Starting Points: Migrant worker

Showing posts with label Migrant worker. Show all posts

May 15, 2010

Luck of the Draw for Indonesian Migrant Worker

A matter of luck - Inside Indonesia - a quarterly magazine on Indonesia and it's people, culture, politics, economy and environment

Migrant domestic workers aspire to more than their home communities can offer and are willing to take risks to change their lives

Rosslyn von der Borch

Singapore's Lucky Plaza, a popular meeting place for domestic

workers

Wayne Palmer

The changing nature of Indonesia's rural economies and an increased awareness of the world - brought about by higher levels of education, greater exposure to the mass media and the ever growing numbers of returned labour migrants - have contributed to a marked change in the aspirations of young rural women. At the same time, the absence of almost any work opportunities beyond poorly paid farming or factory work drives many to seek work abroad, powerfully sustained by their dreams of a better future for themselves and their families.

Women have little or no choice about the external factors that determine the way their migratory experience unfolds. A migrant domestic worker newly arrived in her host country is assigned to an employer about whom she knows nothing. In the absence of any sense of control, she relies on 'luck' to deliver kind and understanding employers.

Migration roulette

Employers and agents often claim that migrant domestic workers arrive in host countries unprepared for the challenges ahead and attribute the difficulties they experience to this lack of preparation. This is true in part, as many migrants find the move from an Indonesian village community and lifestyle to the urban, middle- to upper-class household of their employer disorienting. But it is important to acknowledge that agents, employers and the host community can also make this transition more difficult than necessary.

When I have raised the issue of labour migration with young domestic workers in Indonesia, they have indicated that they are well aware of the high levels of risk attached working overseas. Television and print media coverage of the ordeals endured by some migrant workers make this common knowledge. Prospective labour migrants, then, are generally aware that they will be confronted with a range of difficulties and may experience intense homesickness.

Domestic worker Rini Widyawati secretly kept a diary in which she recorded her observations and experiences during the years she spent working in Hong Kong, which was published after her return to Indonesia. In the opening pages of her diary she describes her stark awareness that she may fail to earn the money she dreams about, but also that the gamble she is taking and may even cause her death. She writes:

A nervousness rises in my heart. Will the future that I seek here be mine? … Will I leave this airport in two years having been successful? … Or will I die here, so that only my corpse will again pass through this airport. This has been the fate of some other Indonesian migrant workers, the reasons for whose deaths are sometimes not clear. Or will I kill myself here when I feel lonely and isolated, with work and family problems piling up on each other? My friends, who have also been migrant domestic workers in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Singapore, have told me this happens.

Perhaps only willing risk-takers seek work abroad, while the 'risk-averse' stay at home. In any case, hundreds of thousands of women take these substantial risks each year, hoping for high gains that are not possible if they stay in Indonesia.

Cycles of luck

When Indonesian migrant domestic workers go overseas they find themselves pitted against familiar enemies, in particular the structural disempowerment so intimately known to their home communities. It is unsurprising, then, that they speak so often of luck. Wilma, who works in Singapore, comments:

Being a maid is not bad at all, but a lot depends on luck. Luck is important. Because if you go to a family and they bully you, don't give you any days off, lock you in the house, then you're really in a bad place. So you need luck.

The uncertainties that arise when transferring from one employer to another can be immensely stressful. But Susi feels she has always been fortunate in the placement lottery:

I've always been lucky, I think, where employers are concerned. They have all treated me well. Maybe I'm good [laughs] or maybe they're good - or it's just my life, or something like that. It's okay. I can do my work.

Dian commented that she was lucky in having the 'understanding' of her employers:

My first boss and this one, they've both let me do my own thing. She isn't finicky about time. The important thing is that the work is done. Yes, they've both been understanding. I've been lucky in that.

Nina talked about cycles of bad luck and good luck. She experienced the 'bad luck' of being repatriated at short notice by her first employer in Singapore, which infuriated her. However she went immediately to another employment agent in Jakarta and applied to return:

So one month later I came back to Singapore. That employer was Straits Chinese. Her mother was sick and had complications, so she needed another maid. She employed me. But I wasn't lucky. Four months later the lady passed away. But good luck was coming. Because I went to the agency and said I wanted a transfer… In the afternoon the agent called me. She asked me, 'Do you want to transfer to a whitey?' [Very animated tone of voice]: 'Hey, that would be great!' I said. At two o'clock I had an interview. Then I got my employer.

