Rome, Italy 27June,2015
source: Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia Overseas Filipino Workers, Labor Circulation in Southeast Asia, and the (Mis)management of Overseas Migration Programs, Essay by Odine de Guzman http://kyotoreview.org/issue-4/overseas-filipino-workers-labor-circulation-in-southeast-asia-and-the-mismanagement-of-overseas-migration-programs/
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| Filipina maid (dowloaded image) |
While the majority of
Filipino and Indonesian women labor migrants end up in domestic work, it is
considered to be risky and sending governments do not have strong bilateral
agreements with receiving states on the protection of these women. As noted
earlier, numerous Filipino women have met misfortune in varying degrees in
their quest for economic upliftment as overseas domestic workers. Media reports
in Indonesia have likewise exposed the abuses experienced by women migrant
workers, many of whom are domestic workers. The abuse begins in the home
country, at the hands of a tekong (middleman/illegal
recruiter) and calo (small company or individual
recruiter), and continues in the employer’s home in the form of non-payment of
wages, long working hours, subjection to cultural taboos, or physical and
sexual abuse. The protection of domestic workers is made difficult because of
the location of the work in the employer’s private residence, where the lines
between the employee’s work and private time/space are blurred.
It is made even more
difficult in Indonesia when “maids are not [considered] workers” and “continue
to be regarded as the private property of households” (Ati Nurbati 2000, 91,
90). Because of the general assumption that domestic workers have low education
and that “they sleep and eat for free,” their salaries are low and are not
governed by minimum wage laws. In fact, “[a]s ‘part of the family,’ a maid’s
wage is not public business” (ibid., 91). The notion that a domestic worker’s
welfare, including salary, lies beyond the scope of public business partly
originates from the capitalist division of labor into the productive and
reproductive spheres, where the notion of work is a “production process that
contributes to capitalist accumulation and exchange” (Eviota 1992, cited in
Cheng 1996, 110). In contrast, domestic work falls within the “process of
reproduction, essential to the survival of the family and society, [but] does
not directly lead to the process of accumulation and exchange;” thus, it is not
customarily considered work, thereby, it converts the status of domestic
workers into non-workers (ibid). To a certain extent, women domestic workers
fall within the ambit of the private on account of gender relations in society.
Patriarchal societies deem women’s proper place to be the home, while men
rightly belong in the public arena.
A review of most
government policies and legislation on the protection of migrant workers shows
that domestic workers’ specific labor problems are not factored in at all
(Palma-Beltran and Javate-de Dios 1992; Heyzer 1994, also cited in Jones 2000;
Goldberg 1996). Even so, many women leave because domestic workers at home earn
only 15-20% of what they can earn abroad. In real terms, however, the enormous
recruitment fees and other travel expenses increase their family’s living
expenses, sometimes exponentially.
Indonesian domestic
workers in Malaysia are offered between US$90 and US$150 per month with
recruitment fees to be deducted from the first three months. But there are
numerous reports of more deductions than agreed upon and failure to receive
full or any salary at all (Jones 2000; Ati Nurbaiti 2000; Eko Susi Rosdianasari
2000). Yet for US$100 a month, many a rural woman would take the risk of
illegal detention, torture, and even death, strengthened by the hope that one’s
own fate will be different. (The bulk of reported abuse of Indonesian domestic
workers is in Saudi Arabia, with many physically and sexually abused.)
Aside from the
often-marginalized position of migrant workers in receiving countries, workers
also fall into hierarchical categories within migrant groups, which can be
imposed upon them by local society. In the hierarchy of overseas domestic
workers in Malaysia, for example, Filipinos are on the top rung. Indonesians
fall into a lower salary range because they usually have a lower level of
education, are not yet knowledgeable about the use of “modern” household
equipment, and are not proficient in the English language.
But regardless of
foreign language proficiency, overseas domestic workers are almost always
unjustly considered “potential prostitutes” by local officials and laypeople
who tend to prejudge foreign workers (Jones 2000, 65); in fact, even in their
home country, unmarried Indonesian women leaving to work as domestic workers
are imagined as “social misfits who could not get husbands or who had personal
problems at home that prompted them to leave” (64-65), despite the financial
support they send back. Of course, recruited domestic workers every now and
then unwittingly do end up in prostitution. The multi-million dollar business
of trafficking in women thrives upon deceiving, or convincing, unsuspecting
women and families about the rewards of overseas work. Once the migration
process has started, where a worker actually ends up is determined by the
recruiters and their allies. Sydney Jones asserts that in the case of
Indonesian women, the high demand for overseas domestic workers in Malaysia
facilitates the recruitment of women legal and illegal recruiters conscripting
women for housework or for the brothel (65).
