Low incomes,fast lives? Exploring everyday temporalities of Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong

Abstract

In the context of social acceleration and the ‘high speed society’, scholars have been preoccupied with making claims and asking questions about ‘fast life’. However, this narrative is mainly constructed around groups that occupy structurally significant positions within the globalized economy. In response to this totalizing narrative of a ‘fast life’, this paper discusses the temporalities of everyday life of Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong. Drawing on qualitative data, it is evident that for this marginalized group time is constructed in a different manner as they engage in intimate relations with their employers. This not only impacts the temporal organization of activities in time and space, but also reveals distinct qualitative experiences that vary from the typical ‘fast life’ individuals.

Keywords

Social acceleration temporalities time everyday life domestic workers

Introduction

It is widely suggested that late modern societies are characterized by an intensification of activities, an increase in individual responsibilities, social acceleration and the speeding up of the pace of life (Rosa, 2013). In this context of today’s ‘high speed society’, scholars and popular media have been preoccupied with making claims and asking questions about ‘fast life’, which emphasizes that people are increasingly engaged in fast and flexible lifestyles, and, as a consequence, struggle with time pressure, time shortage and ‘getting things done’ (see for instance Tomlinson, 2007; Wajcman, 2008). Although the global networked economy is considered a key aspect in understanding this social production of time in everyday life, the predominant focus has been on groups which have high visibility and apparent structural significance within the globalized economy (e.g. high skilled, middle- and high incomes or the global elite). Those groups positioned at ‘the receiving end’ of the global networked economy (Massey, 1991), such as low-income service sector workers or labour migrants, have been largely untouched in existing work on time in everyday life [but see Boulin (2013) on workers in retail sector, Sharma (2014: 56–82) on taxi drivers’ time]. For these groups, spatial and temporal norms and orders at play in global capitalism may work out quite differently in terms of the way their time is structured and experienced.

Against this background, this paper explores how everyday temporalities of such marginalized groups are constructed by focusing on the temporalities of Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong. This group occupies a crucial and distinctive position in the global networked economy as ‘servants of globalization’ (Parreñas, 2001), fulfilling the temporal needs of middle- and high-income groups, as they clean houses, manage the household and take care of their employers’ families. Thereby they engage in quite direct relations with their employer, in terms of the exchange of time for money, but also because of the fact that in Hong Kong, domestic workers are required to live in with their employers. As illustrated with interview and observation data, this intimate relationship has a significant impact on the way their temporalities are constructed.

Fast lives, slow lives, time management

In ‘fast life’ literature, the contemporary relation to time in everyday life is set against the background of global neoliberal forms of capitalism (Harvey, 1989), a new organization of work (Castells, 2000; Hassan, 2009), ongoing innovations in Information and Communication Technologies and a culture of speed (Agger, 2004) or immediacy (Tomlinson, 2007) that have altogether significantly changed the objective qualities of time and space. Labour time is intensified and complex, with an emphasis on the (fast) exchange of information, networking and flexible time management that involves working at different locations and outside regular office hours. Social life is infused with commodities and technologies that incite and normalize expectations of immediacy (Tomlinson, 2007: 132): ‘fast’, ‘easy’ and ‘smart’ products that connote the propensity of saving time (e.g. fast- and ready-made food, automatic vacuum cleaners, fast cookers and instant boiling water from the tap) and intelligent technologies (e.g. personal computers and smartphones) that perceive and process information and can act autonomously, releasing spatial and temporal constraints and enabling activities anyplace, anytime. Altogether, these conditions form some kind of ‘fast life’ habitus of post- or late modern societies.

At the individual level, this ‘fast life’ is symptomatic of long task lists, high (demands for) spatial and temporal flexibility, and an intensification of activity behaviour in time and space, of which multi-tasking or juggling multiple activities may be a well-known version. These phenomena have been argued to relate with another characteristic of the ‘fast life’ narrative, namely particular perceptions or qualitative experiences of time, that seem to apply to many people worldwide (Wajcman, 2015). Southerton and Tomlinson (2005) stress that the experience of ‘time squeeze’ manifests in three different ways: a lack of volume of time (duration) may lead to feelings of time shortage and time pressure, temporal disorganization refers to the difficulty of coordinating social practices with others and, finally, temporal density refers to practices such as multi-tasking or juggling activities that are associated with the experience of intensified time. In her recent book ‘Pressed for Time’, Wajcman (2015) argues that these qualitative experiences of time are (indeed) influenced by shifts in the nature of work and consumption patterns, usage of different kinds of technologies (from baby bottle to smartphone), but also by contemporary conceptions of good parenting and gender distributions of (domestic) work. ‘Fast life’ is thus not only about ‘busyness’, but also involves some kind of ‘problematic’ relation to time that is embedded in different spheres of everyday life.

