The case of a maid who battled a millionaire has gripped Singapore
bbc.com
bbc.com
It's worth noting that she was only able to get justice, because of the volunteer work put in by a very good lawyer - someone whose fees she could have never afforded.
This doesn't seem unique to Singapore - I've heard of this problem existing in every country. The legal system only works if you have the money to bankroll your case. Even a multimillionaire like Hulk Hogan couldn't have prevailed against Gawker without a billionaire backing him. It boggles my mind that such a pay-to-play system is still considered to be acceptable.
Today, if I can spend $1K on legal fees and want to sue someone with a $1M budget, I'll just lose. To compete with that, I'd have to pony up $1M up front and hope I win to recoup my costs afterwards.
The alternative model is this:
Step 1) A lawsuit is filed
Step 2) Each party puts double the money they are willing to spend into the "pot". So if you have a $1M budget, you have to put $2M in. The counter-party willing to spend only $1K puts $2K in.
Step 3) The court takes the available funds from the pot evenly to the two participants, giving each one the same amount as the larger "willing to pay" amount specified.
So in this example: The poor guy seeking justice spends gets a refund of $1K (spending a net of $1K) and his lawyers receive $1M from the pot. The rich arsehole also gets $1K back and his lawyers get $1M from the pot.
I'm not saying this is a perfect system, but it would allow poor people to sue rich people and not be at a massive disadvantage.
Which is why nothing like this has any chance of happening.
No thanks.
And wouldn't this be a great way for lawyers to earn lots of fees by encouraging poor people to sue rich people.
Much simpler is simply get rid of personal lawyers. The adversarial model is not the only option. You can do like small claims court and have the judge act as a truth finder.
The court could hire a lawyer if the judge feels that assistance is needed (for complex cases).
Under a pooled system, you could ante in 10k and if the opposition needs more money to defend themselves than 5k, they have to give you monetary ammunition as well! This prevents being nuked into settlement by being outspent, despite an otherwise sound claim. (Which definitely happens right now)
Typically a husband must pay a high powered lawyer for his wife, if his salary is higher.
Some potential difficulties could arise in separating legal fees related to a case from general legal work being done by lawyers on retainer. Furthermore, this would still require both sides to front the money for the case, although if a lawyer thought they had a strong case, they could take the case on incentive for a poor client.
Every criminal defendant (at least for felonies or serious misdemeanors) in the US has access to a government-funded lawyer, if they can't afford their own. There are over 15,000 public defenders in the US, who get a fixed salary as you mention. They are often overworked, and have limited time and resources to help the people they defend, but they help countless people every day. I'd like to improve the funding and the number of public defenders available (and of course decrease the number of people on trial for nonsense). I'm glad the system exists. It's helped friends and family, with largely positive outcomes that I don't think would have been any better with an expensive private lawyer. When it comes to more serious crimes, you probably don't want to be in that situation.
Saying it would be an unjust prosecution should include something to back it up; the most logical outcome is that if both lawyers are just as skilled the little edge they may have by actually having a innocent defendant -or a gilty prosecuted- would help get better justice overall, I don't think I could even be persuaded otherwise until I can read about a real world nation where such system was tried and failed.
One relatively easy fix is to bump up the budget for public defenders, including a decent pay increase. You'll attract better talent and have more of them so they aren't as overworked.
It doesn't generate revenue and takes up huge costs in salaries/pensions/healthcare etc.
Cities and States have finite resources and and therefore come up with formulas of how many courts, judges, cops per 100K they can afford.
Where I live there is like 1 Judge for 300K ppl. And most places its worse. So irrespective of how sophisticated and nuanced the law gets that becomes a bottleneck.
Something for the imaginative HN crowd to attack.
The de-facto necessities to succeed however, e.g., access to well-organized and consumable cross-referenced case law, the requisite knowledge of courtroom procedure, knowing what to file, by when, and what things mean without significant training or oversight of a retained lawyer; and that's where your issue comes in.
You could make the argument that an infinite number of courts and judges would bring the cost down; but I'm not convinced it would. As you'd still have the exponential case law parsing cost outpacing your availability of lawyers.
