Challenge: Most households in Singapore employ a foreign domestic worker or ‘maid’. Trouble arises when employers perceive their worker to be so indispensable - and the power dynamic so easy to manipulate - that they require them to work endlessly with no rest days. Alarmingly, approximately 40 % of Singapore’s 225,000 domestic workers are still denied the basic right of having one weekly day off, despite a labor law coming into effect in January 2013 making it mandatory.

Objective: Non-profit organization Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2) has spent the last decade campaigning to improve conditions for low-wage migrant workers. With this campaign, TWC2 had a clear objective: make people aware of the magnitude of the problem and inspire conversations that will result in domestic workers having their due day off.

Strategy/Execution: Adopting the opposite narrative to prior campaigns and the labor law, this film focused on the benefits for EMPLOYERS. Tapping into our modern fear of missing out, the film shows how parents lose out on their relationship with their children by always requiring their domestic worker to be around. The domestic worker’s day off was re-positioned as an opportunity to enhance family bonding, rather than as an inconvenience.

Outcome: Within a few days of its launch and driven by global press coverage exceeding US$1 million in PR value, the film targeting Singapore’s population of 5.4 million people, had surpassed 4 million views, 92 million social media impressions and instigated a fervent global debate on domestic workers’ rights.

TWC2, (Transient Workers Count Too) an NGO that fights for foreign domestic workers rights in Singapore needed to raise awareness on the issue and eventually change employer's behaviour towards their domestic staff.

Right before Labour Day on May 1st, the campaign was launched and sparked the conversation on foreign domestic workers’ rights. The film was put online on the project website IGIVEADAYOFF.ORG where people could pledge to give maids their legal weekly day off. Due to its momentum, several international media included the topic on their Labour Day’s agenda.

With 4M views within 4 days in a country of 5,4M, the video succeeded in calling attention to the plight of domestic worker’s right to a day off and generated a heated debate on the realities of working families.

Different global media coverage helped the campaign reach 85 million of media impressions and more than 54,000 people pledged to give foreign domestic workers their day off.