This struggle for time and timing is reflected in numerous writings on time management, which seems to be the sine qua non of contemporary daily life. To illustrate, Google.com (2015) generates 40,500,000 hits when searching for ‘time management’ and a search at Amazon.com for ‘time management’ in Books results in a total of 29,331 items, with 14,353 hits in the category Business & Money, 6701 hits in the category Self-Help, and 4240 hits in the category Education & Teaching (Amazon.com, 2015). The instructions given in these texts generally include tips on planning, prioritizing and delegating (Sabelis, 2001) or dealing with distractions and procrastination, tips that are reproduced in the wide array of time management workshops that are on offer. Time management is everywhere and for everyone: at the office, at home, at school and with tailored advice for couples, the family, for mom, for dad, for kids and teens, for Middle Schoolers and even for PhD students. Not only the ‘must do’ activities need to be planned, but also ‘leisure’ time or ‘free’ time is increasingly the object of planning (Sabelis, 2001: 395).

Finally, in response to the dominance of speed, timing and time management in daily life, many seek escape from the ‘fast life’ reality. In recent decades, the number of yoga practitioners has skyrocketed to an estimated 250 million worldwide (Thestar.com, 2013) and a wide array of spiritual self-help books and magazines help people to integrate moments of contemplation into their lives and try to get in touch with their inner self via different physical, mental and spiritual practices (see Sharma, 2014: 81–107 on yoga at work). Besides this, different slow movements exist that actively seek to resist and critique fast life. The Slow Food movement, active in 160 countries worldwide, states ‘we are enslaved to speed’ and aims to counter the rise of fast food and fast life (Slow Food USA, 2014), Slow Travel Europe (2013) suggests that we could ‘rediscover our donkeys’ as opposed to planes, trains, buses and camels (they may be too slow) and last but not least, Slow Science states scientists ‘need time to think’ (The Slow Science Academy, 2010).

High incomes, low incomes and global cities

The experience of a speeding up or the (increased) intensity of social life is not something that is unique to this age. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Mumford (1934[1963]), Simmel (1903[2002]), and Wirth (1938) discussed how the nature of social life was changing, as industrialization together with the growth of cities significantly changed the organization of work and thereby altered the experience of time and space in everyday life. With respect to the pace of life, cities, as places where people, goods and economic activities cluster, are generally considered ‘natural’ places of intensity and speed, as opposed to villages and rural areas that connote calmness and a slow pace of life. Often described as ‘dynamic’, ‘vivid’ and ‘full of movement’, cities are perceived as the motors of the global 24-hour economy, as key nodes in spaces of flows of today’s Network Society (Castells, 2000). However, besides the abstract notion of space, in the ‘fast life’ literature, little reference is made to the role of geography and spatial characteristics of places or cities.

Because of their high-ranked position in the global economy, global cities in particular could be considered the places where speed and the intensity of a ‘fast life’ are most tangible. In this respect, it is surprising that high-speed narratives are hardly linked to world city or global city theory. This body of work, pioneered by Friedman (1986) and Sassen (2001), emphasizes that global cities, as major centres within the global service economy, attract both high-income and low-income groups (Sassen, 2001). The vast demand for high skilled professional workers has coincided with a demand for low paid jobs, especially in the service sector, e.g. in the form of office cleaners, clerks, security guards, but also domestic workers, taxi drivers or (fast-food) restaurant workers. These people take up jobs in services that high income groups often rely on to fulfil their daily needs (Agger, 2004: 74). The global cities literature stresses the significance of low income groups for the global economy and indicates that high and low income jobs engage in structural relations in terms of time (and money) supply and demand.

However, the high-speed narrative mainly addresses high-income and middle-income groups and other groups that are ‘traditionally’ time-pressed such as dual incomes with children. Although research suggests that social practices that associate to ‘fast life’ are present amongst a wide variety of households (see for instance Southerton, 2003, Wajcman, 2015), the question of whether low income service sector workers and other marginalized groups have similar experiences of ‘fast life’ has hardly been addressed, especially outside of the Anglo-Saxon and European context. The contemporary discourse on time in society has a strong focus on managers and other ‘high skilled’ professionals, which contrasts with notions in early modern work of Mumford (1934[1963]) and Thompson (1967) in which the changing relation to time in society was about time discipline amongst the working class, those who worked at the factory, performing the same operations hour after hour, earning minimum wages. The focus of concern has moved away from the worse-off to the better-off in society, from those who mainly need to sell their time to those who mainly need to buy time.

