City considers home-help regulation

Shanghai’s legislature is considering the city’s first regulation on home-help services.

A first draft introduced on Tuesday proposes an administration platform with information on home helpers working in the city.

It requires home help agencies to register and update home helpers’ personal information, contracts and service ratings and ensure it is correct.

Agencies failing to register the information or have false information would face fines of up to 50,000 yuan (US$7,040), with a “serious offense” costing up to 100,000 yuan, the draft says.

The platform should connect with the national personal credit information system, according to the draft, meaning offenders could see their credit tarnished.

In terms of qualifications, the draft asks agencies to check identity cards, skill certificates and health statements.

Agencies would get allowances from the government for organizing training for home helpers, and trade organizations would introduce qualification levels for home helpers and corresponding wage levels.

The draft was penned by the city’s commerce commission, justice bureau and Shanghai People’s Congress, and discussions have been held with service providers, workers and users of such services.

Hua Yuan, head of the city’s commerce commission, said the regulation aims to address many problems in the sector, including low qualification requirements, low contract loyalty and the lack of standards.

“There is a strong call from the public to make home help an honest and safe service,” he said.

Hua said over a third of the over 8 million households in Shanghai use or need home help services.

Dai Liu, chair of the Shanghai People’s Congress finance and economy committee, said the committee proposes that butler services and foreign home helpers should also be covered by the regulation, while the committee also questions on how to make a vast number of self-employed home helpers register with the administration platform.

Fang Li, who has been running her “Jinli” home help agency for over 10 years, said the government should keep an eye on some small agencies which follow bad practices.

“Some of them even run card gambling games, and some home helpers who lose at the games are loose in moral standards,” she said.

Fang thinks qualifications are another big problem.

“At the present, in many cases we agents have to rely on accounts of home helpers and our experience in making judgments about their skills,” she said.

Fang also wants more government support for agencies, many of which are struggling in the face to rising rents.

Hu Yanjue, a local resident who has hired home helpers who lived in her home, who worked for her by the hour and who dealt with babies, said standardizing the market was at the cost of raising service fees.

“I hire home helpers under the recommendation of friends, so a possibly self-employed one who cost me 6,000 yuan a month is not necessarily worse than one who cost me 8,000 yuan through an agency,” she said. “Of course, standards, especially in health, is very important.”