If you’re muttering “not ALL locals”, hold your horses.

My interviewees were quick to confirm that the ‘expat employers’ stereotype still endures amongst domestic workers, but they were equally quick to insist it is a vast oversimplification.

Every one of them stressed that a domestic worker’s experience depends on the individual case, and that local families make just as good employers as foreign ones. Bhing, for instance, spent her first 11 years in Singapore working for two local families, both of whom she loved.

“Both were very nice to me, I had no restrictions. The weekly day off was not mandatory yet, so I only had two days off a month and a curfew. But they were flexible. For example, if I said I wasn’t feeling up to cooking one day, my employers would buy food instead. I could eat in front of the TV or sit with them at the table. They treated me like part of the family and even told me about their problems.”

Leizle, 40, who currently works for a British family, was similarly effusive about the local family she had previously worked for. Like Bhing, she considers herself lucky; her ex-employers, whom she stayed with for 8 years, encouraged her to join them for meals, took her on family holidays, let her mother stay with them when she visited Singapore, and even visited her family in the Philippines.

As volunteers with HOME’s helpdesk, the women confirmed that they also encounter complaints about expat employers. (These are vastly in the minority, but might simply be due to how local employers outnumber foreign employers many times over.)

Although these almost never extend to physical abuse or withheld pay, they explained that complaints about foreign employers generally concern them being overly demanding or setting unreasonable standards.

For example, Bhing told me about an experience she had with a Swiss family.

“After I finished working for my last local employer, I thought I would try working for an expat family because all my friends wanted expat families and said they were good. It was a nightmare.”

Although the terms of her employment were a bit more generous, they were very strict.

“I was very excited during the interview, but when I began working for them, it was very different. They didn’t allow me to sit on the living room couch, and when they went out on weekends I had to wait up for them until 2:00 AM. I was also only allowed to eat by my room, just outside the kitchen. It was totally different from my local employers.”

Novia and Leizle also pointed out that the kind of work performed for expat and local employers can differ, leading to different expectations being set. Local families tend to engage domestic workers to look after young children and/or their ageing parents, while expats virtually never request help with eldercare.

Leizle also suggested that based on her and her friends’ experiences, local employers can be more accommodating of a new worker. “Most local families are willing to teach you when you are new, but some expat employers have very high expectations from you that your service is 100%.”

But on the whole, she felt it really “depends on the family who you work with. In my own experience, and what I hear from other domestic helpers, not all expat families are good. It can be very bad too. And local families are not all bad. Some can be very good.”