The spatial and temporal configurations of the daily lives of low-income groups may likewise be informed by the global economic system, technologies and a high-speed culture. However, it is questionable whether these ‘fast life’ conditions will apply in the same way to them as it does to the ‘high skilled’, flexible professional. As Massey (1991, 1994) argues, time–space compression – and related concepts and symptoms – may ‘work out’ differently for different social groups (e.g. in terms of gender, ethnicity and socio-economic status). Those who are highly mobile, in both the moving and communicating sense, and are positioned in a way that they have control over time–space relations are the people who can benefit most from time–space compression and turn it to their advantage. However, those who are positioned ‘at the receiving end’ may be less mobile and/or have less control over space–time relations (Massey, 1991) and thus less control over the way they live their (everyday) life.

Indeed, while high income jobs may be characterized by flexibility and relatively high level of control, in low income jobs working guidelines can be quite strict and controlled by the employer, e.g. in the form of standardized work practices, the need to reach sales targets, the amount of time that can be spent on tasks or activities (e.g. in office cleaning) or inflexible working hours. Attuned to the 24-hour economy, they may work more anti-social hours (Bryson, 2007: 105) in order to stretch the opening hours of shops and services into early mornings, evenings and weekends to serve the ‘public needs’ (i.e. the needs of higher income groups who are working stretched office hours). And, for domestic workers and other care givers, working hours may be endless, as they are ‘on call’ from dusk to dawn to provide care for employers and patients. Since lower-income groups may not have the capacity to buy time-saving commodities, the care-deficit may thereby transfer from high-income to low-income groups, who end up being time poor (Bryson, 2007: 105).

As Sharma (2014) argues, institutional arrangements and the time of others play an important role in the construction, meaning and experiences of time. In her work, she shows, for example, how taxi-drivers’ time is circumscribed by arrangements on licensing and (a lack of) spatial and temporal infrastructures, but also involves synchronizing to the time of clients. Time, in other words, is relational. In everyday life, people engage in and synchronize with different rhythms at play, or negotiate or resist them. Thereby, they ‘weave together’ (Davies, 2001: 137) different (overlapping) temporalities – also non-capitalist ones, e.g. time informed by natural rhythms or the social needs of others (Bryson, 2007: 108). In the context of the global capitalist system, this could mean that low-income groups mainly have to adapt to temporal demands of the global capitalist order and its key figures, or, in Sharma’s (2014) words, must ‘recalibrate’ in order to fit into normalizing temporal orders. Although low-income groups may be clearly linked to the global spatial and temporal orders at play, they may find themselves not in command, but rather ‘on duty’.

Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong

As an occupational group, Filipina domestic workers are clearly related to global capitalism, yet located at the ‘receiving end’ of time-space compression. Domestic workers are generally hired by middle- and especially high-income groups who are looking for someone to take care of household chores and often also the children. Domestic workers engage in quite direct relations with their employers who ‘buy’ their time and also partly structure the way they use their time as demands for their time use come directly from the household. In Hong Kong, where domestic workers are subject to a live-in rule, this relation may be particularly intimate. Because of their co-presence in the same household, Filipina domestic workers and their employers in Hong Kong can be conceived of as a stark example for illustrating the kind of symbiotic relation between high and low income jobs described by Sassen (2001).

Although an increasing number of Overseas Filipino Workers have a degree or vocational education, many leave their relatively poor home country, as there is a lack of jobs and they can earn more money in lower status jobs elsewhere. In Hong Kong, domestic workers earn a minimum wage of HK$ 4110 (approximately €425 or US$ 500) per month (Hong Kong Labour Department, 2014), whereas the average monthly wage in the Philippines is US$ 215 (€160) (ILO, 2014). The employment of domestic workers is arranged in a standard two-year contract between the ‘Employer’ and the ‘Helper’. The contract lists five categories of tasks for domestic workers, namely household chores, cooking, baby-sitting, child-minding and looking after aged persons in the household. Employers are required to provide shelter and food, or a monthly food allowance. There are no regulations about working hours or breaks in the contract, except for the right to one rest day a week and statutory holidays.

According to their contract, domestic workers may go home every two years – when their contract is renewed, the costs of the journey home should be provided by the employer. When a contract is finished or terminated, a foreign domestic worker has two weeks to process a new contract, before she has to leave Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, ‘for every Helper to be employed, the employer must have a household income of no less than HK$15,000 per month [approximately €1600 or US$ 1900] or assets of comparable amount to support the employment of a Helper for the whole contractual period’ (Hong Kong Immigration Department, 2014). The employers are Hong Kong residents from Hong Kong and China, but also expats from a variety of countries. Almost all domestic workers in Hong Kong are female (99%), and over 80% of these women are aged between 25 and 44 (Hong Kong Census & Statistics Department, 2011).

