In Service and Servitude: Chapter 7

Christine B.N. Chin

1998

7. Conclusion

The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionately circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Defense of Poetry,” 1821

Contemporary domestic service in Malaysia is indicative of more than just the performance and consumption of paid reproductive labor. Changes in the profile of domestic workers are not merely a natural consequence of modernization. Rather, contemporary domestic service has become an educative institution through which the state objectifies the material boundaries of the middle classes and, at the very same time, normalizes middle-class adoption of the nuclear family.

It should come as no surprise to discover that the state is involved in shaping the material and symbolic aspects of social life. From the colonial to the postcolonial era, strategies of coercion-repression and consent have been used to arrange and rearrange society. Such strategies have and continue to involve low wage foreign migrant labor.

To develop a natural resource-based export economy, the British encouraged the in-migration of Chinese and Indian workers and proceeded to construct “racial” identities and a division of labor that ensured social order in the midst of the processes of (predominantly European) capital accumulation.

The postcolonial state elite implemented the NEP to redress the colonial legacy that naturalized the association of ethnicities with different economic function and geographic space. The NEP was an affirmative action development program that sought to construct a modern urban professional Malay identity out of the inherited colonial identity of Malays as rural fishermen and farmers. Strategies of coercion, such as quota systems in employment and education, and the transfer of corporate wealth, institutionalized public and private sector preference for Malays, as state agencies became the trustees of redistributed Malay corporate wealth. Public discourse critical of various aspects and effects of the NEP was silenced mainly and visibly by repressive legislation.

My analysis demonstrates that efforts by the postcolonial state elite to rearrange society were not dependent solely on strategies of coercion-repression. By adopting an educative ethos, the increasingly gendered and ethnicized state apparatus has broadened and deepened considerably its involvement in everyday life. A key strategy of garnering consent draws on contemporary demands for foreign female domestic workers to inculcate Malaysians into different forms of social relations and organization that fulfill the objectives of expanding export-oriented capitalist development and maintaining social stability in the multiethnic society.

The larger fields of possible actions and responses that led to Malaysian employment of Filipina and Indonesian servants were shaped, partly, by the history of the state’s relation to domestic service—especially the consistent refusal to legislate the performance and consumption of domestic labor. This could only reinforce the patriarchal belief that housework is nonwork, even when it is remunerated. During the colonial era, contestations between European employers and Chinese male servants were solved effectively with the first wave of Chinese migrant female servants during the 1930s.

Unlegislated domestic service in the postcolonial era reflects more than the belief that housework is nonwork. Legislated domestic service in the 1970s would have affected the supply of female workers in factories owned by TNCs. Many Malaysian female servants and would-be servants who were faced with the prospect of performing either paid housework in unlegislated environments or the more structured and relatively higher waged factory work, chose the latter. To be sure, the Malay/UMNO-controlled state could not openly encourage Malay or non-Malay women to be servants since the NEP was premised on uplifting the socioeconomic lot of Malays without appearing, at the very least, to undermine the socioeconomic future of non-Malays. Malaysian demands for servants were quickly filled by the second wave of foreign (Filipina and Indonesian) female servants that resulted from labor-sending states’ responses to changes in the global and regional economies.

At the outset, it can be said that the official regulation of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers’ in-migration is necessary to ensure a more orderly movement of “guest” workers in and out of Malaysia. Yet, official regulation meant more than merely processing work permits for foreign workers. A closer analysis of the three key rules—income, religion, and family rules—governing the employment of Filipina and Indonesian servants delineates how and why only certain categories of Malaysians legally qualify to do so.

Rule I, the income rule, stated that a Malaysian family must be able to furnish proof (in the form of a copy the Borang J personal income tax return) of a certain level of annual income in order to qualify for state approval to employ a foreign domestic worker. In the 1980s, an annual income of RM50,000 was required to employ a Filipina servant whereas there was no preset annual income level to employ an Indonesian servant. In 1994, the difference between income levels had changed somewhat: RM48,000 to employ a Filipina domestic worker and RM24,000 to employ an Indonesian servant.

During the NEP’s second decade and within a context of growing criticism that development had not benefitted a majority of Malays who were the targeted recipients of redistributed and new wealth, the income rule constructed the material qualification for Malay and non-Malay entry into the imagined community of the Malaysian middle classes. The lower income qualification rule for the employment of Indonesian servants, in effect, subsidized the Malay middle classes: Malays were expected to employ Indonesian women who were of similar ethnoreligious backgrounds. This rule allowed the state elite surreptitiously to offer a visible indicator of the NEP’s success in expanding the Malay middle classes in particular, and the Malaysian middle classes in general, as foreign domestic workers became public boundary markers of, and for, the Malaysian middle classes.

