Filipino and Indonesian Women overseas domestic workers

Posted by Belarmino Dabalos Saguing
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/

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).