Women workers left behind by globalization

Women workers left behind by globalization

Ati Nurbaiti, Staff Writer, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

A steady inflow of foreign exchange totaling approximately
US$1 billion from Indonesia's migrant workers in 2002 alone has
led to the state's complicity in the violation of its citizens'
human rights.

The contribution came from 465,485 workers, mostly
"unskilled," meaning a large portion of them are women in
household and child care services. The contribution of hundreds
of thousands of undocumented men and women goes unrecorded.

Even on International Migrant Workers Day on Dec. 21 reports
reached the public of abused women seeking work overseas.

Following New Years' Day over 200,000 migrant workers
including some 70,000 from Indonesia protested in Hong Kong
against plans to tax their income.

The reports on Dec. 21 revealed that some 1,000 women aiming
to work overseas were being virtually detained at a overseas
worker agency compound in Tangerang, a similar story to many over
these years, where abuse begins at the recruitment phase.

On the same day in Karawang, West Java, officials and
community leaders read out letters from migrant workers to
neighbors and relatives, in commemoration of International
Migrant Workers Day. The letters brought news of longing, of
suffering but also optimism that comes from hearing success
stories of other migrants, moreso if they are from the same
village. Stories of abuse, rape and even unnatural deaths have
failed to deter women from seeking jobs overseas for the sake of
their children and families.

West Java is among the country's main sending provinces of
migrant workers to the Middle East, Malaysia, Singapore and other
countries, and the fact that among the poorest villages are in
this province helps explain the phenomenon since the mid 1980s.

It is shocking that for some 20 years, workers have merely
cited "fate" or God, or themselves, for either success or
misfortune, or death, despite the high regularity in the
recruitment and sending of overseas labor.

Governments are left to bilateral agreements and diplomatic
bickering as regional mechanisms to protect workers so far are
not functioning, if any -- even though countries within Southeast
Asia alone are both sending and receiving countries of migrant
workers. Last year's deportation of some 300,000 undocumented
Indonesian workers from Malaysia was a glaring recent example as
the Association of Southeast Asian Nations did nothing to
intervene.

The alarming consistency of the stories of abuse runs parallel
with the constant flow of foreign exchange that these migrant
workers have been sending back to Indonesia, apart from
alleviating the state's burden of unemployment.

Workers returning from the Middle East via Colombo, Sri Lanka
last month cited similar stories to those heard since the 1980s
-- horrendous work conditions in which workers are isolated and
are not even allowed to go out to the market, working as the only
maid for up to 18 people in a three-story household, with work
hours from dawn to midnight, not to mention beatings at the hands
of agencies (Indonesians and nationals in the host countries) and
employers, for trivial mistakes such as talking too loudly or
letting the veil slip from the face.

"I am not going back again," one woman on a Colombo-Jakarta
flight said, who had initially hoped for a monthly wage of over
Rp 1 million (US$110). "Not if they treat people like animals."
At meal times during her stay at the agency, she said the staff
had distributed mere rice and porridge-like food "as you would to
your dog or chickens".

Another young woman, Wati, returning from Bahrain, said, "I've
not reached my goals to work for two years at least, and I'm
going back, who knows, maybe I'll get a good employer." She only
knows that she was sent back after three months for a minor eye
problem. The women said it was "customary" to give the wages of
the first one or two months to the agency, thus workers returning
home after a few months had almost nothing to show for their
troubles.

With "globalization" the flow of workers from one country to
another is supposed to bring better welfare to all involved; less
obstacles are expected, and many among some 8,000 computer
programmers in Bangalore, India's "Silicon Valley", are still
eyeing the U.S. despite the recent dotcom collapse.

How the flow of domestic workers and their welfare will be
affected remains unclear. So far, the sectors listed under the
General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), an agreement under
the World Trade Organization on services, does not mention their
line of work -- most likely because housework and child care is
"unskilled" from the point of view of the market. Reports of
abuse remain rampant with little sign of improvement.

A recent two-week course on globalization in Bangalore, India,
highlighted the assumption dominating economic schools -- that
the only things with value are those on the market, while those
in the "private" domain, such as housework, have no value.

"An economist once said that the country's total gross
domestic product would go down if he married his housekeeper,"
Rachel Kurian, the course convener, said.

She cited a 1995 Human Development Report by the United
Nations Development Program, that work outside of that valued by
the market -- mostly women's work in the home -- reached a value
of US$9 trillion, or three fourths of the world's gross domestic
product. Such estimates are based, for instance, on the cost of
paying for your laundry or meals.

The view that such work has no market value -- thus no worth
and dignity -- translates into the rampant ease in trampling on
the rights of women even when they are clearly workers, despite
the fact that minimum wages are ensured in the labor laws even
for migrant workers such as in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Obviously, the continued enthusiasm of the women seeking such
work overseas is because of the undervaluation of housework in
Indonesia itself and the abuse which comes with it. With domestic
workers being paid Rp 300,000 or less -- compared to at least Rp
700,000 for drivers -- promises that they would earn at least Rp
1 million overseas continues to attracts aspiring villagers.

This explains the continued determination of the women
released from the above "detention" in Tangerang. "I'll seek a
better agency through which I can go to work overseas," one said.

Here, domestic workers are "maids" and are hence not even
workers with rights such as those written in the contracts for
migrant domestic workers. The recognition, with much higher
wages, escapes critics of the policy to send domestic workers
abroad; housewives are also among those who say that at least "we
treat maids as family and don't rape and kill" the women, nor
would they continuously have accidents and fall off while wiping
windows of fifth-story apartments working in Indonesian homes.

But being "family" means that outsiders cannot interfere on
how much a maid is paid and how long she must work. Again fate
determines a maid's welfare. Recognition of maids as workers has
barely had a head start in this "reform" era.

A breakthrough would be the set up in 2001 of the Indonesian
Migrant Workers Union in Hong Kong, mostly comprising domestic
workers.

Yet this is still unthinkable in the country; activists have
not been able to link their campaigns for migrant workers to
local domestic workers, perhaps given the seemingly unbreakable
feudal wall of maids being part of family affairs.

In Bangalore, the president of the domestic workers' union, an
elderly woman called Sarojamma, related how she and her
colleagues felt a big difference after they gained recognition of
being workers.

Maids here do not face India's caste system -- yet amid the
globalization hype urging for more flexible mobility of workers
across borders, with all the rosy promises, Indonesian domestic
workers will be largely left on their own -- unless the movement
of their sisters in Hong Kong starts to spread.

The writer participated in the above mentioned refresher
course titled "Globalization and labor, social movements and
women: A human rights perspective" in Bangalore, India from Dec.
4 -18. It was organized by The Hague-based Institute of Social
Studies and the Bangalore-based Indian Social Institute.