Ordinary Gweilo

There was a letter in yesterday’s paper entitled "Insensitive Immigration", from a lady whose husband had died suddenly.  As he was the employer of their domestic helper she contacted the Immigration Department to ask them what she should do:

I was told that the helper was to report to immigration…She returned with a notice to say that her contract had been terminated on March 21, the day my husband died, and that she has to return to the Philippines on Monday April 4.  The notice also stated "I am not satisfied that there are exceptional circumstances which should justify to extend your stay in Hong Kong."

All that the letter writer wanted was for the helper to continue working for her for a few weeks before she left Hong Kong (permanently, I suppose).  Not an unreasonable request, you might think, but the bureaucrats seem to have interpreted the contract literally and insisted it had been terminated on the death of the employer, and that the helper must therefore leave within two weeks.

Putting comon sense to one side for a moment, the illogical thing about this is that if you want to employ an Overseas Domestic Helper, the mountain of paperwork refers mainly to the household rather than the individual.  Does the household need a helper, is the household income sufficient, do you have a broom cupboard where you can keep the DH when not in use, that type of thing.  They require one member of the household to be the employer, but in reality the helper is employed to work for the family.  Hence it should be a trivial administrative matter to transfer the employment contract from one member of the family to another.

Yet it isn’t, as I discovered when I became the employer of our helper (rather than my wife, who had signed the original contract).  There was no particular reason for making this change apart from my wife’s aversion to filling in forms (our helper was keen that we do it ourselves, rather than using the agency). 

If you renew a DH contract it’s relatively simple and can be done at several Immigration offices, but if you change the employer (even from wife to husband) you have to fill in all manner of stupid forms and apply to Immigration Tower in Wan Chai.  This makes no sense, but that’s bureaucracy for you!

Having to deal with this type of nonsense is frustrating at the best of times, but after the death of your spouse it must be many times worse.  The irony is that if this lady had simply ignored the problem for a few weeks it seems unlikely that the Immigration Department would have taken any action.  So by doing the right thing and contacting them she has been exposed to the full idiocy of their procedures.