Women workers left behind by globalization

January 9, 2003, posted 3 March 03

Ati Nurbaiti, Staff Writer, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

A steady inflow of foreign exchange totaling approximately US$1 billion from
Indonesia's migrant workers in 2002 alone has led to the state's complicity in the violation of its citizens' human rights.

The contribution came from 465,485 workers, mostly "unskilled," meaning a large portion of them are women in household and child care services. The contribution of hundreds of thousands of undocumented men and women goes unrecorded.

Even on International Migrant Workers Day on Dec. 21 reports reached the public of abused women seeking work overseas.

Following New Years' Day over 200,000 migrant workers including some 70,000 from Indonesia protested in Hong Kong against plans to tax their income.

The reports on Dec. 21 revealed that some 1,000 women aiming to work overseas were being virtually detained at a overseas worker agency compound in Tangerang, a similar story to many over these years, where abuse begins at the recruitment phase.

On the same day in Karawang, West Java, officials and community leaders read out letters from migrant workers to neighbors and relatives, in commemoration of International Migrant Workers Day. The letters brought news of longing, of suffering but also optimism that comes from hearing success stories of other migrants, moreso if they are from the same village. Stories of abuse, rape and even unnatural deaths have failed to deter women from seeking jobs overseas for the sake of their children and families.

West Java is among the country's main sending provinces of migrant workers to the Middle East, Malaysia, Singapore and other countries, and the fact that among the poorest villages are in this province helps explain the phenomenon since the mid 1980s.

It is shocking that for some 20 years, workers have merely cited "fate" or God, or themselves, for either success or misfortune, or death, despite the high regularity in the recruitment and sending of overseas labor.

Governments are left to bilateral agreements and diplomatic bickering as regional mechanisms to protect workers so far are not functioning, if any -- even though countries within Southeast Asia alone are both sending and receiving countries of migrant workers. Last year's deportation of some 300,000 undocumented Indonesian workers from Malaysia was a glaring recent example as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations did nothing to intervene.

The alarming consistency of the stories of abuse runs parallel with the constant flow of foreign exchange that these migrant workers have been sending back to Indonesia, apart from alleviating the state's burden of unemployment.

Workers returning from the Middle East via Colombo, Sri Lanka last month cited similar stories to those heard since the 1980s -- horrendous work conditions in which workers are isolated and are not even allowed to go out to the market, working as the only maid for up to 18 people in a three-story household, with work hours from dawn to midnight, not to mention beatings at the hands of agencies (Indonesians and nationals in the host countries) and employers, for trivial mistakes such as talking too loudly or letting the veil slip from the face.

"I am not going back again," one woman on a Colombo-Jakarta flight said, who had initially hoped for a monthly wage of over Rp 1 million (US$110). "Not if they treat people like animals." At meal times during her stay at the agency, she said the staff had distributed mere rice and porridge-like food "as you would to your dog or chickens".

Another young woman, Wati, returning from Bahrain, said, "I've not reached my goals to work for two years at least, and I'm going back, who knows, maybe I'll get a good employer." She only knows that she was sent back after three months for a minor eye problem. The women said it was "customary" to give the wages of the first one or two months to the agency, thus workers returning home after a few months had almost nothing to show for their troubles.

With "globalization" the flow of workers from one country to another is supposed to bring better welfare to all involved; less obstacles are expected, and many among some 8,000 computer programmers in Bangalore, India's "Silicon Valley", are still eyeing the U.S. despite the recent dotcom collapse.

How the flow of domestic workers and their welfare will be affected remains unclear. So far, the sectors listed under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), an agreement under the World Trade Organization on services, does not mention their line of work -- most likely because housework and child care is "unskilled" from the point of view of the market. Reports of abuse remain rampant with little sign of improvement.

A recent two-week course on globalization in Bangalore, India, highlighted the assumption dominating economic schools -- that the only things with value are those on the market, while those in the "private" domain, such as housework, have no value.

"An economist once said that the country's total gross domestic product would go down if he married his housekeeper," Rachel Kurian, the course convener, said.

She cited a 1995 Human Development Report by the United Nations Development Program, that work outside of that valued by the market -- mostly women's work in the home -- reached a value of US$9 trillion, or three fourths of the world's gross domestic product. Such estimates are based, for instance, on the cost of paying for your laundry or meals.

The view that such work has no market value -- thus no worth and dignity -- translates into the rampant ease in trampling on the rights of women even when they are clearly workers, despite the fact that minimum wages are ensured in the labor laws even for migrant workers such as in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Obviously, the continued enthusiasm of the women seeking such work overseas is because of the undervaluation of housework in Indonesia itself and the abuse which comes with it. With domestic workers being paid Rp 300,000 or less -- compared to at least Rp 700,000 for drivers -- promises that they would earn at least Rp 1 million overseas continues to attracts aspiring villagers.

This explains the continued determination of the women released from the above "detention" in Tangerang. "I'll seek a better agency through which I can go to work overseas," one said.

Here, domestic workers are "maids" and are hence not even workers with rights such as those written in the contracts for migrant domestic workers. The recognition, with much higher wages, escapes critics of the policy to send domestic workers abroad; housewives are also among those who say that at least "we treat maids as family and don't rape and kill" the women, nor would they continuously have accidents and fall off while wiping windows of fifth-story apartments working in Indonesian homes.

But being "family" means that outsiders cannot interfere on how much a maid is paid and how long she must work. Again fate determines a maid's welfare. Recognition of maids as workers has barely had a head start in this "reform" era.

A breakthrough would be the set up in 2001 of the Indonesian Migrant Workers Union in Hong Kong, mostly comprising domestic workers.

Yet this is still unthinkable in the country; activists have not been able to link their campaigns for migrant workers to local domestic workers, perhaps given the seemingly unbreakable feudal wall of maids being part of family affairs.

In Bangalore, the president of the domestic workers' union, an elderly woman called Sarojamma, related how she and her colleagues felt a big difference after they gained recognition of being workers.

Maids here do not face India's caste system -- yet amid the globalization hype urging for more flexible mobility of workers across borders, with all the rosy promises, Indonesian domestic workers will be largely left on their own -- unless the movement of their sisters in Hong Kong starts to spread.

The writer participated in the above mentioned refresher course titled "Globalization and labor, social movements and women: A human rights perspective" in Bangalore, India from Dec. 4 -18. It was organized by The Hague-based Institute of Social Studies and the Bangalore-based Indian Social Institute.