A Coconaut who is a domestic worker in Hong Kong has sent us photos of what she claims to be her sleeping quarters at her employer’s residence near Central.
“I’ve been working in Hong Kong for eight years and it’s my first time to encounter this kind of room,” she said via Facebook. She started working for her current employer two years ago.
She tells us that her “room” – if it can be called that – is only 170 centimetres long and 69 centimetres wide. The tiny narrow bed has a wooden “wall” on one side and is pushed up against the room’s actual walls on the other side.
The result is that lying down in that bed is like “sleeping in a coffin,” described our reader, who is from the Philippines and wishes to remain anonymous.
“It looks like a cabinet with a bed,” she laments.
Though it appears as there is space outside of the bed-shelf-room combo, she tells us that the area is not part of her sleeping quarters.
In fact, a washing machine is right next to her bed.
“It seems I always have nightmares every time I go to my bed and of course I need to sacrifice or endure the back pain. I can’t move properly, I can’t even stretch [out my hands].”
“I need my job so I have to endure the pain!”
Domestic workers’ living quarters came under scrutiny last week when a new development at LOHAS Park was revealed to have maid’s rooms that were not even big enough to house a single bed.
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