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'Nation of coolies' no longer? Indonesia calls time on maids working abroad
Sydney Morning Herald - June 10, 2016
Her boss, Singaporean socialite Nancy Gan Wan Geok, was livid. She threw the water in Dewi's face, hit her head with the plastic tray and threatened to slash her pay.
In a moment of "hot blood", Dewi grabbed Madam Gan's hair and slammed the 69-year-old's head into the wall until she was unconscious, the Straits Times reported. Panicked that Madam Gan would wake up and call the police, Dewi threw her body face down into the swimming pool, tossing in her sandals to make it look like a suicide.
Dewi had been in Madam Gan's employ for just six days. Her lawyer said an Indonesian recruiter had sent her to Singapore to work as a maid without any preparation or training. On May 31, the Singapore High Court sentenced her to 18 years' jail.
Indonesia's first president, Sukarno, railed against Indonesia's status as a "nation of coolies and a coolie among nations".
But decades after his ardent speech, an estimated six to seven million Indonesian migrants are still working overseas, about 60 per cent of them low-paid maids in countries such as Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and the Middle East. An Indonesian maid in Malaysia earns as little as 1000 ringgit – about $330 – a month.
Female migrant workers are often lauded as pahlawan devisa – "foreign exchange heroes" – because they send money to their families in Indonesia. Huge banners at airports welcome them home.
In 2014, Indonesian migrant workers remitted $US8.55 billion, according to Carol Chan, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. But there is a dark side to this welcome source of money from abroad: female domestic workers are vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.
Last February a Hong Kong woman was found guilty of grievous bodily harm and violence against Indonesian maid Erwiana Sulistyaningsih, in a case that sparked international outrage. The court heard Erwiana was beaten, denied food and wages, forbidden to take days off and had her passport confiscated.
A few months later, Indonesian President Joko Widodo ordered the Manpower Ministry to come up with a "clear roadmap" on when Indonesia could stop providing maids to other countries.
"The idea comes from the president," Soes Hindarno, the director of placement and protection of overseas workers at the Manpower Ministry, tells Fairfax Media. "He once told my minister: 'Why are we still like this? We have kept sending maids abroad over the last 40 years while other countries send their professionals to our country'. The president wants to raise the dignity of Indonesian workers."
In May last year, Indonesia announced it would stop sending maids to 21 countries in the Middle East, although the 1.4 million maids already working there could continue and renew their contracts.
Next year Indonesia will begin negotiating with other host countries to improve the work conditions of maids, such as a day off every week and allowing them to keep their passports.
Mr Soes says the problems differ from country to country. In Hong Kong, for example, where the apartments are tiny, many maids don't have their own room and sleep on the couch or slumped against the fridge.
"If the country agrees to improve work conditions... then we will keep sending domestic helpers to this country," Mr Soes says. "If not, we will speed up the ban on sending domestic helpers to that particular country. Having said this, we don't mean to keep sending domestic helpers forever – our plan is to have zero domestic helpers overseas."
The International Organization for Migration estimates one in five of the estimated 22 million domestic workers in the Asia Pacific is exploited. Its campaign to stop human trafficking and exploitation – IOM X – recently launched a film, Open doors, urging employers to give maids basic rights, such as at least one day off a week.
"We chose to focus on domestic work because this exploitation is often hidden from public view," says IOM X program leader Tara Dermott. "Some are working extremely long hours, don't have access to health care and in the worst cases are raped, denied food and water, have to ask to go to the toilet and are surveyed by cameras."
Every Sunday in Hong Kong, thousands of Indonesian domestic helpers flock to Victoria Park, where they picnic, learn how to do makeup, recite the Koran and play music on their one day off of the week.
Nurjanah, from Pekalongan in Central Java, has been in Hong Kong – the fifth most popular destination for Indonesian migrant workers – for six years. At least here she gets a day off. Nurjanah left Singapore when her two-year contract expired because she didn't have any days off. "Thank God my employers (in Hong Kong) are good," Nurjanah tells Fairfax Media.
She shares a room with three children in a two-bedroom flat, working from 7am until 10pm cooking, cleaning and child minding. However the mornings are fairly free when the children are at school, and Nurjanah has Sundays and public holidays off.
Nurjanah says her salary is good, the equivalent of $500 a month: "It is very difficult to find a job with such a salary in Indonesia, especially for someone like me who is only an elementary school graduate."
But like many domestic workers, Nurjanah takes care of other people's children while her own son, who is in year eight, is brought up by her parents in Indonesia.
Her friends discuss how long they will stay overseas every time they meet. "As a mother, I am worried that my son will go out with the wrong people, I can only hope that my son is always safe," Nurjanah says. "People like me can only monitor our children through their Facebook accounts or by talking over the phone. This kind of thinking makes us want to go home soon."
On her days off, Nurjanah tries to "learn something, to improve myself". She completed a makeup class and now has a few students of her own: "My hope is that I could use my new skills once I'm back in Indonesia. Who knows, I could open my own beauty salon."
The government's plan to phase out sending maids overseas is widely discussed by Nurjanah's friends on Facebook. Nurjanah believes she will be safe because she heard a rumour that it won't affect maids already working overseas.
"I think it's good, there should be progress," she says. "I think Mr Jokowi, as the country's leader, must feel embarrassed that Indonesia is the biggest supplier of maids."
Between 2012 and 2015, Carol Chan visited two migrant origin villages in Cilacap in Central Java. "Since people rarely talk openly about the difficulties migrants face overseas or labour abuse, villages come to view migrant success as the norm," she writes in Inside Indonesia.
"To make matters worse, migrants' accounts of their own negative experiences are often individualised or dismissed as reflecting their own compromised morality. This leads migrants who 'fail' to experience this as a personal failure, rather than as due to weak laws regarding labour conditions and migration processes."
Anis Hidayah, the executive director of NGO Migrant Care, devotes her life to fighting for the rights of Indonesian migrant workers, including those on death row in foreign countries.
However she opposes the government's plan to stop sending maids overseas, saying it violates the rights of women to work where they wish. "It is like a rape case," Anis says. "Every time a woman is raped, the government suggests women should not travel at night, should not go out alone, should not wear short skirts. This is the same."
Instead, she says, the government should empower and educate domestic workers and strengthen their legal protection. "What the government should not do is ban them from working abroad. It will not work. People will keep going abroad and working as maids."
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