Talk among domestic workers of the importance of luck - and of the personal resources necessary for dealing with adversity - points back to the structural injustice and disempowerment that affects labour migrants, to government and legislative failings in both home and host countries, and often to the personal ethical failings of employers, agents and government officials. Consequently, luck continues to play a part in determining the working conditions of migrant domestic workers, even after years overseas.

Not just passive accommodation

In some cases, migrant workers' reliance on luck may decrease as they gain confidence and are empowered through their experiences as migrants. Given access to each other - especially through days off that can be spent discussing problems and experiences, sharing food and news from home or attending classes - a domestic worker's reliance on luck can begin to be combined with a more complex awareness of her rights.

A reliance on luck in navigating the risks inherent in labour migration can suggest a passive accommodation to fate. But it is also closely linked to the personal capital that can make the difference between a 'successful' and an 'unsuccessful' migration experience. Especially in situations where a migrant domestic worker finds herself 'unlucky', her ability to accommodate her situation and to garner the personal resources necessary to see out her contract or to negotiate change, are tested.

But while accommodation can appear to be in tension with the notion that these women are active risk-takers, it can also be an active state, closely aligned to these women's views of themselves as economic pioneers and as risk-takers. As Nurjannah observed, speaking to me about having acquired the discipline of accommodation:

Lately everybody's talking about foreign workers, about maids. That never happened in the past. Even so, there are still many local employers who use mean and bad words when they talk to their maids. Especially - well I can't say especially who they were - but I was a victim of this myself, long ago, sometimes. But I grew up and now I don't care what they say. I just - I mean - but some girls might feel irritated when the - often employers call them 'sotong (squid) head', something like that [laughs, a bit embarrassed] and sometimes the children say bad things as well. I can handle it. I don't mind. I understand. But some newcomers, they've never heard that word, and they might feel so bad and so irritated and they feel so angry.

When asked to explain what she meant when she said she understood, Nurjannah added:

For myself, for my own personal wellbeing, what else can I do? Apart from wear it? It's easier on myself if I just wear it. It makes everything easier. No arguments. I just let them go. Later I will talk to them nicely so they will think about what they've said. But some girls can't do that. Especially in the beginning. I was also like that with my first employer.

In the importance placed on luck by migrant domestic workers, then, we can see a pragmatic appraisal of what is possible in their relationships with their employers and as migrants.

A form of resourcefulness

No migrant worker in receiving countries where comprehensive labour laws exist - and are enforced - should have to rely on luck to deliver reasonable working hours, time off from work and fair pay. However, like Nurjannah, many migrant domestic workers are prepared to accommodate a great deal, regarding this as part of the job. The focus of these women is pragmatically fixed on the route to the achievement of their ultimate goal of financial gain, and not on what is 'right'. Even if she becomes the victim of severe abuse, this goal may not be risked through attempts to assert her rights unless the odds are clearly in her favour.

But far from signifying acceptance of their 'lot', the ways that migrant domestic workers accommodate the challenges and difficulties they encounter demonstrate a resourceful negotiation of complex circumstances in which they are largely powerless. It is in this resourcefulness that the possibility lies for them to achieve the life they dream about - a life in which they have a measure of autonomy, more power to consume and knowledge of the world beyond their village.

Rosslyn von der Borch (rosslyn.vonderborch@flinders.edu.au) teaches Indonesian Studies at Flinders University in South Australia.

Jan 13, 2010

Looking Past the Facade of Italian City After Riots

Image by antonello_mangano via Flickr

By RACHEL DONADIO

ROSARNO, Italy — The official figures show there are 1,600 agricultural workers in this town, all but 36 of them Italians. The reality, exposed by the raw and violent riots here last week, was far different: Some 1,200 foreigners, most of them Africans, earned about $30 a day under the table picking oranges and clementines. Now that the town is largely cleared of foreign labor, the fruit remains on the trees.

In other places, $30 is not a living wage. But this is one of the poorest parts of Italy, and many local people do not earn much more, even if most will not pick fruit.

“Who is taking care of us?” asked Maria Amato, 39, a homemaker. “Until days ago, we didn’t exist.”

