an SGD 48,000 fine after pleading guilty in March to 16 charges of breaching EA licensing conditions by advertising foreign domestic workers (FDWs) insensitively and casting them in an undignified light.
The firm was further fined SGD 30,000 for another 29 charges under the Employment Agencies Act (EAA). These included 15 counts of failing to include the firm’s name and license number in its advertisements, two counts of failing to administer FDW safety agreements, and 10 counts of failing to issue itemised receipts to FDWs.
In total, 99 charges were taken into account for the firm’s sentencing. The MOM added that a notice of license revocation has also been served to SRC over the case.
In relation to this, SRC employment agent Erleena Mohd Ali has been slapped with a fine of SGD 20,000 in November last year after pleading guilty to 10 charges under the EAA. Ali had posted advertisements for Indonesian FDWs on Carousell after receiving approval to do so from one of the firm’s key appointment holders.
In such cases, it’s important to always consider a worker’s dignity and rights and not as just a product being sold in the market.
Also, on the part of the workers, it’s important to know what the law has to say about these things so that they won’t fall victim to scammers and illegal recruiters, and they can perform necessary measures to report such cases and to protect themselves.