Indonesia is a sending country for international migrant workers, dominated by women. Most of them work as domestic workers that only require a low level of education. The economic reasons are the main factor that drives women in Indonesia to become migrant workers abroad. They find it difficult to work at home as the necessities of life continue to grow. In carrying out their work, women who are migrant workers are more vulnerable than men to various actions that violate human rights and various international agreements relating to migrant workers and employment contracts. This chapter raises the experience of Indonesian women who are migrant workers working abroad based on the feminist perspective. Some Indonesian women who are migrant workers experience violence, sexual harassment, unpaid salaries, do work that is not in accordance with the employment contract, and cannot perform worship in accordance with their religion. This chapter also highlights the consequences that Indonesian women who are migrant workers must face when leaving their families to work abroad.
TopIntroduction
Since the colonial period, Indonesia has sent many workers to the international labor market. Until the late 1960s, the placement of the workers abroad was still carried out individually, based on kinship ties, and was traditional in nature (Aswatini, Fitranita, Noveria, Rachmawati., 2019). The Indonesian government began to officially regulate the placement of migrant workers in 1970, with the Government Regulation No 4/1970 on the Inter-Regional and Inter-Country Work Program.
The data on Indonesian migrant workers can be traced from data released by the BPS and the BNP2TKI (National Agency for the Placement and the Protection of the Indonesian Workers). The BNP2TKI recorded that between 2011 and 2016, more than 53 percent of Indonesian migrant workers were women. The number increased in 2017 to 67 percent of the total number of migrant workers sent abroad. Both the 2015 SUPAS data and the BPN2TKI data show five countries that have become the main destinations of migrant workers, namely: Malaysia, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Looking at these two sources of data, they were most likely Indonesian migrant workers who went to work abroad. The statistics for Indonesian migrant workers could not be separated by sex since migration decisions are often associated with women's issues.
Poverty is one reason for migrating abroad. Women face more severe poverty problems due to many industrial activities that employ women workers with low wages. This is made worse by women’s limited access to public service frameworks, such as economic empowerment, education, health, and political participation. The feminization of poverty is often used to explain the phenomena specifically faced by women. It is also suspected that the issue of female labor migration had received less academic attention in the field of international relations (Soetjipto, 2017).
Indonesian migrant workers are also vulnerable to violence, exploitation, and abuse (Noveria, Aswatini, Fitranita, Utami, Saleh 2019; Soetjipto, 2017). Jobs in the domestic realm are difficult for the public to obtain and are often neglected due to the lack of access to enter the relatively private area. The government has tried to provide legal protection through the ratification of the international conventions on the protection of the rights of all migrant workers and their family members through Law no.6 / 2012. The latest global agreement agreed by the Indonesian government is the Global Compact for Migration on the 10th and 11th December 2018. The agreement contains a commitment to strengthen international cooperation and global partnerships to increase protection for migrant worker groups (Noveria et al., 2019). Unfortunately, the agreement is not binding, which means that no sanction will be given to countries that have consented to the agreement if they fail to do the activities in the commitments.
Results from some empirical studies show that some women migrant workers face problems in the destination country. Noveria et al. (2019) pointed out that migrant women who work as domestic workers in Malaysia have been treated arbitrarily by their employers. The study also revealed that women migrant workers were more often exploited compared to their male counterparts. Such exploitations, included, paying them low wages, withholding their wages, and there were even cases of migrant workers who did not receive their wages until they returned to Indonesia. In addition, there were also cases of women migrant workers who were employed elsewhere or were told to do other jobs that were not in accordance with the original work agreement. As such, some prospective women migrants also faced cases of fraud when preparing traveling documents in their country of origin.
This paper focuses on the experiences of women migrants working abroad, especially in the domestic sector, using a feminist perspective. Through the voices of women, the problems they face, both in the destination locations and country of origin, can be better and profoundly understood so that the best solutions can be sought. As such, this article analyses (a) why and how Indonesian women become migrant workers, (b) the conditions of women workers in the workplace, and (c) the workers’ household conditions. This chapter uses data collected from the Population Research Center, LIPI on Indonesian migrant workers who work as domestic workers since 2014 to 2019, secondary data, and other study results consistent with the purpose of this paper.