The working and living conditions of domestic workers in Hong Kong clearly deviate from those of ‘fast life’ subjects, which raises questions about the temporalities of their daily life. The aim of this paper is to explore the everyday temporalities of Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong, and how these are constructed and experienced. How do Filipina domestic workers spend and create their working time and leisure time and which temporal experiences characterize their everyday life? Who and what structures their time? How do they experience time in their everyday life? And what is the influence of the employer and the household they work for in all this?

Methods

In the ‘fast life’ narrative, time is often conceived as absolute, objective or quantitative. This associates with the time-management perspective of individuals as self-coordinating agents who organize their activities into clearly demarcated time intervals. In this respect, time budget studies have proven useful for understanding the allocation of time to activities and absolute time shortages among population groups. However, in order to understand the experiential nature of time, scholars have increasingly stressed qualitative research as a way to understand the complex unfolding, meanings and experiences of time (Davies, 2001; Southerton and Tomlinson, 2005). Qualitative methods in which time is not pre-defined in terms of the clock are open to understanding time as defined by individuals, their actions and the social, spatial and temporal contexts in which these take place. Such an approach emphasizes the importance of embodied or ‘lived time’ (Sharma, 2014) in everyday life.

Data collection

The main body of data for this paper consists of in-depth interviews with domestic workers from the Philippines, who are employed in Hong Kong. The participants for the in-depth interviews were recruited via snowball sampling. Interviews were settled via telephone, at a time and place convenient for the respondent. On some occasions, it was hard to reach the respondents and many only responded early morning or late in the evening. One interview was rescheduled twice, but then cancelled because the respondent was too busy. Another potential interview did not proceed, because the employer wanted to read the questions beforehand. Two interviews were conducted ‘on the spot’, by direct referral on Sundays. However, this method resulted in shorter and less informative interviews. This could have been due to the fact that the interviews took place ‘spontaneously’ and respondents were not prepared, or because of the fact that they took place in public spaces where other domestic workers were present in the vicinity. The interviews were semi-structured, guided by few open questions. The questions focused on their life before becoming a domestic worker, (experiences of) the daily routine of work, free time during the working day, the rest day, the living situation and future plans. Respondents were assured anonymity and confidentiality upon participation of the research. The interviews were recorded and transcribed, coded and analysed following Strauss and Corbin (1998) principles.

Some of the information presented below is based on observations at Hong Kong Island. The observations took place on Sundays in different intervals between 8 am and 9 pm, in public spaces that are frequently visited by domestic workers on their rest day. Additionally, visits were made to the Mission for Migrant Workers (MFMW), a registered charitable organization that delivers services to Asian migrants, e.g. support with employment, migration or legal issues. Spending time at MFMW gave valuable insights into the working life of Filipina domestic workers.

Respondents

In total, 12 interviews were conducted with Filipina domestic workers. The ages of the respondents varied, with the youngest participant aged 28 and the oldest 51 years old. At the time of the interviews, three participants were single, one was engaged and eight were married, of which seven had (1–4) children in the ages of 3 to 29. The women in the sample had different educational backgrounds: some finished secondary school, others completed a vocational degree, e.g. in HRM, or had been educated as a nurse or teacher. Jobs they had before coming to Hong Kong included housewife, restaurant manager, telephone-shop manager, bookkeeper, nurse and teacher. The domestic workers in this sample all remitted money to their family (parents, their husband and children, grandchildren, their siblings and/or nieces and nephews), for daily necessities such as food and clothing, healthcare, educational fees and supplies.

The duration of employment in Hong Kong ranged from 5 months to 23 years, and some women had worked for different employers. The respondents who had worked in Hong Kong for a longer period (>10 years) had not expected to stay this long beforehand. Prospects about the future varied tremendously and mainly depended on the situation of their dependants. Also, the amount of savings they had been able to collect was an important condition for them to decide to go home or not. While some women thought they might go back after the current contract, others thought they might stay up to six years, or until they were fit enough to work.

Low incomes, fast lives?

The participants worked for different kinds of households: single-person (2), couple (2), couple with child(ren) (8), of which one household included two grandparents. The majority of employers were local Chinese (8), and other nationalities included Swedish, Canadian, Filipino and Malaysian-Chinese. General tasks of domestic workers in this sample involved cleaning, doing laundry, shopping for groceries, cooking, feeding children, bringing and picking them up from school, but also involved taking care of an ageing or sick relative or walking the dog.

For domestic workers in Hong Kong, it is not uncommon to work over 12 hours a day. Data from the Mission for Migrant Workers (MFMW Limited, 2014) reported that in 2013, 37% worked 16 hours a day and 9% 19 hours. The domestic workers who participated in this research worked on average 13 hours a day, varying between 5 and 18 hours. A working day generally starts early in the morning, around 6 or 7 am, when they prepare breakfast for their employer, or go the market to get food. For some women, their chores end between 8 and 9:30 pm, after they have done the washing up of the dishes from dinner, but for others, the day does not end until midnight or even extends into the early morning.

