On protecting women workers

Your editorial Protect all women workers (Aug. 12, 2000) sharply criticizes a campaign to stop sending women workers to Saudi Arabia, which was prompted by 22 NGOs and supported by the First Lady. Most of those women work as domestic staff. The most important criticism launched in the editorial is that legal protection should also apply to pembantu (domestic staff) in our own country. I have some comments on this.

First, the fact that issues on domestic staff were excluded from the campaign perhaps can be best understood as a political bias rather than an accidentally neglected topic. The activists are accustomed to a metropolis circumstance where domestic help is a very ordinary phenomenon. That is why we have never heard of an NGO speaking out on the fate of local domestic staff, let alone staging a protest on their behalf, as it could have a boomerang effect on the activists.

I am not accusing the activists of being bad employers. My point is that those activists are paying no attention to the problems of local domestic workers.

Second, the editorial argues that all Indonesian domestic workers wherever they work need legal protection. The question is: Who is going to protect them? And the editorial seems to place the responsibility on the state.

In my opinion, the protection should come from the workers themselves, by setting up a union and using it as a vehicle to establish legal protection and to defend themselves from their employers' misconducts. It is regrettable that the editorial failed to raise such a point.

SAMUEL GULTOM

Jakarta