On protecting women workers

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