V. Linda, YogyakartaHer name is Siti. I talked to her, in her way, at her employer’s house in Bedok, Singapore. It was Sunday, the one week day most domestic workers are given off.
Siti had just visited a fellow domestic worker from Indonesia. She told me it had been one year since she left her village, a small place in Central Java, to earn her living abroad as a domestic worker.
She left behind in her village her husband and nine-month old baby.
When I asked her how she felt working there, she said, “I feel quite at home here”.
“My employer is kind enough. But if I had a choice, I wouldn’t work abroad.”
Sitting beside her, I kept wondering how her life was going. A short talk with my Filipino friend led me into a more complex problem of labor and migration in this regime of economic globalization.
Filipinos working abroad make a good case study. A number are either college graduates or under-graduates.
They understate their qualifications to ensure they get a job. In host countries, they cannot change jobs or step into roles requiring higher qualifications.
So those with higher skills and qualifications fill lower jobs.
For example, those who were trained as nurses may only work as domestic workers.
The phenomenon of young Filipino college graduates working as domestic workers in Singapore has persisted for years as graduates pursue a better life abroad.
Although in Singapore (as well as in other countries) they work as maids, they accept these positions because a domestic worker’s salary in Singapore is equal to a university entry level salary in the Philippines.
With severely limited jobs in their home country, they have no other choice.
I am taking these two stories to put the problems of labor and migration into a more global context.
Data from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA 2006), said 95 million migrant workers in the world are women. And 75 percent of documented Indonesian migrant workers seeking a livelihood abroad are also women (The Jakarta Post, Dec.19, 2007).
The significant female labor migration indicates a feminization of labor migration. Another thing that cannot be neglected is most of these female workers are found in the service sector as well as domestic and care work.
It can be said most migrant labor contracts are highly gendered.
The phenomenon of women leaving their family to work in wealthier countries is not limited to Indonesia but includes the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand, where there large labor forces exist, especially women, but where there are very limited work opportunities.
These countries, along with Indonesia, have become major exporting countries of domestic workers. The main receiving countries are the Gulf States, especially Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. In Asia, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei are also host countries.
The problem however is that only traded commodities have an economic value.
Gross domestic product measures income and cash-flows in the formal sector, while domestic works by women have been neglected — they are not considered indicators of development.
But this situation changed after many women started to leave their home to work overseas, contributing to their country’s gross national product through their remittances.
That is how women whose roles were formerly “invisible” within economic indicators are now becoming “visible” in the rising GNP. Their work now has economic value.
Paradoxically, the jobs they do are still in domestic service, though in foreign countries. The nature of their work does not change.
So although they send remittances home, their economic activities are not acknowledged as professional. Their employment does not attract or require regulations and protection.
In 2006, for example, Indonesian female workers overseas sent home US$5 billion in remittances.
No wonder the Indonesian government has always encouraged more female workers to seek employment overseas.
But in this way, the government seems to treat female workers simply as an export commodity, without legal protection or the rights normally accorded to mankind.
Just look at how many Indonesian maids overseas have died at the hands of their employers or through mistreatment, as well as those who have suffered severe punishment, or who have had injuries inflicted by their employers.
The government seems interested only in the remittance funds from our maids sent from overseas — but it fails to give adequate legal protection to prevent them from being abused by their employers.
Nor does the government care about the social cost associated with those women leaving their families in Indonesia.
Solutions have been proposed to the Indonesian government, including ratification of international conventions regarding migrant workers, bilateral labor agreements with receiving countries, improvement of placement and recruitment systems, building online information systems, education and training for potential migrants. These solutions are important.
Nevertheless, it must begin with a paradigm shift. After all, they are human beings. They are neither cash-producing machines to our country nor commodities for export. Without this shift in the government mind-set, it is futile to expect serious efforts to protect our migrant workers overseas.
The writer is a graduate student of Religious and Cultural Studies Program at Sanata Dharma University Yogyakarta. She can be reached at seruni80@yahoo.com.
