RI to continue exporting workers

JAKARTA (JP): The government intends to continue sending female workers abroad but wants their skills to improve, State Minister of Women's Roles Mien Sugandhi quoted President Soeharto as saying here yesterday.

Mien met with the President to report that she had been asked by countries she visited recently if, from later this year, Indonesia would stop sending female workers abroad.

Mien recently visited Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and Brunei Darussalam. She acknowledged that to obtain travel documents, young female workers sometimes lied about their ages.

Some of them were also unqualified to work abroad as they had only completed first grade, she said.

There are 12,000 Indonesian registered workers in Malaysia, 26,000 in Hong Kong, 21,000 in Singapore and 10,000 in Brunei Darussalam.

Mien said the President called on women's organizations to conduct vocational training for women to improve their work skills.

He stressed that the sending of Indonesian workers abroad should be coordinated by the local administration, the directorate general for immigration and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

On arriving in his/her destination country, every worker should report to the Indonesian Embassy, she added.

Most Indonesian Embassies do not know how many Indonesians are working in their countries, she said.

"This is our own mistake. We cannot blame other countries for this," she quoted Soeharto as saying.

Mien made the trip following reports of Indonesian women workers being mistreated, even forced into prostitution, in foreign countries. Earlier this month she said that 28 Indonesian women working as domestic helpers in Singapore had been mistreated by their employers.

The workers had taken refuge at the Indonesian embassy complex in the city state, State Minister of Women's Roles Mien Sugandhi said after meeting Sunday with 1,000 Indonesians, mostly female laborers, working in Singapore.

"Some workers were abducted for several months and were made to toil day and night," she said. Many complained their wages were withheld although they had worked for several months, others said they had been raped by their employers.

Unable to bear the hardship, some workers broke out of their employers' apartments, by tying bed sheets together and climbing down the outside walls, and sought refuge in the embassy, Mien said.

Part of the problem, she said, was the dishonest Indonesian manpower suppliers, who sent the workers to Singapore, and who sought nothing but profit. They hardly cared about contacting the workers to check on whether they had proper legal protection.

The government is determined to phase out the export of unskilled workers. It hopes that by the end of 2004 only trained workers will be sent abroad. (swe)