Hard-Working Asians

A Malaysian couple have been sentenced to death for over-incentivising their domestic staff. Their Indonesian maid died of deliberate starvation in June 2011, having apparently lacked the initiative to get on her bike and look for something better. An estimated four hundred thousand Indonesian women work as maids in Malaysia, and about half of them are illegal immigrants; so there is a fifty-fifty chance that the maid in this case was expendable. Nevertheless, it is as yet unclear whether her employers intend seeking asylum in the United Kingdom.