The continuity of domestic work

As major facilitator of their employer’s households, in their job, domestic workers have to synchronize their activities according to the household’s schedules, needs and wishes. ‘Well-known’ temporal phenomena, such as the continuity of domestic work and care activities thereby may settle in the daily lives of domestic workers. The continuity of work is experienced especially by domestic workers who take care of younger children, who need continuous care and whose unpredictable sensations and behaviour demand direct attention. Evelyn is employed by a Chinese couple, and is taking care of their 6-year-old son. The timing of her daily activities revolves largely around the schedules of the household members: the start and end of the boy’s school day and of the parents’ working day:

I have to do the cleaning of two toilets in the morning and prepare the boy’s lunch for school and his breakfast, within an hour. It’s like, very quick, so that’s my work in the morning: six to seven is a very busy hour for me, because I have to clean the toilets so quick! Two toilets, make him eat, prepare him to go to school … And: … at 7:30 I have to send him to school. […] Then after that I go to the market. Come back home, clean the house. After cleaning, I have my lunch and after lunch I have to iron. After ironing, I have to pick up the boy from school. After picking the boy, I come back home, finish ironing. That’s it then. In the afternoon I sometimes bring the boy to [the] park to have some play, or … Sometimes we stay at home and I talk to him. Than after that, in the afternoon, at 6 o’clock I have to start cooking dinner. But there are still so many things that I have to do …. In the evening: At 6 o’clock I have to start cooking for the baby. At 7 o’clock, the baby has to have his dinner. At 8 o’clock, sir will come. I have to cook again, because he will not eat cold food, he wants a new one. Then, I cook for sir, then sir tells me to wash all the dishes I used, wash all the things … Then sometimes madam comes at 9, 10 and I have to cook her food. In the night I have to cook three times: for the baby, for sir, for madam.

Like Evelyn, Camelia is working ‘continuously’, from the moment she starts her day in the early morning until she goes to bed. Camelia takes care of two children, aged 2 and 4. Besides the continuity of work, she often experiences the unpredictability of care when she explains that making her employer’s children drink warm milk in the morning sometimes goes smoothly, but sometimes ‘takes more than one hour!’

Getting a break from work is difficult when the work is continuous. Sara is working in a six-person household and takes care of two young children. She does not have much free time during the day because of all the work and is actively trying to get the most out her break after dinner:

So even when I have this free time, I have to read some spiritual books and then, after lunch time, I have to do my 30 minutes of prayer. And then in the evening, I eat five to six minutes, then I am finished, just to finish my prayer again. […] I cannot do this every day. So what I am doing is, I really have to spare my time. I have to cut my dinner. Usually they will give me one hour. So I will shorten so that I can do my prayer, yeah.

Having a break from work is important, not only to take a rest from the physical household work, but also because in these minutes they can have contact with their friends and their family back home in the Philippines, or, as many of them are dedicated Catholics, to do their prayers. For domestic workers who do not have arranged break times, getting access to free time is a constant negotiation with respect to their work activities, but also with their employer. Camelia comments that:

Sometimes […], if the work is not so many [not so many things that need to be done], I ask my madam if I can take a rest for a while and my ma’am said yes. I can take a rest then, even for one hour, she lets me take a rest for a while.

Employers’ demands

The continuity of work for Filipina domestic workers not only relates to the nature of domestic work and (child) care, but also results from the employers’ demands. At MFMW, cases were reported where domestic workers could not deal with the workload or expectations of their employers, as they got exhausted or stressed by many tasks and/or long working hours (and often a combination). There are more women who have an intense daily workload of (cleaning) chores, like Evelyn, who needs to clean two bathrooms every morning, including scrubbing the toilet bowl and mopping the floor. Some of these daily chores seem out of the ordinary, in a double sense. On the one hand, chores such as cleaning the walls, wiping the surfaces of all furniture (Maryam), counting the cutlery (Allie), blow drying your employer’s hair (Amber) or fetching water or the remote (Evelyn) do not seem like essential domestic tasks. On the other hand, some chores seem out of the ordinary in the temporal sense, namely because of their high frequency in the domestic routine, e.g. cleaning doors and door knobs every day, or because of their timing, e.g. early morning or at midnight.

Although the employment contract is standard, the way it is put in practice differs per household. While most domestic workers have a standard (long) list of household chores, some employers always seek for new tasks for their domestic workers after they have finished their work. There are always other things that may need to be checked, employers (and their ‘manuals’) state – make yourself useful is the undertone. While long working days are partly due to the boundless nature of domestic work, some of this boundlessness seems to be pushed further by employers’ requests and their expectations about the nature of a domestic worker’s job. This preconception that ‘there is always something that can be done’ and that domestic workers should therefore always look for things to do, was also held by some domestic workers themselves.

