Working conditions, psychological distress, and health status of foreign domestic workers in Taiwan

Background: Taiwan hosts about 131,000 foreign domestic workers, most of them were from Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. Living in individual employers' households, these women are hidden from the sight of the public and their working conditions are often prone to abuse.

Objective: This cross-sectional survey was conducted to explore the working conditions, psychological distress, and self-reported health status in this population.

Methods: A total of 231 female domestic workers (83 Vietnamese, 41 Indonesians and 107 Filipinos) agreed to participate in an anonymous survey and completed questionnaires. Information obtained by the questionnaire included averaged working hours, time for rest, mental health status, burnout status, and frequency of various psychosomatic health problems.

Results: As expected, workings hours were long for these workers, with an average of 13 hours per day. Feelings of homesickness and loneliness were common, and a great majority of these women reported having muscular-skeletal discomforts, menstrual pain, headache, and irritating stomach. Their mental health status and burnout status, however, were comparable and even better as compared to that of the general working women in Taiwan. Unexpectedly, findings of this study indicated that the health status of foreign domestic workers varied substantially across nationalities.

Conclusion: Because domestic workers came from dramatically different cultural and socioeconomic background, differences in health status by nationality might be related to multiple factors and should be interpreted with caution.