When my children were born my wife was working too.
We found the need to engage baby sitters while we were at work, and had an assortment of house maids over the years, to help out.
These were mostly the children of rubber tappers who did not wish to work as tappers or other field work on the estates. Some of these workers were introduced to our homes by supervisors of small holdings that dotted the town. Many of these girls had three or four years of schooling at vernacular schools after which they dropped out to look after their infant siblings while both parents were at work. These children were from small holdings where there were no crèches or child care facilities as the number of infants was lesser than the statutory number that required the employer to provide child care facilities. The girls who came from homes that required additional income were well mannered girls, caring and looked after their charges with care and devotion.
The earnings of these young workers were handed directly to the parents who would dutifully come over at the end of the month to collect the wages due to the children. Their own wages would be paid around the first week of the month. But they never remained with us long as their parents realised that they had the potential to earn more as plantation workers and take them home with them to be exploited as workers in the rubber estates.
When the children were of employable age, the parents would withdraw them from homes and use them to help them at work - like doing simple things like removing scrap rubber from tapped rubber trees and latex cups until they had acquired skills to tap trees on their own.
The supply of such domestic workers appeared to be inexhaustive as the estate workers had many children, gave little importance to their education and were easily tempted to send them out as domestic help whenever they were approached. Life in the estates though hard, provided the workers with more or less steady incomes, and the job perks (which included free housing and basic utilities) cushioned them.
However the situation changed when the parents were displaced from small holdings to make way for oil palm cultivation or development of housing estates which required less labour and promised more wealth than rubber.
These displaced workers moved to towns and lived in squatter colonies where their friends (who had moved earlier) had settled - only to find that life in squatter settlements was much tougher. For a start there was rental to be paid and also regular payments for utilities. These expenses were non existent in estates and small holdings as the law required employers to provide these amenities at their own expense.
These were a drain on their meagre income. On top of that new friends and workmates would invite them for cheap liquor until they become addicted and unable to drop this habit. Overtime they become weak and sickly and some succumbed to their illnesses and died of malnutrition, leaving their families in poverty. The defenceless children, with no or little education vanquished in poverty and become odd job workers or unskilled workers at construction sites to be exploited by subcontractors.
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