Prior to 1991, rule II, the religion rule, allowed only Muslims (read: Malay) to employ Muslim (read: Indonesian) servants. The intent was to construct and maintain clear boundary markers within the expanding Malaysian middle classes: Malays would employ Indonesian-Muslim servants while most non-Malays who are also non-Muslims would employ Filipina-Christian servants.

Many non-Malays who had failed to meet the income qualification rule to employ Filipinas began to employ illegal Indonesian servants. The blurring of intraclass ethnoreligious boundaries separating the Malay from non-Malay middle classes, and also the blurring of interclass boundaries (since working-class peoples could and did employ illegal and indentured Indonesian servants), prompted the state authorities to enforce this rule rigorously by searching for illegal foreign servants, and subsequently deporting them. When the Malay and non-Malay middle classes vehemently objected to the proposed deportation of Indonesian servants, the rule was retracted.

Rule III, the family rule, insisted that Malaysians who wanted to employ foreign female domestic workers had to be able to furnish proof of marriage and children. Applications for state approval to employ foreign servants must include copies of personal income tax returns, and respective official marriage and birth certificates of employers and their children. This rule, which inculcates Malaysian adoption of the nuclear family form, is premised on achieving two interrelated objectives.

During the NEP period, expanded education and employment opportunities for Malaysian women led to a gradual increase in the marriage age and a decrease in the birth rate. An eventual reduction in the size of the future Malaysian workforce, then, had the potential to jeopardize the official plan to deepen industrialization, and ultimately the success of the modernity project in constructing a developed socially stable multiethnic polity. At the very same time, public discourse centered on the fear among Malaysians, especially men, that they were losing financial and social control over their womenfolk, since many more women were active in the workforce. Malaysian women’s new roles and status were perceived to have been achieved at the expense of the socioeconomic future of the country.

A key answer to the dilemma was the 1984 National Population Policy (NPP). Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad appealed to women to stay at home, if possible, and have at least five children per family. The NPP had dual objectives: to ensure continued economic growth by increasing the size of the future workforce that would eventually increase the productive and consumptive capacities of the Malaysian economy and society; and to reconstitute Malay and non-Malay women’s roles and identities primarily as mothers and wives.

Since the late 1980s, labor shortages require Malaysian women to serve their country in the dual capacity of mother and worker. Today, the family rule encourages women to work beyond the home without having to worry about childcare and housework. Taken together, the income and family rules draw on Malaysian demands for household help to coopt domestic service as a key educative institution of the state.

The middle classes’ demands for servants also tell us how contemporary export-oriented development offers Malaysian women new opportunities and new forms of dependence. In spite of, or perhaps because of, additional employment and education opportunities, women remain constrained by the practice of private patriarchy that holds them responsible for housework. Private patriarchy is reinforced by and reinforces public patriarchy, in which various pieces of legislation and policies on taxation and childcare constitute women from the middle classes primarily as homemakers.

Although Malaysian employment of Filipina and Indonesian servants frees working mothers to pursue careers while maintaining families, Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers are more than substitute homemakers in middle-class families. Just as they are constituted as public boundary markers by the income rule, they are boundary markers in private space as well.

Analysis of employer-foreign servant relations ascertained that Malaysian employment of Filipina and Indonesian women facilitates the construction of middle-class identity in the domestic domain. The transformation of working mothers into household executives is distinguished by the identity construction of middle-class female employers as clean, trustworthy, and civilized while foreign servants are seen more or less as unsanitary, untrustworthy, and backward. The negative aspects of employer supervision in unlegislated work environments are amplified by state authorities’ efforts to circumscribe foreign servants’ activities in public space and the consequent public perception of foreign servants as prostitutes and criminals. Many times, employers’ methods of control and surveillance can and do result in verbal, emotional, and physical abuse of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers.

Foreign servants do not passively accept the identities and traits constructed by Malaysian employers, society, and the state. Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers’ individual and collective infrapolitical activities challenge and/or renegotiate different kinds of values and the use of resources in the performance and consumption of paid reproductive labor.

The Malaysian modernity project, which promises the middle classes the opportunity to pursue a certain version of the good life, takes an ironic turn that is characterized by the dehumanization of foreign domestic workers and their abusive employers. Fearful that servants will engage in illegal and immoral activities within and beyond the workplace, many female employers deny the domestic workers such basic rights as rest days, rest periods during the daytime, the freedom to socialize with friends, and decent sleeping accommodations. The caring nuclear family that the state is intent on constructing in part by way of regulating the in-migration and employment of foreign domestic workers may also prepare the present and possibly future generations of the middle classes to expect women to perform housework, and to perceive and treat Filipina and Indonesian women as little more than foreign servants who can be owned and who must be controlled.