Household management

Not all domestic workers are given a pre-set schedule and/or receive continuous directions from their employers, but instead just get a number of household chores to do every week and can decide for themselves when to do the work. Though not exclusive to childminders, autonomy in work was more prevalent amongst women whose job did not involve taking care of (young) children. Leah works for a couple. She does not have so much work so she does not ‘have a plan’ (a work schedule). Domestic workers like Leah may be less of a ‘helper’ and more like a household manager. For Lexie, it is very clear that:

it’s my self-management, how to manage the house and everything […]. I have my own schedule […]. I manage it, for example, cleaning only the living room, so I have to do that 30 minutes more or less. That’s because maybe I need to catch up with other work, I have to finish a weekly schedule.

In these examples, time and the ordering of activities, is not decided by the employers and their household members, but rather is in the hands of domestic workers themselves. As Lexie indicates a couple of times during the interview, ‘I manage it’, by which she means not only that she decides what she does when, but also that she has everything under control and that there is ‘no pressure’.

Domestic workers like Lexie, who are more in charge of their daily schedule, seem to struggle less with the experience of continuity in their work. They may have longer breaks on a regular basis or anticipate the satisfaction of finishing their work, instead of facing the boundlessness of it. Bernice, for instance, who works for a household that employs two domestic workers – she takes care of cleaning and doing the laundry, the other takes care of the children – has a break every day:

[After lunch] I can have a break until 3 o’clock and then I have to start ironing. Sometimes it takes from 3 o’clock until 3:30 to 4 until I’m finished and that’s it. And then we have to wait until they [her employers] are coming back. And then we don’t need to cook. They are the one[s] who will cook, they just told us what we need to prepare, cut the vegetable, wash the fish, something like that. And then they are the one[s] who will cook.

And during her break:

… they allow us to use the Wi-Fi at home. Yes, that’s why we have a Facebook and Skype back home to the Philippines [she is radiating with joy while telling this]. […] Because they are not always in the house, because they have to work. And then we steal the time, ha-ha-ha!

Being on-call

For domestic workers, living at the workplace and in close proximity of their employers bears the risk of always ‘being on call’. Camelia explains: ‘I cannot stop the kids […] stop them to call you. And of course, you can see the dirt. You want to work also if you are in the house. You cannot stop yourself [from] working. Ha-ha!’

In terms of ‘being on call’, co-presence with the employer and/or household members seems significant. In some situations, a domestic worker is always called upon by their employer and the household members, either during the day if employers stay at home, or after they come back from school or work. Being ‘on call’ seems to be related to having access to private space in the employer’s house. Some employers respect their domestic workers’ private time, especially in the evening when their doors are closed (if they have a private room) and only call out for their domestic worker in exceptional circumstances. According to Hong Kong law, domestic workers have to get access to ‘suitable accommodation with reasonable privacy’ (Hong Kong Immigration Department, 2014). But because space standards in Hong Kong are low, it is not uncommon for domestic workers to have a tiny room, ‘shoebox size’ (Evelyn), which is more a closet than a room. Some domestic workers do not have a private room at all, but sleep in the living room or kitchen, or, like Maryam and Amber, share a room with one of the employer’s children. For these women, it is hard to take a break when they are in the house. Not surprisingly, some domestic workers feel they are working 24/7.

Toilet texting: Stealing time

While some women can use their smartphone during the day, the majority of my domestic workers held the notion that when you are working and/or in presence of your employer, you cannot use your (smart)phone – in some cases, their employers explicitly forbid it. For some women, this means that on their working days there are hardly any moments when they can make contact with the outside world: their friends, children, husband and other relatives, either in the Philippines, Hong Kong or elsewhere.

Every night I just leave the message and in the morning my husband will answer. Because at 12 o’clock [at midnight], they are already sleeping. I just leave a message there and in the morning my husband will answer back. (Evelyn)

And Maryam, for instance, cannot call her parents at night, not only because of the hour, but also because she shares a room with the baby and is afraid to wake her up. As a ‘solution’, some of the women may use the excuse of going to the bathroom to be able to send text messages:

If I want to text I go to the toilet. […] I mean, after the toilet I just wash my hands and text. Just one time and then I go back into the restaurant or something like that, and sit again. Because I have no freedom, no fixed times. […] I cannot use my cell phone when my madam is here. I can just use my phone when the kids are asleep already in bed. (Camelia)

This act of ‘toilet texting’ enables domestic workers to negotiate a couple of minutes for themselves while being on the job or, indeed, ‘steal the time’, as Bernice put it, from their employers. This toilet texting is a response to a lack of time, or time poverty. However, ‘toilet texting’ is not always possible and may even cause stress, because, as Maryam explained, you cannot go to the toilet all the time or stay there too long without being noticed by your employer. Texting or calling during grocery shopping and running errands, or pretending to play with the employer’s child while actually sleeping or taking a rest at his/her bed (Evelyn) are other ways in which they may steal time.

