However, that said, I would like to know if they ever caught her.
Wonder what went wrong, but having someone living with your family can be a strain - if I had a maid, I would arrange for a 016 service, as it would only be 2-3 NT per minute.
Perhaps a bit of leave once in a while would improve the situation as well.[/quote]
My great-aunt’s family had a full time live-in maid to take care of her, an 80+ year-old suffering from Parkinson’s… the maid was from the Phillipines and as time went along she became part of the family and even learned to speak mandarin fluently. Unfortunately my great-aunt passed away earlier this year and I don’t know what happened to the maid.
In any case, she was most likely caught and shipped out, but by which authority (legal or underground) who knows…
People do not have to legally give their passports to others for “safekeeping.” The maid agencies suggest you do this to make life easier for the agencies and the families - it makes it harder for the maid to run away.
To the original poster - when you get your new maid/nanny, try to remember that it is exhausting to look after a baby. If you also expect her to wait on you hand and foot and do all the household chores, I can pretty well guarantee her work will start to suffer. Don’t take the way the average Taiwanese family treats their third-world maid as a model. Treat her well, give her what you yourself would consider a reasonable amount of time off, pay her on time, be polite, let her have friends, and don’t take away her passport. If you do this, I can almost guarantee you won’t have any trouble.
Maybe because I grew up poor where everyone took responsibilities for chores and child care, that this whole thing bothers me. I would walk my little sister from the school bus when I was six and both my parents worked, and we had to clean our rooms and fold our clothes as soon as we had the dexterity to do so. I can’t understand how people can totally pass all of these responsibilities (cleaning up after adults, doing their housework and laundry and shopping and cooking, and taking care of a baby) to one person and then give her slave wages for doing all that. Would it have killed you to pay her decently? Would you be willing to do all of that work for only $250/hr, knowing that you need to send money home to your family for support, pay your agent, and still have some money for yourself? How much morale would you have after months of working to have almost nothing to show for it and spend your days either in a tiny room on your freetime or scrubbing toilets and taking care of a baby and cooking meals for the rest of the time. Ugh. No wonder she ran off. I hope she’s okay. Certainly serves the guy right, even if he did treat her “well” with wages that would make a better punchline than a means of living. People here bitch about getting paid only $550/hour to teach English yet see nothing wrong with paying a woman only $250/hour to be a housekeeper, nanny, and cook.
I’m so disgusted.
What should you do next? Think about paying your next slave, er “maid” better so she doesn’t see working illegally as a more pleasant option than working for you for measly wages.
OK, lets refrain from making inflammatory value judgements here, and stick to the facts as they have been given so far.
With-holding someone’s passport is simply illegal - no one has the right to take possession of your passport, it is the property of the issuing government, and may only be held by the bearer. If Guest has done this, then he has not only acted illegally, but also abused his maid’s basic human rights.
However, if she left her passport voluntarily, then Guest, it is your obligation to IMMEDIATELY return it to the Indonesian Representative Office in Taipei.
But you will forgive me at this point - and some of the other contributors so far - for smelling a rat here - because basic common sense would dictate that it is sensless for the maid to run off without her passport, leaving it perhaps as a parting gift, or as a ransom of some sort, if she did not have a chance to take it with her in her bid for freedom (regardless of her outstanding obligations to the employer). Ergo, many people may quite rightly suspect that Guest did in fact have possession of her passport, which is illegal.
Well Guest, perhaps at this point you should come clean, and put this matter to rest once and for all. Did you illegally take possession of her passport or not?