Our desk: Happy New Year to the one forth amongst us

Brook Yang

An unkempt man stopped in front of a shelf that holds several rice pudding cans, reaching out his hands for one. Surrounded by an array of desserts and snacks at the busy supermarket, the young window cleaner, sporting a uniform covered in dust, held only that 250ml can as tightly as if a celebration was relying on this little precious gift.
Not a fancy delicacy but commonality in Chinese towns, the canned rice pudding contains a flavor from many hometowns of the mainlanders working in Macau. But after being imported here, it is no longer an item for which many of them can spare money.
What is out of the daily reach of the tens of thousands of people like this man is not only a can of sweets or a meal at a small restaurant, but also a sense of social security. In Macau, such sense reflects on an affordable room that doesn’t need to be shared with several others, an inexpensive medical insurance, a Christmas holiday or enough respect from the city they serve in.
This might be a normal scene in this expensive city we live in, or in any metropolises that are filled with migrant workers. But the man – along with his peers in the lower class, and the non-local professionals and executives – constitutes up to one forth of Macau’s population. And when we look around, over 41 percent of the city’s laborers we see are in fact non-residents.
The official statistics recorded that there were 162,877 migrant workers in Macau at the end of September this year, where the total employed population was 394,400 and the city’s population was 631,000. By the end of November, the number of non-local workers was added by some 4,300.
Whether they are dream-seekers who have relocated to the feasting city, or rural dwellers that had to find a source of income outside hometowns, the one forth among us contributes largely to the urban machine’s functioning day and night. Yet many times, many of them are treated unfairly and even unkindly.
In addition to this, the public holidays in Macau accounted for 19 days this year, whereas civil servants have the privilege to eight more holidays. Yet by law, the one forth of us are only entitled to ten public holidays, which exclude Easter, the Dragon Boat Festival, as well as Christmas.
We who enjoy a normal amount of holidays and annual leave might not understand the homesickness of a security guard who hasn’t returned home in Nepal for two or four years; or the melancholy of a housemaid who quietly wept over her young child left behind in Indonesia.
If a holiday is a luxury and social welfare is beyond the desirable, higher salaries or a housing allowance could be the best gift to a migrant worker in lower class. However, such rationale is not accepted by every local resident.
When the migrant workers’ associations urged the government to take measures to achieve fair treatment for migrants last month, a local activist from casino workers’ unions stated that the market salary for domestic helpers is higher than some MOP3,000 “even with daily meals provided”.  According to this activist, domestic workers often refuse to stay in the employers’ house and then continue to complain that the housing allowance is insufficient. “Those housemaids stop pretending to be miserable as their pay rises even faster than civil servants’,” he taunted.
The activist, who fights against inequality in the wealthy city might not notice that many domestic workers tend to rent a bed space outside rather than staying in-house because they simply cannot stand being on-call around the clock by the family who provides them a roof to live under.
The union leader, who appeals for the interests of his fellow croupiers and other local residents, might not realize that only when everybody’s rights are respected, can his vision for an equal livelihood be plausible.
When the New Year’s dawn arrives, an influx of laborers may flow south as usual from the North District and the other side of the border into various construction sites that are set to extend the glamorous Cotai Strip, where courteous staffs will greet us with a “Happy New Year!”