In the 1990s, the political economy of the nuclear family is an extremely important dimension of the modernity project. The expansion of export-oriented development in Malaysia requires changes not only in peoples’ relation to the production process, but also in consumption patterns. The model of the nuclear family is considered as the most appropriate structure for socializing members of the expanding middle classes to come to rely on or expect the capitalist market to be the major provider of consumer goods and services. The Malaysian-Philippine-Indonesian maid trade, in which servants are exported and imported like commodities, is an example of the middle classes’ growing dependence on the capitalist market.

Malaysian employment of foreign female domestic workers has become a key part in the middle classes’ pursuit of distinctive identities and lifestyles, hence modernity by way of consuming material goods and services offered by the capitalist market. While the employment rules construct and legitimize the form (i.e., the nuclear family) in which modernity via consumption is best pursued by the middle classes, the advertising industry helps promote identity construction via the consumption of high-quality goods and services. I found little difference in Malay and non-Malay employers’ definition of a middle class lifestyle that is characterized by the purchase and display of material goods, including that of commodified foreign servants as symbols of social status.

Silence over the working conditions of Filipina and Indonesian servants shows how the notion of civilizational progress according to neoliberalism is globalized and, in the case of Malaysia, mediated through the lens of a real or perceived urgency to ensure social stability in a multiethnic society. At issue is not just the simple, compelling, and necessary argument that some foreign domestic workers are mistreated, abused, and should be protected against profit-hungry DOMs and employers who lack conscience. Rather, it is how morality is reworked in a way that naturalizes public and private acceptance of the dehumanization of Filipina and Indonesian women. The state’s strategy of garnering consent, which seeks to inculcate different kinds of social relations and organizations (with the objective of creating a new kind of citizenry and a new level of civilization), subsequently appears to be inculcating a certain kind of morality in which the mistreatment and abuse of foreign domestic workers remain largely unproblematized.

Utilitarianism: The Route to a Socially Engineered Modern Malaysian Polity

A dominant social code of conduct has emerged from the mechanisms and consequences of the in-migration and employment of foreign female domestic workers in Malaysia. It is evident in labor sending states’ responses to changes in the transnational economy; the opening of the immigration gates; the nature of DOMs that specialize in the supply of domestic labor; and employer-foreign servant relations.

I have shown that the dominant social code of conduct, which extends from the transnational to the household level, reproduces the Benthamite principle of utility. Jeremy Bentham, writing in the Enlightenment era, proposed that the utility or value of an action should be based on a “felicific calculus” of pleasure against pain, i.e., an action is valid and morally good if it is effective in bringing about a particular response that is favorable to the actor. ₁

Approximately two hundred years later and in a different region of the world, the Benthamite principle of utility that is informed by felicific calculus is evident as labor-sending and labor-receiving states and their social forces respond to the expansion of open markets and free trade. From the perspective of labor-sending states, the “export” of domestic workers is a way to maintain, if not increase, foreign exchange earnings; relieve the political, economic, and social pressures of unemployment and underemployment; and improve the skills training of migrant workers. Labor out-migration policies conceivably “maximize pleasure” and “minimize pain” as sending states pursue the “greatest happiness of the greatest number” of peoples: peoples are expected to have less competition in the job market, while female nationals are given the opportunity to work overseas, and the demands of overseas employers are met accordingly.

The utility of labor out-migration policies is conflated with the ethical presumption that the out-migration of domestic workers will bring the greatest good to society and the economy in the labor-sending countries. Despite reports of employer mistreatment and abuse of foreign female domestic workers in Malaysia and elsewhere, labor export policies are morally justified—from a utilitarian perspective—because of the larger and putatively more important political, economic, and social benefits that are elicited from labor out-migration.

From the perspective of the labor-receiving state of Malaysia, the utility of the labor in-migration policy is discerned from the fact that Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers allow working-class and middle-class Malaysian women to participate in the labor force, and ultimately the modernity project. Yet, growing numbers of female and male migrant workers are considered a potentially disruptive force in the multiethnic society. The need to ensure social order in the context of mutual coexistence between Malaysians and “guest” workers becomes the justification for public and private surveillance on foreign female domestic workers. Nonetheles, these two modes of surveillance contribute to negative public perceptions of foreign servants while legitimizing employers’ dehumanizing attitudes and behavior toward the women in private space.