There comes a point where stare decisis and it's potential infinitive of cases depending on the craftyness of your lawyer at painting a distinction without a difference, and judges willing to buy it, where the costs seem pretty much guaranteed to spiral out of control.
This is by design in all professions which requires memberships in addition to a degree like lawyers and accountants as compared to engineers.
If banks still did banking on ledger books only the rich will be banked as it was until recent times.
To scale your ability to serve is closly related to cost of service. It is applicable whether it is SaaS or rocket science or legal system
Again, the problem comes in in the fundamentals of velocity of information propagation, of which only half is open to unrestricted scalability. Namely, documents can be propagated at the speed of light. Understanding cannot. You can put every document exactly where I need it as soon as it is accessible, but unless I've had enough immersion in the jargon and specific ways of life of the profession, I'm going to need time to absorb and reckon what to do with it, and where to go next. Even if I do know what to look for, good luck hitting up any database of well cross-referenced case law without paying an exorbitant fee due to the nature of the returns of the profession, and the essentially captive audience to it. Most of those data sources areas fundamental to law as Machinery's Handbook to Machining, yet its locked up behind more imposing barriers to entry than Fort Knox; fiscal, temporal, and cultural.
Short of a periodic collapse and simplification of case law such that the entire field can become more accessible so something less than a Guild/Cartel of highly exclusive barristers, I'm not seeing a fundamental opportunity to change things for the better.
If you're just looking to do one case and be done, the law library may work. If you're in court with any regularity, the rest of the profession has made your decision for you, and it's time to pony up for access to the big boy's toolset.
The social contract I have with society is not I that follow arbitrary rules I don't understand in return for the benefits the society gives me.
A breonna taylor situation would not be legal in any sane society yet it is today, because the people running the judicial system make laws inaccessible and self protecting.
Complicated laws and regulations need enforcement and lawyers . You legalize alcohol, FBI needs weed laws and civil rights to keep their jobs. You legalize weed , they need something else.
Today the DoJ will charge you by the page to get access to legal documents. What else are we paying tax for !!
If it is too complicated for only professionals to understand then needs to be simplified. You are right we need fundamental simplication and radical change .
From the Justinian times codification and simplification of law has always been a mark of good civilizations. Asoka put stone pillars so people can know the law. There are countless examples. If ten commandments needed lawyers it would never have worked .
It will only happen if we doing something about it .
I'm glad I live in a country were lawyers still have some professional honor to take on cases that don't pay. But they have to subsidize poor clients with rich ones.
Pro-bono stuff is a great and honorable tradition, but it's not enough. I worry about any system that depends on poor citizens being sympathetic enough to receive free legal representation as a charity from otherwise unaffordably expensive lawyers. It's clearly superior to locking all poor citizens away from legal representation, but it's not anywhere close to sufficient.
Out of interest, here's a map of judges per capita. It seems the situation in the US is especially bleak among western countries.
https://en.actualitix.com/doc/maps/wld/world-map-professiona...
https://iaals.du.edu/sites/default/files/documents/publicati...
That said, a privatized law system could potentially provide greater competition and lower costs overall.
"Customary Law With Private Means of Resolving Disputes and Dispensing Justice: A Description Of a Modern System of Law and Order Without State Coercion"
How it would work in practice would depend upon the specifics of the contracts and the quality of the arbitration. There's potential for both positive and negative outcomes. Ideally competition would create an equilibrium which benefits both parties.
There's a very pessimistic, knee-jerk interpretation I'd like to address. Outcomes are in no way guaranteed to go one way or the other in this hypothetical.
Better protections for workers would allow a larger pool of potential hires. This in turn could create a cost incentive for robust worker protection and liability. Insurers may guarantee the employer or employee by screening for potential misconduct.
This is not to say that it would be a perfect system, but that there is a potential for incentives to work in both directions. With enough scrutiny by brighter minds than my own a workable framework might emerge.
The difference in this case were the criminal charges. Like in most jurisdictions in the world, it would be pretty foolish of someone to represent themselves without being trained in criminal law and court procedure — especially when a failed attempt doesn't mean bankruptcy, but incarceration.
