Startups want to prevent domestic workers from being ripped off

A domestic worker in Hong Kong on her phone. Image by KC Wong.

There are hundreds of thousands of domestic workers in Asia. Many are women from Indonesia and the Philippines, living in places like Hong Kong or Singapore where they perform tasks like cooking, cleaning, and helping out with children.

In many ways, domestic helpers get the short end of the stick. The women aren’t in positions of power when it comes to picking their employers, negotiating their contracts, or sending money back home.

But a number of startups are looking to level the playing field.

Cutting through the fees

One of the biggest issues that workers face is an endless parade of expensive fees. There are fees to find a job, fees to get introduced to a potential family, fees to send remittances, fees for this, fees for that.

“Helper Choice was created in an effort to offset the unethical and unscrupulous activities of certain domestic worker employment agencies,” says co-founder and CEO Laurence Fauchon. She founded the startup in 2012 after hiring a maid in Hong Kong, only to later find that the woman had spent a fortune in fees to a hiring agency to be set up with a family. That practice is illegal, but many agencies do it.

Put simply, sending money back home sucks.

Laurence’s startup is an online job portal for domestic workers in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Middle Eastern countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia. While most portals charge helpers themselves for listing their profiles, Helper Choice allows them to post their profiles for free, and charges potential employers for access to the database.

The website gives helpers the prerogative to choose their employers – instead of vice versa – which Laurence hopes will promote a good match between families and helpers.

But that’s just the beginning.

“We have heard many heartbreaking stories from helpers about sending money back home,” says Laurence. “One helper had saved almost her entire salary for ten years, but when she retired and returned to the Philippines, she realized all the money was gone.”

Spending wisely

Put simply, sending money back home sucks. Remittance services are laden with pricey transfer fees and often rely on family members to line up at brick-and-mortar offices to receive cash sent from abroad. And when it’s finally in the family member’s hands, there is no guarantee that it’ll be spent in accordance with the worker’s wishes.

Last year, we looked at BeamAndGo, a remittance service that allows overseas Filipino workers to purchase digital gift certificates for their families back home.

The certificates can be used to buy anything from groceries to medical supplies or even insurance, and guarantee that a worker’s hard-earned cash won’t go to waste. It’s also significantly faster than traditional remittance services – it’s SMS based – and isn’t overflowing with hidden fees.