Maids make up a big segment in China's labour market. Many middle-class families employ them, freeing wage-earners from household chores and helping balance the economy by allowing their wealth to trickle down.

Recently, a labour market in Shaanxi Province has been advertising a special kind of maid, who not only takes care of cooking and cleaning, but offers "bed-sharing" services with the head of the household.

According to the advert, these maids tend to be from rural areas a totally redundant description since almost all maids have rural backgrounds are over 35 years old and earn a high 2,000 yuan (US$250) a month, in a market where a regular maid's pay is about 500 yuan (US$60).

As one can imagine, the moral warriors are jumping up and down in a carnival of denunciation. Some have suggested the police "monitor" employer-maid relations.

I don't know how that can be done. Does it mean police should barge into families with maids, at midnight, unannounced, as they used to do in hotels? To make that proposal feasible, anyone who hires a maid will have to surrender their privacy.

According to one dubious survey, around 5 per cent of maids have sex with their employers. Is that something we should tolerate? It all depends on the circumstances.

In most cases, it is the result of sexual harassment. Even though things happen within the confines of a private space, it is not different in nature from advances in an office environment.

The top priority is for those in this line of work to be aware of the potential "occupational hazard" and learn how to protect themselves. It is the job of employment agencies to educate them beforehand and the duty of women's associations to intervene whenever maids report such incidents.

Now I don't believe most employers are sex maniacs. They may be tempted, but when they know their maids are armed with legal knowledge and understand where to draw the line, they will back down and behave.

The Shaanxi case, if the report is accurate, is another story. Though widely considered immoral, this act, in my opinion, is less despicable than preying on the uninitiated.

We have to see this in the proper social context. Prostitution, albeit illegal, is rampant under umpteen guises. More relevant is "ernai," a uniquely Chinese phenomenon whereby a man takes a second wife and stashes her away in another abode.

Police may have periodic crackdown on prostitution, but nobody has heard of a vice squad against ernai unless it involves an official who falls from grace.

The relationship is not legally protected, but people seem to have a taciturn understanding about what would otherwise be put in a prenuptial agreement.

The Shaanxi "bed-sharing" maid is just a variation on the high-priced Pearl River Delta kind, a poor man's ernai. We wish these women were jolted out of contentment and fought for their legal rights. But whatever vestige of feminism they may have, it is foiled by the strong pull of commercialism.

Granted, the Shaanxi ad should not have existed. It is a sad reminder of the dynamic chaos we live in today. It testifies to the yawning wealth gap, the insufficiency of decent jobs, and the need for empowering women to protect themselves.

However, it would be a cop-out to clean up the ad and punish the advertiser, while sweeping the fundamental issues under the rug.

Email: raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 11/11/2006 page4)