Labor exporter speaks out on abuse

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.