Katabang is a Bisayan word used to describe any worker, particularly female, hired to perform a variety of household or domestic services for certain employer referred to as agalon. This relationship illustrates the concepts of role and counter role that are vertically structured.
In the past, the Spanish word muchacha (later localized to atsay) was popularly used which can be traced to our colonial social stratification system wherein landed families kept a number of servants as status symbol.
The word servant is an older English term to refer to those providing the service. Later, “maid” became common–a better English word perhaps for a female servant.
Katabang is coined from tabang, which means help, and this is the equivalent to what the Tagalog called katulong.
By law, the latter is now replaced by the word kasambahay or kasama sa bahay, which means house companion or cooperator, and accorded certain legal rights.
We have also transported or exported our katabang from provinces to cities as well as abroad through local recruiters and placement agencies. And having a katabang now is beyond as symbol of status but of necessity and freedom from domestication of female agalon.
Incidentally, it becomes the domestication of the poor women–the katabang.
Abroad, like in Hong Kong, those employed for domestic services from other countries are called foreign domestic helpers or FDHs for short; thus, the use of DH is common in the Philippines.
But Filipinos employed abroad, including domestic helpers, are generically called overseas Filipino workers (OFWs).
As compared to the katabang in the Philippines, the DH is better educated, and has enjoyed a higher economic rating because the pay is more, even higher compared to some professionals in the country.
Failure to find decent jobs in the country, the prevailing low pay, and the desire to improve the economic condition of their families are some of the drivers for mothers, daughters, and sisters to work abroad, even as domestic workers.
Let’s look into the story of Jingjing from a town in Negros Oriental whom I first met when I was in Hong Kong in 2011 (not 2010 as I erroneously wrote in my previous column). Although she graduated with a degree of BS Secondary Education from a local university, she opted to work as an FDH in Hong Kong for the past 10 years. And she was so willing to share her story.
Orphaned of a father and later being a single mother, Jingjing is unmindful of the sacrifices and the loneliness she has to endure, as long as she can provide a better future for her mother, a brother, and a son. Jingjing admitted that Hong Kong offers fulfillment to everyone’s dream, and she is just one among a hundred of her town mates who, due to financial difficulties, were forced to leave home to try their luck in a place that offers a relatively better pay.
As mandated by Hong Kong law, the current monthly minimum allowable wage for FDH is HK$3,740 or about P20,000, but some employers offer higher pay.
In the 2011 report of the Hong Kong Immigration Department, those from the Philippines numbered 131,332, or 48 percent of the total FDHs there. The Indonesians comprised 49 percent, and the rest are from Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, and others.
In her paper published in the Silliman Journal (2008), Michele Joan Valbuena writes that the DH measured their success and rewards for working in Hong Kong by their ability to give their families a better life and good education to their children. She also shows in her paper titled Who is Happy? Who is Not? Cellular-Phone Mediated Communication Among Filipina Domestic Workers in Hong Kong that with their cellular-phones, and now with Facebook and Skype, they are always connected with home. This allows them to monitor and remind their children to be good in school.
But with the difficulties they experienced as DH in Hong Kong, some mothers whom I interviewed did not want their children to be like them. The reasons range from the psychological and social costs involved, not to mention the verbal and physical abuses they go through.
It can be said that the escape from a submissive position associated with domestic tasks, and the desire for a gainful employment of married women in Hong Kong are what have opened to Filipino women the opportunity to work in HK.
Together with other FDHs, they have actually helped improve the social status of wives and the economy of Hong Kong–not only their families back in the Philippines.
Meanwhile, the foreign exchange reserves of the Philippines reached a record high of about US$77 billion earlier this year, according to a report, and it is attributed foremost to the sustained growth in remittances from OFWs, including the DH. Again, this shows the many sectors in the country being benefited by the domestic workers.
Although the katabang in the Philippines may have not earned much to uproot their families from poverty, and neither have they contributed to the foreign reserves of the country, they certainly have given other Filipino working wives the opportunity to practice their professions as engineers, bankers, teachers, medical doctors, law enforcers, and so on.
Thus, as we desire for better treatment of DH in Hong Kong and elsewhere in the world, the local katabang also deserves similar attention.