The rest day: Catching up on (social) life

On Sundays and public holidays, the majority of domestic workers have their day off. On this day, the women go to church, meet their friends and engage in private and leisure activities. Public spaces around Hong Kong, especially parks and squares, are scattered with groups of domestic workers – often sitting on spread-out cardboard boxes or sheets they have put on the ground. One of their major meeting areas is around Chater Road in Hong Kong Central, at the heart of the central business district, where the largest concentration of domestic workers can be found at Sundays. They gather at seating areas and lawns in parks and squares, but also occupy walkways, sidewalks or sit down next to large buildings, such as the HSBC bank and luxury shops that provide some shade. This is officially sanctioned by the Hong Kong government. There and then, contrasts between those in command and those at the receiving end of the time–space relations of the global economy can be directly observed.

Even though it is their day off, on Sundays domestic workers may have an early start. They wake up around 6 am, prepare themselves to go to mass, cook their own food for their pick nick with friends and take care of their appearance. After or before mass, they meet up with their friends and have breakfast or lunch together. In search of a place to spend their day off from work, they use public space for private time: they chat, play games and take time to make a (video) call back home or catch up with their friends and family via Facebook. Everywhere, groups of domestic workers are taking pictures, which they share via social media. They are having lots of fun, killing time by taking ‘wacky pictures’ as Bernice described them – pictures in which they do all kinds of (weird) poses.

Many of the activities domestic workers do on Sundays are things they do not get to do sufficiently during their working week. Like Sara, many domestic workers use their Sundays for personal care: clipping nails and getting a manicure or pedicure from other domestic workers, combing hair, plucking eyebrows and doing each other’s make-up – some will use the public bathroom facilities for this.

Usually, yeah, I have my time, but very little time for myself. Actually, I keep telling my friends, you know, I only become pretty on Sunday. But during Monday to Saturday, I don’t even comb my hair …! (Sara)

Besides personal care, there are women laying down, trying to get some rest. Some domestic workers are tired from their working week and catch up on sleep or give each other massages. On Sundays, domestic workers take care of themselves and their bodies’ needs. Jenna states: ‘Sunday is a time of relaxing’ and ‘that’s the day you can recharge’.

‘Free’ time?

Although on their day off domestic workers should get 24 hours of free time, there are women who work before and after they leave the house. Some do this voluntarily and sometimes it just happens: on her day off, Camelia explains that she was delayed that morning for more than an hour, because ‘I make milk for the kids […] and then she vomits! She [the employer’s child] vomits here [pointing to her chest]. So I’m giving her a bath and clean the clothes that she vomited on …’. Other domestic workers get chores from their employers which they need to do before they leave and/or after they come back, like Evelyn, who needs to clean the two bathrooms, also on Sunday, and needs to be back around 8 pm to cook for her employers. Furthermore, there are domestic workers who get jobs to do if they stay at home on Sundays. For them, going out – as early as possible – also means getting away from the workplace:

I cannot stay home, because if I stay home the employer says ‘do this one, do this one’ She doesn’t care if you have a holiday. If you stay at home she says ‘you do this one, you clean this one’, in the house. (Maryam)

By leaving the house, these women are escaping from household chores and employers who may place temporal demands upon them. The fact that they have limited access to private space and ‘have no place to go’ (Nancy) is partly what takes them to these public spaces on their rest day. In these cases, where going out is more a getting away from the house, free time also gets a double meaning as they may not be so ‘free’ after all in how they (can) spend this time.

Conclusion and discussion

For Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong, it is not self-evident that their lives are ‘fast’ as conceived with regard to notions of social acceleration and an intensification of daily activities. Contrary to a stereotypical ‘fast life’, where flexibility, having control and managing time are of prime importance, one of the main characteristics of time in the daily life of Filipina domestic workers is that it is largely determined by their employers or constructed around their employers’ temporalities. While synchronizing with their employer’s temporalities, domestic workers may sometimes encounter ‘fast life’ experiences, for instance at household ‘peak times’, e.g. when the children come home from school or around dinner time. These ‘caring’ activities are associated with the experience of continuity and the boundless nature of their work. However, part of this boundlessness may be created by the fact that when at home, domestic workers are always on call and also continuously called upon by some employers. Whether a domestic worker is really struggling to get things done may depend not only on the amount of work that she has to do, but also in the manner in which this work is allocated to her, and whether this is an act of time management or ‘time disciplined’ task lists. The position or agency given to the domestic worker in the managing of the household has a profound impact on the way time of domestic workers is constructed.

