Working Overseas: Be Paid Lowly and Treated Badly.. Then, Send Home Money

Working Overseas: Be Paid Lowly and Treated Badly.

. Then, Send Home Money

Back in their homeland, Indonesia, migrant workers from Indonesia are called pahlawan devisa (heroes / heroines of foreign exchange). They work abroad and send money home to finance their family lives. They pursue jobs abroad due to the scarce domestic opportunities. As of April 2008, they have sent home some US$2 billion a year, helping relieve deep-seated worries about unemployment. Indonesians make up the majority of migrant workers in the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of Indonesians working there. Most of them are women from impoverished villages. Weni binti Aceng, a former Indonesian migrant worker, said, people "think Indonesians will have absolutely nothing to eat if they don't work in Saudi Arabia." She admitted that Indonesian workers were "treated so badly".

In Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, many Indonesian migrant workers are also suffering from abuse and torture. According to Anis Hidayah, the executive director of the Indonesia-based voluntary body Migrant Care, as cited by Al Jazeera, there were 5,563 cases of alleged abuse of migrant workers in Saudi Arabia in 2010, including 1,090 allegations of physical abuse and 898 allegations of sexual abuse.

On the other side of the globe, in Hong Kong, there are currently 130,000 Indonesian migrant workers today, while there were only 6,000 in 1993. Indonesians are now the biggest group of migrant workers in Hong Kong. The second biggest group is from the Phillipines with 120,000 workers in the city.

Migrant workers in Hong Kong have to work hard and lowly paid. Most of them are domestic workers. They take care of children or elderly family members. So far, migrants are among groups excluded from a new law introduced in Hong Kong next May, which set the minimum wage at a very low and inadequate level of HK$ 28 an hour. That would mean that the migrants are now still getting less than HK$ 28 an hour. The new law will be applied to legal citizens or permanent residents. Migrants are excluded from opportunities of employment, since they are considered to be temporary residents, while even some of them have been there for years.

Indonesian migrant workers, like their fellows from other countries, also suffer from being discrimination and racism targets. The Hong Kong government, for example, threatened to ban Indonesian migrants from Hong Kong in retaliation to Indonesian anti-Chinese riots in 1998. Filipinos are also suffered from racist campaigns of some political figures in Hong Kong after eight Hong Kong tourists were shot dead during hostage killings in Manila in August, 2010.

From NTB (Nusa Tenggara Barat / West Nusa Tenggara),Indonesia, by March 2010, were reported around 400,000 men and women working abroad. NTB sends around 35,000 to 40,000 workers per year to work in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan. Kompas Online reported, NTB Manpower and Transmigration Office chief Agus Patria said most of the migrant workers from the province were successful in their overseas jobs because they could send a total of around Rp2 billion to their families at home every day. "But unfortunately the families who receive the money from their relatives abroad are usually not good in managing the money, especially for productive purposes, and eventually they too opt to work as migrant workers abroad," the report said further.

In Hong Kong Indonesian Migrant Workers' Union (IMWU), Coalition of Indonesian Migrant Workers' Organisations (KOTKIHO) and other groups are trying to address the Indonesia migrant workers' problems. In Indonesia, Migrant Care is one among so many other voluntary bodies paying attention to these issues.

Facts on migrant workers:

If migrants formed a country, it would be the fifth most populous in the world, with 200 million people

49 percent of the world's migrants are women

The countries with the highest percentage of migrant workers are Qatar (87 percent), United Arab Emirates (70 percent), Jordan (46 percent), Singapore (41 percent), and Saudi Arabia (28 percent)

Remittances sent home by migrant workers totalled US$414 billion in 2009

Sources:

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/07/20/039no-sense-urgency039-help-indonesia039s-heroes.html; http://english.kompas.com/read/2010/03/15/1507430/How.Indonesian.Workers.Treated.in.and.out.of.The.Country; http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/11/2010112073331127625.html; http://chinaworker.info/en/content/news/1366/

The above article was first published April 9, 2011 inWork Overseas

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