Labor exporter speaks out on abuse

Ridwan Max Sijabat, The Jakarta Post/Jakarta

Saleh Alwaini raises his eyebrows when asked about the widespread abuse of Indonesian citizens working overseas. Instead of blaming the workers for their suffering, as others have done, the 57-year-old president of labor exporter PT Binawan Inti Utama fingers the government and labor companies whom he says have no sense of humanity.

"We cannot blame either foreign employers or their governments for the abuse, when we continue to ignore the fact that we have mostly treated these workers like commodities.

"It is not fair to blame Malaysia for the presence of over 1.2 million illegal workers there -- it is their own affair and they should have the authority to deport them. We did not take the necessary measures to prevent our workers from entering our neighbor illegally. Similarly, we should not condemn Middle Eastern countries when cases of rape and torture (of migrant workers) surface because we too have failed to set good examples of how to treat our workers and respect their rights," he said in an interview with The Jakarta Post at his office in Jakarta recently.

Saleh said, while he did not condone the abuse, the widespread maltreatment of Indonesian workers overseas had a lot to do with the way they were sent overseas, their skill level and their employers' resulting dissatisfaction with their performance.

Most of those who were abused were female, uneducated and unskilled and employed as domestic helpers and gardeners. Most were also not adequately trained before they were sent, he said.

Many Indonesian house maids were abused by their employers after they found their maids were not familiar with their culture, household equipment and furniture or were not protected by proper labor contracts, he said.

Saleh, a father of three, is one of several businessmen of Arab descent who pioneered labor exports to the Middle East in the 1970s. He realized the export labor market was a good business when a Saudi banker sent him US$4,900 for his services helping to recruit 70 male workers and sending them to him to be employed by the royal family and to government officials as house maids, gardeners and drivers.

Saleh conceded he and a few other labor exporters also sent women to be employed as house maids despite the government's ban on sending female workers at the time. The government finally allowed women to work overseas in 1978 after it found that the women were treated as if they were part of their employers' families and were well-paid, he said.

"We visited the Indonesian workers regularly and we always got a red carpet welcome from their employers. The workers were allowed to take annual holidays during Ramadhan and brought home a lot of money because they were highly paid," he said.

However, the golden era for Indonesian workers in Saudi Arabia dissipated after labor export companies mushroomed in Indonesia, leading to an oversupply of workers to the region. This glut caused a drastic fall in the salaries Indonesian workers could command and led to an increasing number of unskilled workers entering the market.

"After that, more and more ordinary people in the Middle East recruited maids from Indonesia and some even began treating them like slaves, reselling them to other employers," he said.

Aware of the potential risks in the supply of unskilled workers in the informal sector, Saleh suspended supplying workers overseas for five years in 1995 until 1997 while he established a special labor training center in a large area in Cianjur, West Java. For the first five years of its operation, the center, which offered strict military-style training programs, equipped workers with the skills to work in the electronic, oil mining and construction sectors.

"The six-month training programs gave workers a good base in work ethics, work-specific skills, and the languages of countries where they would be employed," he said. Using these training programs, Binawan sent about 1,000 workers a month to the Middle East, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea, he said.

The Binawan scheme was popular with foreign employers because the workers supplied by the company were disciplined, skilled, well-protected and able to start work quickly. They were also more highly paid than other Indonesian workers in similar industries. "No worker supplied by Binawan has ever been abused or not paid during their overseas employment. You can check this with the Manpower and Transmigration Ministry," Saleh said.

Due to the increasing demand for skilled workers overseas, Saleh added a new program in 1997 to train fresh university graduates for a year to be employed in offshore mining companies in the Middle East, in international-standard hotels, as nurses and to staff ferries and cruise ships overseas.

"This program ran for only three years because it was very difficult to train university and academic graduates to meet internationally accepted standards. The program was made inefficient because of the poor quality of education in Indonesia under former president Soeharto's New Order regime," he said.

The failure of the program extinguished Saleh's dream of establishing a nursing school in Indonesia to meet the increasing worldwide demand for the profession.

However, his dream was rekindled in 2001 after the authorities gave a green light to the establishment of an international- standard nursing school with a local and foreign consortium helping finance the institute.

In cooperation with the Sydney University of Technology in Australia, Philadelphia University's Nursing School and the University of Indonesia's Nursing Academy, the Binawan Foundation started running the nursing school with an international curriculum and teaching staff from the three universities in Cianjur campus, West Java.

The construction of a new high-tech campus is near completion in Kalibata, South Jakarta. President Megawati Soekarnoputri is scheduled to open it early in September and simultaneously attend the graduation ceremony of the Binawan Institute of Health Sciences's first crop of students.

Saleh said the institute would produce about 400 graduates with Bachelor of Nursing degrees annually and they would be employed in international hospitals in Middle East, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, United States and Australia where the demand for nurses is high.

Part of the institute's uniqueness was that it offered a loans scheme for students with their loans being repaid during their first two years of overseas employment.

"Students are only required to pay for their entrance test fee upfront. The school lends each student Rp 26 million to cover their tuition fees and lodging at a tidy dormitory for four years and the loan is paid back from their monthly wage of between US$2,000 and $3,000 during their overseas employment," said Musayaif, a spokesman for the institute.

Proudly, Saleh said his nursing school would help empower workers as sending skilled workers was far nobler and smarter than exporting unskilled ones to the informal sector.

"Of course, this is a business and I am seeking to make as much money as possible, but I have a strong commitment to empowering workers, improving their social welfare, repairing Indonesia's image overseas and improving Indonesia's remittance from labor exports," he said.

He hoped in the next 10 years European countries would come to realize Indonesia had international-standard professional workers in health.