Madam Wahyuni, a 40-year-old Indonesian caregiver, is considering a job offer in Taiwan but faces a difficult decision. She weighs the financial benefits against her desire for freedom and the trauma of her previous experience working for a demanding employer in Saudi Arabia.
SRAGEN, Indonesia : When the chance to work as a caregiver in Taiwan came knocking at Madam Wahyuni’s door in early 2024, she thought long and hard about the opportunity.
Her former boss, she said, used to make her work 19-hour days with little break or time to herself. She would scold Mdm Wahyuni whenever she thought her domestic helper was working too slowly or for tiny mistakes. She barred her from using the home’s WiFi whenever her employee wanted to have a video chat with her family back home.It was night and day compared to the 50,000 rupiah a day she made selling vegetables at a local market back home.
reported that there were around 208,000 Indonesian migrant workers on the East Asian island. This figure has ballooned to 447,000 in the first half of 2024. “I heard bad things about working in the Middle East, anything from violence, lack of freedom to unfriendly employers,” said Ms Siti Nabila, a 25-year-old convenience store clerk from Indonesia’s West Java province who is applying to work as a helper in either Hong Kong or Taiwan.
For decades, the top destination countries for Indonesian domestic workers and caregivers have been Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, particularly as the economies of these Gulf states skyrocketed during the oil price boom of the 1970s. Various human rights groups have argued that the kafala system has paved the way for a culture of impunity among abusive employers since domestic workers were unable to leave their employers and report the abuses that they endured.
For two months in 2020, she was locked in her room and was only allowed to go out whenever the employer needed her to do some house chores.Former Indonesian migrant worker, Mdm Surani, 49, says she was locked up in her room for two months by her Saudi Arabian employer in 2020. However, in 2011, Jakarta took things to the next level by recalling its then-ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Gatot Abdullah Mansyur in response to the execution of an Indonesian domestic worker, Ruyati Sapubi who was accused of killing her employer.
In 2015, Indonesia imposed a moratorium on the sending of domestic workers to Saudi Arabia along with 18 other countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The row turned into a full-blown diplomatic crisis in May after the Filipino embassy in Kuwait aided the escape of three citizens who were abused and held captive by their respective employers.
Despite the rows, relationships between Southeast Asia and Middle Eastern countries in other sectors were largely unaffected. The moratorium did not include Indonesian domestic helpers who were already in these countries, like Mdm Surani. An activist holds a banner reading "Saudi Arabia is a criminal of humanity" during a protest against the execution of Indonesian migrant worker Mdm Ruyati outside the Saudi Arabian embassy in Jakarta on Jun 21, 2011.
Meanwhile, Kuwait and Qatar have been among the top five destination countries for overseas Filipino workers over the last four years, overtaking Singapore and Japan. According to PSA data, last year there were 140,000 Filipinos working in Kuwait and 134,000 in Qatar while there were 97,000 in Japan and 84,000 in Singapore.The influx of Filipinos working in the Middle East was not without consequence.
Former domestic worker, Joy Rama, 31, sitting at her home in Rodriguez, Rizal Province, the Philippines. “When she finally decided to let me go, the whole family surrounded me and made me sign a piece of paper written in Arabic. I was so scared for my life and so desperate to go home, I signed it,” she said.
Among the measures taken by the Philippines was a moratorium on the sending of new domestic workers to Kuwait in 2018 and Saudi Arabia between 2021 and 2022. When Indonesia partially lifted its moratorium last year after improvements in domestic worker’s rights in a number of Gulf States, a Despite these improvements, Indonesia is still cautious about fully lifting its ban and allowing private agencies to deploy domestic workers to the Middle East on their own. Currently, all Indonesian helpers have to be deployed through government-controlled arrangements.
In 2015, Taiwan relaxed the eligibility of residents looking to hire live-in foreign caregivers to any person more than 80 years of age. Before, a doctor’s certificate was needed before a household could hire a live-in caregiver. But experts said that domestic workers and caregivers in Taiwan are prone to exploitation in the form of long working hours, heavy workload as well as violence and harassment since they are not protected under Taiwan’s labour laws due to the informal nature of their work.
Then there’s the issue of her living arrangement. Because space is at a premium in her city, Taipei, Mdm Suparni is forced to sleep on an inflatable mattress inside a cockroach-infested storage room. The only other space where she can have her privacy is the apartment’s balcony which is primarily used for drying clothes.
“Even the strictest of labour laws cannot control what goes on in the privacy of an employers’ home,” Mdm Anis of the Indonesian Commission on Human Rights said.In August, South Korea welcomed 100 Filipino workers as part of itsto allow for the first time, foreign workers to work for Korean families as domestic helpers and caregivers.
The ministry, the newspaper wrote, is offering a dormitory for these workers in cooperation with the Seoul Metropolitan Government.
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