Protect all women workers

Protect all women workers

The campaign to stop sending women workers to Saudi Arabia by
22 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has received a
significant boost with the open support from First Lady Sinta
Nuriyah and State Minister of the Empowerment of Women Khofifah
Indar Parawansa. With the backing of two very influential women
in President Abdurrahman's administration, it is difficult to
envisage how the government can reject the demand, which has been
voiced by various organizations for more than a decade.

The 22 groups marched to the Ministry of Manpower on Thursday
to press their demand to halt the sending of Indonesian women
workers to Saudi Arabia for three months, beginning on Aug. 17.
They argue that the government must ensure the safety and
security of Indonesian women, most of whom are employed as
domestic helpers, before they are sent there. The demand is based
on reported cases of abuse -- from slavery-like working
conditions, torture to sexual abuse -- many Indonesian women
workers suffer in the hands of their Arab employers.

Recognizing the contribution these hundreds of thousands of
women make to the economy -- from the repatriated dollars to the
easing of the tight labor market at home -- few people would
argue for a permanent halt to sending women workers to Saudi
Arabia, or anywhere else in the world for that matter. A
temporary freeze to sort these problems out, however, is merited
in view of these reported incidents.

The women NGOs are asking that the government make some kind
of arrangement with the Saudi Arabian government to ensure that
these women are adequately protected against such abuses and that
they have a legal recourse when something bad does happen to
them. The NGOs argue that the government has an obligation to
ensure that the women are well-equipped and trained and are
thoroughly informed of their rights before they leave the
country.

While these demands are valid and reasonable, one wonders
whether or not the NGOs and their supporters, including First
Lady Sinta and Minister Khofifah, have ever bothered to look at
the fate of domestic helpers in our own backyard. Are the
pembantu rumah tangga who work in big Indonesian cities
adequately protected in the same way we are insisting women
workers being sent to Saudi Arabia? Unfortunately, the answer is
a big "no". Sadder even still, we have not heard of any NGOs
speaking for them, let alone staging protests on their behalf.

Just because we hardly hear or read reports of abuses against
pembantu in Indonesia, it does not mean that they do not happen.
They do, much more frequently and just as violently than we care
to admit. They rarely get reported by the media because they are
common daily occurrences that are considered not as newsworthy as
stories of Indonesian women being abused in Saudi Arabia, or
because, like all domestic problems, they never leave the house.

If we are talking about minimum protection, these pembantu do
not enjoy a single shred of legal support. There are no set
contracts which spell out the rights and obligations that
domestic helpers and their employers have to sign. With the
exception of Jakarta, most other cities do not have bylaws
regulating the employment of pembantu rumah tangga. One would
even doubt if the bylaw in Jakarta is fully observed. Given the
sorry state of Indonesia's judicial system, one could suspect
that hardly any cases of abuse against domestic helpers, if they
ever reached the court, were settled in favor of a pembantu.

Unless the NGOs, the First Lady and Minister Khofifah expand
their current campaign to include domestic helpers in Indonesia,
they will be accused of adopting a double standard. They could
even be accused of racism for singling out the Arabs in their
campaign.

There are bound to be many benevolent Arab employers as there
are benevolent Indonesian employers, and there are bound to be
bad ones in Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. Since no one can tell the
good from the bad before hand, the best way to approach this is
to ensure that women workers are adequately protected. If this is
the objective of the NGOs' campaign, then they should also turn
their attention to the fate of domestic helpers in Indonesia.

To the maids, most of whom left their rural villages in Java
to avoid abject poverty, it makes no difference if they end up
working in Jakarta, Riyadh, Singapore or Hong Kong. All they care
about is that they make reasonably good money in return for
honest work. The task of the NGOs and the government then, is to
ensure they are well-protected wherever they choose to work.