DEWAN KOORDINATOR | Indonesia Support Facility

The statistics of the quality of Indonesian people’s life create a deep concern. Within 11 years (1996-2008), the government was only able to raise Rp 40.000,00 (about US$ 5) of its people’s purchasing power. For the education sector, it was only able to elevate the level of education by a year. The number of unemployment reached 30 million lives with educational quality of the job seekers consists of 55.43% elementary graduate and below. Meanwhile, the number of poverty reached 32 million lives.

Adding to the equation, extremely weak development policies whether in the agriculture or industry sector. Government’s policies failed to motivate the agricultural sector. As the result, the rural society was unable to create any job field and many of their youths were forced to seek employment in the cities. Aside of that, there is the weakness in controlling the inflation and the high increase of interest rate which hampered the growth of micro-businesses.

In other words, looking at the statistics, Indonesia should’ve already been in a systemic poverty and hunger crisis. But it’s surprising that while the threat of famine has been heard for long, until today the impoverished citizens still survive. What have the destitute citizens done to make ends meet?

To name one, there are many of them working as domestic workers, and majority of them are women. Ironically, domestic workers in Indonesia have extremely low bargaining position. Their working hours is longer than the standard (more than 12 hours – overnight) with awfully low wage (around Rp 400.000 or US$ 50 per month), and often become targets of abuse and sexual harassment threats from their employer.

There are even demands of domestic workers to be an all-around worker, meaning they have to possess the ability of cleaning, washing, cooking, ironing, babysitting, even massaging the homeowner. They also don’t have employment contracts and social security. Even ‘domestic worker’ profession isn’t included in the category of labor, so there is no labor law protecting them.

Isn’t it very unfair, when millions of women becoming domestic workers actually saves the nation from hunger, all they’ve got is unfair treatments from the society they’re residing in?

This problem, of course, is not only a problem of government’s failure in fulfilling the needs of its society but also a problem of a cultural condescension towards women’s work value. Domestic workers directly become the reflection in how Indonesian society appreciates domestic works which in patriarchal context are done by women. Household business is considered an unskilled work, and it’s in the nature of women to be capable of handling it. Here domestic workers begin to sacrifice and women’s work generally seen as second-best.

In the public dialogue, “Manifesting Acknowledgement, Respect, and the Fulfillment of Domestic Workers’ Rights”, July 7, 2011 in Jakarta, Poppy Ismalina (Director, Magister of Development Economics, Faculty of Economics and Business, Gadjah Mada University) suggested a strategy to increase the value of domestic workers by calculating their real economics value with indirect valuation techniques. This technique will calculate the cost of homeowner’s missing productivity, the health cost from the accumulated tiredness and stress from doing the domestic works and other expense factors which homeowners would have to spend were they not employing any domestic worker. This technique later would be used as the basis of determining certain domestic worker’s wage. With this technique, society would no longer look down on domestic worker’s work value and domestic works as unskilled works.

The question that often appears when this technique is put to use is, if domestic worker’s wage follows the Regional Minimum Wage (RMW) standard, wouldn’t it be dilemmatic for Indonesian society, which is also underpaid that they can’t pay proper salary to domestic workers? It would cause many homeowners incapable of hiring any domestic worker. Regarding this, once again I’d like to emphasize that this effort to calculate the real economic value is an effort to strengthen the work value of domestic worker, and not merely an effort of raising domestic worker’s earnings.

Hence, if homeowner were only capable of paying US$ 50 per month, then he’d be entitled to a domestic worker’s service in accordance to the value of the money. With RMW about Rp 1 million per month (US$ 120), then one would only be able to employ a domestic worker for 3 hours or for limited kinds of task, for example, just washing and ironing.

This effort would also accelerate the movement of gender equality in domestic space. If only certain works were done by domestic worker, the rest of the domestic works could be negotiated for work allotment between a husband and wife at home.

On the other hand, critical awareness must also be given to domestic workers. This critical awareness could be mediated by education and organization of domestic workers. The education of domestic workers must not stop at technical skill trainings like domestic worker agents usually give. Domestic workers must be given empowerment education, whereas all of their skill is based on one’s proficiency of knowledge and understanding of their rights, and a capability of self-advocacy whenever unfairness happens to them. This critical awareness movement through education has already been done by Rumpun Tjut Nyak Dien and Sapu Lidi School of Domestic Workers.

Of course government’s participation is greatly expected regarding this matter. Government should start revising the Bill of Labor and they should include domestic worker as skilled work, so the social security and law protection for domestic workers could be secured. Strengthening the value of domestic worker is a concrete effort that we can make for the empowerment of women’s value in Indonesia

Nur Imroatus S, Community Empowerment Coordinator of AMAN Indonesia