It was not yet noon on Sunday but the streets around Chater Road in the centre of Hong Kong were already thronged with groups of women sitting on sheets of cardboard as they shared food from plastic containers. Some found positions close to the Prada and Gucci shops near the Mandarin Oriental hotel but more were crammed in to underpasses beneath the multi-lane roads that cut through the city centre.

These are Hong Kong’s migrant domestic workers, most of them from the Philippines and Indonesia, who come here every Sunday, their only day off each week. For Annabelle Maregmen, who came to Hong Kong from the Philippines in 1998, it’s an opportunity for the women to support one another as well as to relax and have fun.

“When I came to Hong Kong, I told my family I would stay for two years because I was studying education and I wanted to continue my college degree,” she said.

“So what I’m thinking is that two years is enough for me to earn some money to continue my studies. But it didn’t materialise because during that time I wanted to send money back home. I wanted my sister to go to college and so my perspective changed.”

Hong Kong’s 370,000 foreign domestic workers, 99 per cent of whom are women, account for almost 5 per cent of the city’s population. Many have lived most of their adult lives in Hong Kong but they can only remain as long as they have a contract for domestic work.

Some conditions have improved in recent years and domestic workers now have a standard contract and a minimum monthly wage of HK$4,900 (€557). But they have no statutory limit on working hours and because they live in, they are effectively on call every day except Sunday.

“Normally, people stay here for the whole day but some have to leave by 9pm because although we’re supposed to have 24 hours off, some of them have a curfew,” Maregmen said.

Cleofa Jean Mendez-Sison came to Hong Kong from the Philippines at the beginning of last year because she wanted to earn enough money to pay for therapy for her seven-year-old son, who is on the autism spectrum. A qualified teacher, she worked in a private school in the Philippines, but it did not pay enough. She is hoping to go home in a couple of years and she finds domestic work challenging.

“It’s really hard to adjust actually because you know, when you’re in the Philippines, no one will ask you to do this. But here, every action that you make is being watched and you’re not allowed to make a mistake,” she said.

“I’m afraid of being terminated. That’s why, even if I know that something that they ask me is beyond my contract, I will do it because I’m scared. I’m scared of being terminated.”

Up the hill from Chater Road at the Anglican St John’s Cathedral, the two-room headquarters of the Mission for Migrant Workers was crowded with women seeking advice about their rights and how to deal with disputes with their employers. Cynthia Abdon, a social worker from the Philippines, has been running this service in Hong Kong for 45 years and many of the problems have not changed.

“It has improved a lot in terms of policy. But policy is one thing, practice is another,” she said.

The recruitment agencies in the Philippines that arrange domestic placements in Hong Kong are not allowed to charge the workers a fee but in practice many of them do. The workers sign IOUs or postdated cheques or loan agreements with companies in the Philippines, which then pass the debt on to collection agencies in Hong Kong.

“Sometimes they’re paying two-thirds of their salary to these companies,” Abdon said.

Foreign domestic workers are obliged to live with their employers, who are in turn obliged to give them a room of their own to live in. But homes in Hong Kong are small and many workers share bedrooms with the children they care for or sleep in common areas.

[ ‘Employers can be very creative’: exploitation of migrant workers on the riseOpens in new window ]

“Every now and then, we do a survey, and we are told they have their own accommodation. Further question, can you lock the door? No, because it is a stockroom or it is a laundry room or a toilet,” Abdon said.

“You live in the place where you work. You cannot work for anyone else. You cannot also take up part-time work, even online selling. You’re taking care of kids, taking care of the elderly, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, everything.”

Cases of abuse are difficult to prove but Abdon’s mission encourages the women to come forward and offers them refuge in a shelter if necessary. The mission also helps to lodge formal complaints on the workers’ behalf.

“One Indonesian woman, who was physically abused, didn’t have a day off, was not paid at all, only ate two slices of bread and drank one litre of water, and had to wear pampers because she was only allowed use the toilet when she went to sleep or upon waking up,” Abdon said.

“She was made to sleep on the floor in winter with no blanket at all. She said, ‘I made a lot of mistakes because I was so sleepy.’ She was made to strip, her employer pulled her to the bathroom, and turned on the electric fan and poured cold water on her.”

When Edith Victoria was diagnosed with breast cancer in June 2020, her employer said she wanted to terminate her contract but the employment agency told her that was not allowed. Faced with the prospect of paying a fine, the employer changed her approach and helped Victoria to find a shelter to stay in during her chemotherapy treatment.

“When I came here to the mission for migrants, I found a home, a home [where] they helped me a lot. Especially when I was in distress because I didn’t know what to do. I had no one, no family. So they became my family here,” she said.

“I’m grateful to my employer because she continued my visa so I was able to work. But I can’t forget that she wanted to terminate me at first, at the time I needed help the most.”

Many of the domestic workers are highly educated women, qualified teachers or nurses who left the Philippines or Indonesia because they could not earn a living wage there. More than half of them have left children at home and they came to Hong Kong planning to stay for only a year or two to pay for their children’s education, but economic necessity has kept them there for much longer.

“You find some people who have been three generations, the mother, the daughter, and the granddaughter. It’s very painful,” Abdon said.