Global, regional, and national efforts to encourage open markets and free trade in material goods are matched, today, with open markets and free trade in foreign female domestic workers. DOMs would argue that exorbitant fees are necessary to ensure an efficient and uninterrupted supply of workers. Some draconian measures to control foreign servants are considered necessary to ensure the conduct of business within legal parameters set by the labor-receiving state. Middle-class employers, then, may and do proceed to recoup monies that are given to DOMs and the costs incurred in providing Filipina and Indonesian women with board and lodging, by extracting more labor from and/or refusing to pay monthly wages to the domestic workers.

In each of the above cases, it cannot be argued that the practice of utilitarianism is significantly immoral or amoral since what is of utility, according to the actors, is what is necessarily moral. The policies of labor-sending and receiving states as well as DOMs, and the actions and perceptions of employers, are premised respectively on the belief that the transnationalization of migrant domestic labor, and the modes of public and private surveillance of foreign domestic workers, bring about responses favorable to the respective actors. Morality in these instances is bounded by the dictates of policies and actions that are effective, not so much from the perspective of servants’ interests, but from the perspective of the interests to maintain a constant revenue inflow in the form of foreign exchange earnings; an uninterrupted supply of labor; and the social control of foreigners at the household and national levels. Morality is conceived in and exercised on purely utilitarian terms.

As far as the Malaysian state’s relationship to capitalist development is concerned, the effort to social engineer a stable developed multiethnic polity is necessary, and even strengthened by the global expansion of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is globalized on the presumption that open markets and free trade are the most viable routes to local, national, regional, and global development. ₂ In the face of this, utilitarianism becomes the practical ideology that conjoins the needs of transnational capital with the state elite’s objective of maintaining legitimacy while restructuring Malaysian economy and society.

In 1993 Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad said that:

We have asked the Ministry of Education to concentrate on manual and living skills rather than on learning too much about history and arts and all that because we are going to have an industrialized society [emphasis mine]. Fine, if you can have people who can write good novels and all that. We need a few of them, but not too many. . . . We want to actively change the value system. We have devoted RM100 million for this process. We are setting up centres where we will take the people and tell them why this value system is bad and why this is good and why you should practice this value system and not that. . . . We have to explain this thing to them because we cannot expect them to reason these things out themselves. ₃

The Prime Minister’s statement confirms the existence of strategies of consent through which the state seeks to construct a different kind of citizenry with “modern” values. Implicit in the proposed emphasis on manual and living skills is that the command of technological knowhow will improve human resource development, thus deepen industrialization and the competitiveness of the economy. The construction and dissemination of technological values, skills, and knowledge are privileged over the critical study and discourse on humanity(s):

With the transformation of the nation from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy, there will be new demands not only for technical, managerial, and skilled manpower but also for a labour force that is instilled with the values and culture of an industrialized society [emphasis mine]. Industrial skill will have to be developed at a rapid pace to provide support for further expansion of the manufacturing industries. While the government will continue to expand and re-oriented [sic] the education and training system, the private sector will be called upon to share a larger burden of training the human resources of the country. ₄

Social engineering in preparation for the twenty-first century involves engineering different values—most notably the value of utility—that undergird peoples’ relation to the natural and social environments. ₅ Utilitarianism, however, makes the task of nurturing a “caring” family and society all the more difficult. Already, the dehumanization of foreign female domestic workers in Malaysia indicates that social engineering in this manner comes at a potentially great cost to the individual and collective humanity of the peoples. To build a society fed mostly on a diet of utilitarianism is to build a society that has the potential to be gradually divorced from, or unfamiliar with and unreflective of, the historical struggles that have helped shape visions of what is and is not possible, and what should and should not be permissible in the present and for the future.

The path of export-oriented development that is packaged and promoted by the World Bank and the IMF, and consequently adopted by the state (albeit with a combination of direct and indirect modes of state involvement), is one that hinges on increased production and consumption. Taken to its logical conclusion, sustained consumption is expected to stimulate further innovations in technology that, in turn, enhance the production process. State and private-sector encouragement of the middle classes’ emphasis on consumption is indicative of the initial steps in a modernity project designed to undermine or even eliminate real and perceived ethnic, religious, and cultural differences. Indeed, given the state elite’s attempts to secure for Malaysian society and economy an advantageous position in the race among states and nonstate actors to attract transnational capital and markets, the need to address the plight of foreign female domestic workers cannot but become incidental to the modernity project.

Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad acknowledges some of the contradictions in pursuing a vision of modernity that is shaped by neoliberalism:

What might you rightly ask, is “a fully developed country”? Do we want to be like any particular country of the present nineteen countries that are generally regarded as “developed counties”? Do we want to be like the United Kingdom, like Canada, like Holland, like Sweden, like Finland, like Japan? To be sure, each of the nineteen, out of a world community of more than 160 states, has its strength. But each also has its fair share of weaknesses. Without being a duplicate of any of them we can still be developed. ₆

In other words, the modernity project can emulate the West and Japan, albeit without generating the myriad of social problems that are perceived to confront them. As if to reemphasize his point, the Prime Minister has been extremely vocal in his criticism of social life especially in the West. He has argued that, “The ideology and logic of materialism have all too easily influenced human society . . . This is a direct result of the impact of Western thought, which fanatically focuses on the material basis of life. Values based on the spiritual, on peace of mind, and on belief in feelings loftier than desire, have no place in the Western psyche.” ₇

Paradoxically, the privileging of utilitarianism as a key driving force for the future has had the effect of encouraging rather than discouraging materialism. To restate my earlier point, the expansion of export-oriented development and the success of the modernity project are premised on changes in production and consumption patterns and processes.

A belief in feelings loftier than desire is possible when social actors, in their everyday lives, begin to confront the ways in which the principle of utility has become the basis from which to define, perceive, and evaluate one’s self and others. Many Malaysian female employers would readily rationalize their abusive behavior toward foreign domestic workers from the perspective of utility—i.e., they justify their behavior from the perspective that it is, for the most part, necessary and effective in bringing about particular outcomes. To deny Filipina and Indonesian servants rest days is to be able to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and/or legal problems to employers and the workers. Consequently, while the path of export-oriented development improves the standard of living for the expanding middle classes, the various structural forces that shape the in-migration and employment of foreign servants also work to enslave the consciousness of employers.

It is admirable that the modernity project, as pointed out by the Prime Minister, should not be designed to encourage a kind of materialism void of some sense of humanity and dignity. The many different peoples and cultures in Malaysia offer the opportunity to construct an alternative vision of development that need not necessarily sacrifice humanity for material progress and wealth. Yet, economic and social preparations for capturing transnational markets and capital, thus material wealth, threaten to bring about the reverse.

The present global wave to create and harmonize open markets and free trade thrives on and affirms a materialistically oriented social identity and life. For better and for worse, postcolonial states and societies must contend with this: in such a milieu, an acceptance of the covenant of improving living standards, hence quality of life, automatically dictates an acceptance of a reductionist notion of civilizational progress. At the close of the twentieth century, a key challenge remains for all—to strive to build and maintain societies in which “service” is given to humanity, not to capital.

Note on the Epigraph

John Shawcross, Shelley’s Literary and Philosophical Criticism (London: H. Milford, 1909), p. 148.

Endnotes

Note 1: Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation, edited with an introduction by L. J. LaFleur (New York: Hafner Press, 1948), p. 2. Back.

Note 2: For a discussion on the felicific calculus in the global expansion of financial credit services, see Stephen Gill, “The Global Panopticon: The Neoliberal State, Economic Life, and Democratic Surveillance,” Alternatives 2 (1995): 1&-;44 Back.

Note 3: As stated by Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad in response to questions from participants at the seminar entitled “Towards a Developed and Industrialized Society: Understanding the Concept, Implications and Challenges” (see Ahmad Sarji Abdul Hamid, ed., Malaysia’s Vision 2020: Understanding the Concept, Implications and Challenges [Petaling Jaya: Pelanduk Publications, 1993], p. 26). Back.

Note 4: Mahathir Mohamad, “The Second Outline Perspective Plan 1991–2000,” in Malaysia’s Vision 2020, p. 445. Back.

Note 5: As Anne Archer writes in the context of the globalization of information technology: “To begin with, “desires” are postulated without any general theory of humanity (which has the job inter alia of distinguishing between propensities and conduct in such terms of good/evil, virtue/vice, grace/sin, rational/irrational, free/determined, etc.). Since our theorists turn their back on this job, yet want to make other peoples’ desires carry the moral burden, then the simple act of wanting something has to be seen as rationally desirable on this view, otherwise the blank ethical check cannot be issued. In other words, good reason is presumed to be forthcoming from anyone who desires anything: the only way of making ethical check-outs redundant. Then, such actors harness their wants to Zwenkrätionalitat, they survey the technological means available, and the end result is dubbed “progressive” for mankind as a whole” (“Theory, Culture and Post-Industrial Society,” in Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, ed. Mike Featherstone [London: Sage Publications, 1990], p. 8). Back.

Note 6: Mahathir Mohamad, “Malaysia: The Way Forward, “in Malaysia’s Vision 2020, p. 403. Back.

Note 7: Michael Vatikiotis, “Making of a Maverick,” Far Eastern Economic Review (August 20, 1992): 18. Back.