[2] https://www.statecourts.gov.sg/cws/ECT/Pages/An-Overview-of-...
I'm no expert on their system, but there's some regulation of lawyers' fees ('RVG') and also a different system of law - among other things, they do not recognise the concept of precedent, making rulings on statute alone - which means questions of law are much more easily resolved.
Of course, replacing a country's entire justice system would be politically complex in the extreme.
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1641554
I do think Hogan could have afforded his suit, but probably wouldn't have bothered. The lawsuit lead to the typical Streisand effect, no one would have heard about this until it went big, so many people like me wouldn't have heard about a famous person's sex tape with disreputable characters involved without an endless lawsuit.
Gawker was a fault for showing someone's sex tape, which had apparently leaked and was quite likely shown against the people in it's wishes. Separately from the terribleness of that event, extremely rich people can afford endless lawsuits until something hits, they can overwhelm regular people, which is also a bad thing.
To be honest, I don't think it's the case where I live ( Belgium - Europe).
> The most common pro bono cases are asylum cases, family law cases (such as divorce, alimentation or visitation rights cases) and criminal law cases. A special branch of the criminal law cases is the so-called Salduz permanency.
https://www.crowell.com/Locations/Brussels/Pro-Bono-System-i...
I'm not sure why people keep saying she got justice. It's not justice until she's compensated for the lost salary / effort of defending herself, and the person who wrongly accused her is punished, along with the corrupt people who helped him.
It's an open secret that Singapore rely heavily on cheap labors from overseas for many jobs that Singaporeans are refusing to do: construction works, live in maids, hawker centers cleaning (some old Singaporeans do do this though).
In many household it's common to have 1, or in some of my friends' home, 2 live in maids to help with chore. They get paid around 400-600 SGD (250-400 USD) per month depends on where they are from, how fluent they are in English and are expected to work at least 5 days a week. The employer keeps their passports, and can pretty much send the maid back to their country immediately. This imbalance relationship feels very wrong to me, but most people here don't care.
Because the pay is low, the quality and ethic of some domestic helpers are not great. Some do steal and sabotage their employers when they're not happy, I've heard many horror stories over the year. On the other hand, many employers don't see them as equal, or even human. A quick google will show you both side of the story, and for all the good things Singapore have to offer, low-pay workers' right is virtually non-existent and as long as Singapore benefit from it, I don't think it will change anytime soon.
Edit: Something I forgot to include: employers do provide a room and meals for the maids, so their expenses in Singapore is minimal if they want to, and in many cases they send most of their salary back home.
Why is it bizarre and inhuman?
A maid working in Singapore will earn 3-4x what she will make in Indonesia with generally better working conditions.
In addition because expenses are minimal (food+accommodation provided) you can save in 3-5 years what a typical lower class family living in Indonesia will save over 20.
What rights they have if they are selected out a shopping mall. They have zero avenue for support when they face abuse whether physical, sexual or emotional. visas in places like these ask you to leave immediately if you get quit or fired from a job.
That is not true at all. Singapore is a country of law and order.
> visas in places like these ask you to leave immediately if you get quit or fired from a job.
They have been invited to a country as a temporary worker to do a specific job.
Saying you have to go home if you get fired is not inhuman.
I have worked offshore and had my contract canceled - it sucks but it’s not inhuman.
I think you underestimate the psychological effect of constantly being treated as a disposable guest worker; there's a difference between that and working off-shore or being an expat treated as an equal. As I mentioned in my other reply[1] it is a "good deal" for many Indonesians in a way, but it comes at a price, a price which strikes me as quite needless as well.
But what's wrong with the shopping mall part? I'd be happy to sit in a shopping mall as potential employers come by to hire me for 3x what I'd make elsewhere. Maybe even 1x; I'm not convinced I would dislike it more than the normal job interview process.
I mean, it is odd and probably uncomfortable doing it in person, but the process is the same.
You cannot compare a job fair to what was happening in those malls. Imagine you're not coming to a job fair, but you stay in a dorm room with 20 other women, and every day you sit in a room waiting for someone to come. Some agencies make the workers to stand in line in front of the "showroom" for any potential employers to walk pass. It makes me feel like they were selling goods and not a person.
