Does your Filipino maid have a Facebook account, and internet access so she can post updates?
If not, then she should.
The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) has ordered that domestic maids working outside the country should have a Facebook account and add the POEA and their recruiters as friends.
This was issued in a memorandum issued on Feb 24, 2015.
The POEA also made it mandatory for recruitment and placement firms to have Facebook accounts and to include in their lists of friends all domestic workers they are sending overseas.
Agencies without Facebook accounts will not be allowed to send maids abroad starting this month.
The purpose of this latest measure: to use Facebook to monitor and “ensure that the workers’ interests are amply protected and their well-being and welfare are promoted”.
The memorandum does not say what happens if the maids, once overseas, “unfriend” the POEA and their recruiters or deactivate their Facebook accounts.
About 70,000 Filipinos are working as maids in Singapore.
The Philippines is aiming to cut that number by 20 percent.
It also want to cut the number of Filipinos working abroad as maids by half.
A 2013 survey by the Mission for Migrant Workers of about 3,000 domestic maids in Hong Kong found that one in five said they had been beaten by their employers.
More than half said they had been verbally abused, and 6 per cent claimed to have been molested.
