The “perennial debate” over whether maids should or should not be guaranteed at least one rest day a week has apparently been “reignited,” with the Ministry of Manpower indicating that it will be consulting employers, agencies and non-governmental organizations on the issue. But in the pantheon of unnecessary reignitions, surely this is up there with Guy Fawkes asking the guys stoking his bonfire if they wouldn’t mind giving it another go as it’s getting a bit chilly atop the pyre.Really, Singapore? We’re worried that employers might struggle to make their own dinner if their maid goes AWOL for the day? God forbid an NSman having to carry his own pack. Or a maid meeting someone she likes in her down-time. (Speaking of God, even He took a day off at the end of the week. There might be a lesson there.)Perhaps we’re looking at this the wrong way though. We’ve always had a reputation for being hard-working; so maybe the solution isn’t mandatory days off for domestic helpers, but a phasing out of days off for everyone else. Think how much juicy work you could get through if you had seven days instead of a paltry five! How efficient and effective you’d be if you could just work solidly through the night! You wouldn’t have to worry about whether you were spending enough time with your partner, since you’d never have time to meet a partner in the first place. And by working ourselves into an early grave, we’d make all kinds of handy savings—the yacht, the second home in Bali, the round the world tour; all so much unnecessary spending. Retirement homes would go out of business, because we wouldn’t even be retiring to bed early, let alone giving up work. And workers from those homes could be re-employed to go out and fritter away the money the rest of us are earning, since we won’t be needing our pension plans after all. MC days would go out of the window, to be replaced with WFDB (working-from-deathbed) days, with no backdating of the doctor’s note from the afterlife allowed.Come to think of it, if everyone was at their office all of the time, there’d be no need for a maid to clean your home in the first place. There’d be no need for homes at all. Problem solved!