> live in maids to help with chore
> The employer keeps their passports
> They get paid around 400-600 SGD (250-400 USD)
Economic Slavery has always been there and is still there. There are plenty of jobs which people don't want to do unless they are poor. Either countries kept parts of the population always poor or imported from poor countries. Like mexicans in america. Exploiting the working class is a feature of modern variants of capitalism.
Legal slavery is the only thing that got abolished.
P.S. on a seperate note and no means a defense of this, the salary is slightly misleading as it usually includes stay and food.
What sounds particularly indicting in the described situation though is employers keeping the employees' passports. Things like this can make someone's situation more similar to a slave's.
I am not sure there is all that much difference.
[1] sic qatar world cup
Its not quite so simple though. By that definition migrants from Eastern Europe working farm jobs in Western Europe are economic slaves, but their conditions are much better than these maids and they can go home anytime without repurcusions.
During his lieutenant-governorship, Raffles placed some restrictions on the local slave trade in line with wider British policy across its Asian territories, although slavery remained widespread and Raffles himself was served by a large retinue of slaves at his official residences in Java.
Conversely, if a white person gets employed in Indonesia they get paid western salaries even though they do the same work as Indonesians who still get paid Indonesian salaries for the exact same job. Of course, as an Indonesian working as a vet abroad is damn near impossible. The deck really is stacked against you if you happen to be from a country like Indonesia.
It's exploitation, even if all sides have some benefits.
I think some here are reasoning too much from their western perspective, and this isn't the kind of thing you really tend to see if you just visit for a week. Is it exploitation? Sure, I never said it's not. Everyone should deserve a reasonable minimum living standard, and it's sad I see so many people who don't. Yet at the same time, a lot of Indonesians still see as a "good deal" for them, exploitive or not, as it's just a better life than staying in Indonesia. This doesn't make it right, but it does explain it. There's a reason this women went back to Singapore after her negative experience.
In many ways, this is just as much of a failing of Indonesia's government who fail to solve basic problems as they're too busy siphoning money to their own accounts or getting lost in petty religious/ethnic arguments.
One the things that slightly disturbed me was oh we will sort out accommodation and servants, as my Grandmother was in service in the UK when she was young.
In the meantime there were at least 3 Ferraris and a couple of Lamborghinis going back and forth over Orchard road.
So in a car, you're supposed to wear your seat belt, right? It's normally a traffic offence, but not if you're transporting construction workers at the back of a truck[1]. It's perfectly fine to make them live in a room with 12 other workers, with limited toilet and kitchen capacity. It's fine to ignore them when COVID-19 hit, until it's no longer possible to do so[2]. Singapore is built by the workers, and they're considered disposable by the system.
[1] https://citiesofmigration.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/IMG_...
It is an offence for an employer to keep the FDW's passport[1].
I do agree with you on the power imbalance. It can make it hard for the FDW to assert their rights, even if they know they exist.
[1] https://www.mom.gov.sg/faq/work-pass-general/can-an-employer...
Our live-in helper gets paid SGD$700 monthly. She has her own room and bathroom. We treat her like a part of the family. My children adore her, and she takes very good care of them. Her mother used to work for us many years ago, and has since retired. Because her mom is not doing well health wise, we also gift her SGD$100 every month, to help with her expenses. The family has managed to build a very nice house with all the money earned in Singapore.
And there are many such cases in Singapore. Which is why Indonesians keep coming back to Singapore to earn a decent living.
its about the fact that the police, the public prosecutor, and the district judge all somehow failed to notice that the claims made by the upper-class family were so outlandish and nonsensical that there must have been hundreds of other cases that weren't so unreasonable and where justice must have been grossly misapplied, and that the typical migrant worker would just take the injustice on the chin and move on for a lack of resources and persistence. the severity of the bias, and the possibility that the system has not worked for a long time, all contributed to this embarrassment.
as a side note, two years ago when the initial sentence was handed down the defendant was pilloried online for being one of many hundreds of "thieving maids" that pitiful singaporean families had to endure. facebook groups commiserated with each other with horror stories. the bias extends across the country. a case of the emperor's new clothes, perhaps.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/parti-liyani-...