Having access to time off from work is not organized for all domestic workers in an equal manner. While some of the women got sufficient (longer) breaks from work and finish their working day after dinner, other domestic workers are working until after midnight and always have to negotiate their free time. The importance of space in the way time is structured becomes very clear in these negotiations. Co-presence and a lack of private spaces mean for some women that they have no time–spaces to go, to escape from their employer’s sight and wishes. The most disadvantaged workers may even find themselves in some kind of spatiotemporal lock-in, where they are both out of time and out of place. This lack of access to time–space also becomes clear on Sundays and public holidays when large numbers of domestic workers inhabit Hong Kong’s public spaces, to meet their friends and escape from their working environment so that they can ensure private time for themselves.

The construction of the domestic worker’s working time and free time is circumscribed by complex (power) relations between domestic workers and their employers. The notion about ‘stealing time’ raises the question whether some domestic workers conceive of their time as being owned by their employers when at work. Furthermore, because of their dependency on their jobs, domestic workers find it hard to negotiate or resist the temporal demands set by their employers. They may want to maintain a peaceful relationship because of the everyday proximity and the influence employers can execute on their domestic workers everyday life. These meanings derived from the relationship between domestic workers and their employers matter. For some workers, the problematic experience of the temporal, of working long hours, was overshadowed by the employer–domestic worker relationship, either in a positive or negative sense. These (power) relations and their meanings have a significant impact on the way time in everyday life of domestic workers is constructed and experienced.

Considering the way in which temporal issues and conflicts manifest for domestic workers, it is debatable whether the ‘fast life’ narrative and terminology are suitable to understand time in their daily lives, and the lives of other low-income workers, labour migrants and marginalized groups. A ‘traditional’ ‘fast life’ seems to be constituted within a particular setting of working and living conditions. But as these conditions differ for and within different social groups, they may work out in a different way for each individual. Domestic workers in Hong Kong experience similar, yet also very different working and living conditions and the research has shown that inequalities can be observed within this, already disadvantaged group. This stresses the complexity of inequality that plays out not only at the larger (global) scale, but also in the institutional arrangements of everyday life.

Finally, it is important to take into account ‘lived time’ when understanding time in everyday life. The diverse experiences of working and living situations of Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong and the impact this has on the way they spend their time negates prevailing preconceptions about their everyday lives and their living and working conditions. There is still a lack of knowledge about the everyday lives of domestic workers, and empirical evidence is needed to gain insight in the way the time of domestic workers is constructed and to figure out the details that structure their experiences. It is thereby important to let the domestic workers speak for themselves. They work and live in harsh conditions that may be unthinkable from the perspective of many ‘advantaged’ people. Nevertheless, domestic workers have also found ways to deal with these working and living conditions, including the lack of (private) space, and not being able to spend (much) time with their family back in the Philippines, and express gratitude about the opportunity to work as a domestic worker in Hong Kong and to be part of their employers’ families.

This research illustrates the importance of understanding the impacts of a ‘globalized temporal order’ on different social groups, not only as a conceptual point, but also as a moral point about inequality and injustice (Adam, 2002). At the global scale, we can conceive of the role of Filipina domestic workers as the transfer of time deficit, which is part of the conditions under which neoliberal capitalism operates. Hong Kong’s middle class depends on foreign domestic workers to take care of their households and children, so that they themselves can work in the local economy. In this respect, while early servant classes initially were mainly hired as a matter of ‘class’ and status, Hong Kong’s foreign domestic workers seem to represent a global time deficit that is characteristic to late modern neoliberalist economies and that manifests in globalized dependency relations between workers from different societies.

However, while the time deficit of the working class in Hong Kong may be ‘solved’ by buying time from Filipina domestic workers, the time deficit may transfer to the domestic workers themselves for whom the deficit appears not only to be larger, but also qualitatively different. The time deficit and the intensification of the lives of the working classes are thereby not the (only) reason for the harsh working situations that some of the workers have to endure. The fact that there is a lack of government regulations on working hours for domestic workers and the need to live in with the employer jeopardizes their work-life balance and makes them vulnerable to employers’ attitudes and demands. When it comes to the crunch, the dependency of domestic workers on their jobs can give employers considerable power over their workers’ everyday lives. In the worst case, knowingly or unknowingly, employers take advantage of this dependency relation, of being the main regulator of working times and tasks, and stretch the time- and limit the space-boundaries of Filipina domestic workers, making them time and space poor.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Sarah Sharma and Ray Forrest for comments on an early draft of this paper.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: For this research, financial support was received from Dr. Hendrik Muller’s Vaderlandsch Fonds Foundation and Vrijvrouwe van Renswoude Foundation.

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