AP

SINGAPORE

EIGHT Indonesian maids have fallen to their deaths from high-rise apartments in Singapore this year, and the Indonesia embassy said on Tuesday it is pushing for a ban on cleaning outside windows.

Indonesia, which supplies about half of Singapore’s 200,000 maids, has asked employment agencies to include a clause in work contracts that prohibits maids from cleaning the outside of windows or hanging laundry from high-rise apartments, Indonesian Embassy Counsellor Sukmo Yuwono told. Singapore’s Manpower Ministry is working with Indonesian officials to identify and possibly blacklist agencies and employers who don’t ensure maid safety, Yuwono said.

“Our position is ban it,” Yuwono said. “We warn against employers giving dangerous jobs like cleaning windows to their maids. It’s upsetting. These are human beings dying for nothing.” Singapore is under pressure to improve the working conditions of foreign maids, who live full-time in one in five households in the citystate of 5.2 million people. In March, the government pledged to mandate that maids must be allowed at least one day off a week starting next year.

Last week, a court fined an employer 5,000 Singapore dollars ($4,000) and barred her from hiring domestic workers in the future after a maid fell and died from her fifth-floor apartment last year while cleaning windows standing on a stool.

Eight maids, all Indonesian, have died after falling out of windows while working this year, five of whom were cleaning windows, Singapore’s Manpower Ministry said. Four maids fell to their deaths in 2011.

Local media have published photos of maids squatting on windowsills, crawling on ledges or reaching dangerously off-balance to clean the outside of windows in highrise apartment buildings.

In March, a passer-by snapped a picture of a 26- year-old Indonesian maid who had slipped while cleaning and was dangling from a window ledge eight stories up. Another maid tried to pull her up but after five minutes lost her grip and the woman fell to her death.

“These deaths are very sad,” Halimah Yacob, Singapore Minister of State for Community Development, Youth and Sports, told the Straits Times. “Employers must constantly drum the message into their maids about being careful when cleaning windows. Once they do that, we will be able to save a lot of lives.” Most of the Indonesian maids in Singapore come from small villages, which may lead some to miscalculate the risk of working on high-rise exteriors.

“When you are used to a very simple life in the village, (there’s) no such thing as a high-rise building,” said Mareyeami, an Indonesian who has worked as a maid in Singapore for six years.

“Maybe they don’t know how to clean the windows safely so they will just try their best. In our country, we don’t think about our safety, life, all that.

We just get the job done.” Indonesia is working with Singapore officials and agencies to improve maid training and raise awareness among employers about maid safety, Yuwono said.