Human history is really bad on the whole, even the bad parts that exist today are often less mild or less common than what preceded our current era.
If you want to go back further, it’s estimated that 40-50% of adult fatalities in hunter gatherer societies were caused by murder, based off of historical evidence and study of modern hunter gatherer population.
There really aren’t that many eras you can point to that are really much better than the present for a typical human being. There are plenty of times that are better for the kind of person who writes history books, but that is a very different proposition.
Here’s a decent breakdown of the evidence for various state and non-state ancient societies[0]. Obviously there is some significant overlap between state and non-state societies, but in general the violent death rate in ancient societies is really high compared to even the 1800s, an era we consider violent by modern standards.
0: https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...
That study indicates that violence-based mortality is high in a few hunter-gatherer societies, but not in all of them, and also not in societies adjacent to these.
And you know what? It doesn't matter. The exact percentage of the population that got murdered is only one portion of the basic thesis that the present is the best time for the average human being to be alive ever. While the typical ancient adult may or may not have been murdered, the average ancient human would be dead before their 15th birthday due to disease (most common), malnutrition, or predation.
The worst countries today for infant mortality are in central Africa, with countries like Chad, Nigeria, and Somalia averaging a heart breaking ~11% mortality rate for those under the age of five. While I wouldn't run around shouting "this is fine and we should do nothing about it" compared to the entirety of human existence this is an astounding stat. There are royal families a few centuries ago that did worse than 11%.
No, these benefits are not evenly distributed. All in, you'd much rather be born in the US or the EU than in say, Chad. And quality of life does not improve linearly; you would much rather be a hunter gatherer than someone in an ancient Greek polis, where you were both more likely to be enslaved and where you'd probably live an even shorter and more disease ridden life. But if you had to pick any point in time to be a random, average person, now is the best time in all of human history to pick.
Humans have now about 20-30 year generations, so I think it's fair to judge our progress as a species in at least multiples of this.
I'm in my mid 30's and kids these days are way nicer to each other than they were when I was a kid. Bullying, making fun of kids of silly differences, etc is way down. I think the future long term, and in a two step forward one step back kind of way, is going to be better than it is now.
I'm curious why it was illegal. Is it illegal to ask a domestic helper to clean your house? Or is it because she was asked to clean 2 houses and an office?
https://www.helperchoice.com/c/singapore/job-duties-of-domes...
In this case, they thought incorrectly and have been caught, exposed and worse.
However, I doubt that true justice (as in legal punishment of some sort) will ever be meted out to the rich and powerful family.
>In her defence, Ms Parti said that in 2012 or 2013, Mr Liew's wife, Madam Ng Lai Peng, wanted to throw the DVD player away because it was broken, but agreed to let her take it back to Indonesia to fix.
>Madam Ng said in court, however, that the DVD player was not broken. At the trial, it was shown that the device could play a video digitally stored in the hard disk. However, a demonstration at the appeal showed that when a DVD was inserted into the player, the error message "could not initialise disc" was displayed.
>Justice Chan Seng Onn said a DVD player that is unable to play a DVD can reasonably be described as "spoilt". He found it likely that the Liews no longer wanted the "partially spoilt" player.
[1] https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/courts-crime/dvd-play...
600 SGD goes a long way in those countries.
Good housing will cost you.
Singapore is an orderly country and there is some institutional support to safeguard the working conditions of FDWs. However there is a power imbalance between employee and employer, and the FDW may not know her rights, or it may not be in her short-term interest to assert them.
Additionally, many FDWs are employed through agencies who will usually prioritise fee-collection over FDW welfare.
Between that and the poor living conditions, it's indentured servitude for the time of their contracts. Absolutely awful.
HK is doing much better and has stronger laws to protect domestic workers (actual day off, etc...), Singapore is catching up but in other countries it's extremely sad.
Generally speaking FDWs are pleased to have the opportunity to work in Singapore as it is 2-3 times what they could earn at home, but they do hope for a "kindly" employer.
Other countries do not have such a good reputation. Philippines actually banned Saudi Arabia from hiring domestic OFWs because of cases of indentured servitude, abuse and murder.