Microsoft has entered a deal to acquire Greenfield Online, an attitudinal researcher and owner of European comparison shopping player Ciao GmbH, for $486 million. Microsoft’s in it strictly for the shopping search platform, which it dubs “commercial search,” and has already found an (undisclosed) buyer for the research/survey business.
The Maid Trade by Journeyman Pictures is a very interesting glimpse of the harsh working conditions of some of the foreign domestic workers in my so-called first world country of Singapore.
Pay close attention to the second minute of the video. The trainer in the video pointed to a picture of a dark-skinned man and told the maids in the class not to get a boyfriend like that with some very racist words. I have no idea how this can be allowed to be taught in the maid agencies.
Where else can you pay someone as low as SGD $200 per month to work in your home all day long without any off days? You can even make them sleep on the kitchen floor, underneath the table or any where you please. A lot of maids are not allowed to sit at the same table with their employers or on the sofa, even though their pets can do it. Most of the time, the employers ask their maids to eat their leftover food. We treat them like sub-humans. What’s worse? They are trained to call their female employers “MUM” instead of “Maam”.
I know this because this was how my mum and relatives do it. My mum was very harsh on the maids. My dad would allow day offs and let them sit on the sofa and dining table with us. My older sister used to share a bedroom with one of our maids and it was great but my mum would never allow it at her place. My parents had very different styles of handling maids and they had numerous conflicts because of this. Things became easier for them when they divorced so they could hire their own maids and be free of each other’s differences.
The Singapore government has some stupid rules that push all the responsibility of the maids’ conducts on their employers. Therefore, there are all sorts of fines for the employers if their maids misbehave. That is why the maids are told not to have boyfriends, marry in Singapore or get pregnant in Singapore, which is the main reason why employers do not allow their maids to leave the house. The employers have the right to send the maids back to the agent or straight back to wherever they came from if they break the rules.
The Singapore government charges a heftly maid levy of SGD $265 and above every month, which is paid by the employer. Is it any wonder why they don’t really care about them? They get more money than most of the maids. With over 140000 maids in Singapore, the government gets above SGD $37,100,000 a month, or SGD $445,200,000 a year! This is a big business!
If you ask me, most people don’t need maids. They should spend a few hours per week doing their own house work, cook their own meals, wash the dishes and take care of their own kids. I wish my parents did that because I hardly had any quality time with them when I was growing up.
I just can’t look myself in the mirror if I paid someone about SGD $250 per month to work in my house to do all the things I should do myself. Just because we have no minimum wage laws in Singapore, does not mean I should exploit this situation by hiring a foreign worker who is willing to take ridiculously low wages. This is modern day slavery at its best. We deny them even less of the human rights our government denies us.
This is just the part on domestic workers in Singapore. The situation of the other non-domestic foreign workers is much worse. It is sad that this happens in Singapore and we need to fix this as soon as possible. This is a humuliating disgrace for all Singaporeans.
I will no longer be posting posts about WordPress, web development, web design and search engine optmization on this blog. Instead, I will post them on my new site Maverick Web Creations, which I created to advertise my WordPress services.
Verizon and Google may be close to a search deal for the carrier’s wireless customers, reports the Wall Street Journal. The Journal says, “It’s the latest sign that telecom companies are finally conceding that their homegrown search services have stalled — and that they need help from the Internet’s big guns.”
I have not caught on the social networking hype of registering on sites like Twitter. I did not want to waste my time on things like Twitter because I am not a person who likes to check out what’s the latest news about other people except for my favourite band, Oasis.
A few weeks ago, I decided to test the status feature of Facebook. I was feeling happy and relieved that this unpleasant house mate of mine was going to move out soon in early August so I added a countdown message that went something like “3 more days to go”. Some of my friends started sending me messages asking me what I was counting down to!
When my house mate moved out, I changed my status message to something like “So long sucker, hope you don’t steal other people’s shampoo and take other people’s stuff in the future!”. A female friend of mine then asked me what caused me to get so upset.
Now I am beginning to understand why sites like Twitter are so popular. Some people just love these one-liners and have to know more. I think I should start using Twitter and some other similar sites like it even though I think they are dumb.
The problem is, I do not wish to login to all of my social networking sites to manually update all my status messages. I stumbled on a WordPress plugin called PingPress.fm that might do the trick. It works with Ping.fm, which is a free service that helps you to update all your social networks at one place. I will test it out and see how it goes.
Every year in Singapore, the government gets someone to release a communist-styled patriotic song. This year’s song is titled “The Singapore Song”.
ClickZ’s editorial team is moving to a new office in Manhattan’s financial district. Effective today, we’ll be joining other Incisive Media’s properties including law.com in lower Manhattan.
ComScore said today it changed the way it’s reporting on ad networks, effective with the August 2008 data. You’ll get a chance to see the changes when they are released in mid-September.
R/GA set up R/GA Brand Design, to address the shift of branding in the digital age. The new division takes into account early consumer impressions, if not first impressions, including when a prospective customer lands on a Web site to find out more about a brand or product. “As brand-consumer relationships shift to the digital sphere, the responsibility of brand perception is shifting to digital agencies,” R/GA said in a statement.