Thousands of maids underpaid

More than 10,000 Indonesian women working as live-in maids in Hong Kong are being illegally underpaid after their employers dumped their Filipino hires, according to a survey.

The survey of foreign domestic helpers found that 12 per cent of Indonesian maids in the city of 6.9 million are paid less than the government-set minimum wage of about $575 a month.

In some cases, the women received as little as half the legal minimum wage, according to researchers for the welfare pressure group Caritas which interviewed about 600 maids.

A study by the same organization two years ago found Indonesian maids were the most commonly abused of all foreign women working as live-in domestic helpers in the former British colony.

More than 200,000 foreign maids work in Hong Kong. The biggest group, about 120,000, comes from The Philippines, followed by 110,000 from Indonesia.