In a broad sense, the worst immigrant rioting ever seen in Italy — shocking here not only because of the anger of migrants, some of whom clashed with local residents, but also for the attacks on them by townspeople — cuts to the heart of the nation’s difficult evolution from a place of emigrants to one of immigrants.

But it is also a story fixed to this place. The economy is so weak here that locals and immigrants are competitors. In a town where people are reluctant to reveal their last names and often their first, a mysterious element complicates any full understanding of the riots: the ongoing strength of the Calabrian Mafia, or ’Ndrangheta, which has deep roots in agriculture. The son of a local organized crime boss was arrested and accused of wounding a policeman in the riots, suggesting that the mafia may have orchestrated the locals’ response to the immigrants’ violence.

“It’s a very, very complicated situation,” said Francesco Campolo, a police prefect who is one of three interim commissioners appointed by the region to govern Rosarno since the arrest last year of the mayor, who was charged with having organized crime ties.

This week, the absence of the immigrants, 1,200 of whom were whisked by bus and train to detention centers over the weekend, was clear. On Tuesday, firefighters demolished a former factory that served as seasonal housing for many migrants. It stood, just barely, a long roofless space of tin shacks, dirty mattresses, hand-me-down clothes, mud and garbage.

Image via Wikipedia

Authorities are investigating these central questions: How did the protests become so violent? Who, if anyone, orchestrated the citizens’ retaliation? And who benefits from the immigrants’ temporary or perhaps permanent disappearance from the area?

Alberto Cisterna, who oversees Calabria at Italy’s National Anti-Mafia Commission in Rome, called Rosarno the Corleone of Calabria, where clans of the ’Ndrangheta exert “extraordinary control.”

Official estimates indicate that the ’Ndrangheta did 44 billion euros, or more than $60 billion, in 2008, in international drug and arms trafficking, public works fraud, usury and prostitution.

Many authorities say that in a town where the ’Ndrangheta is strong, the presence of the immigrant workers must have been welcome, or at least convenient.

They note that agriculture is not profitable if transportation and labor costs are high and producers pay about 75 cents for a carton of fruit.

In any case, most agricultural outfits may have Italians on the official rolls, but they pay migrant workers under the table to harvest the fruit — if it is harvested. For years state authorities have not cracked down on the arrangement.

Calabria, like other southern Italian regions rich in agriculture, has long benefited from hefty European Union agricultural subsidies. To prevent fraud in which small acreage yielded puzzlingly large harvests, in 2007 the European Union changed its rules to base subsidies on the number of hectares planted rather than the tons produced.

The result, some authorities hypothesize, is that it may be more lucrative for some Calabrian landowners to let their harvests rot on the tree and collect the subsidies than to pay pickers. In theory, the migrants may have become less useful and, possibly, less tolerated.

Still, over nearly two decades, their presence had become part of the fabric of Rosarno, whose 16,000 residents included an estimated 2,500 immigrants. This week some local shops were hurting for the migrants’ business.

Image by scottmontreal via Flickr

“Before Christmas I baked a whole batch of sandwich rolls just for them,” said Letizia Condulucci as she worked the counter at her family’s bakery.

Like many Rosarno residents, she vehemently defended what the townspeople had done over the years to help the migrant workers and was outraged that they had wounded residents. “Ninety-nine percent of us helped them,” she said. And in the riots, she said, “they destroyed the town.”

On Monday evening, Rosarno residents held a peaceful protest, marching through the city’s flat concrete grid with a sign that read: “Abandoned by the state, criminalized by the media. Twenty years of cohabitation isn’t racism.”

But conversations with residents revealed a more complex reality. Many used an oft-heard phrase in Italy: “We’re not racist, but ....” Ultimately, they tended to say that maybe things were better without the immigrants, since it was hard enough for the Italians to make a living.

The city commissioners say that the riots were fueled by wild rumors on both sides. The immigrants had heard that local residents killed an immigrant, while local residents had heard that immigrants had wounded a pregnant woman so badly that she lost her baby. Both rumors were false, the commissioners say.

Still, the violence was dramatic. After immigrants struck residents and shops with sticks and burned and smashed cars, residents began responding with violence. By late Saturday night, most immigrants feared for their safety and voluntarily boarded buses and trains that took them to immigrant detention centers elsewhere in southern Italy, Rosarno authorities said.

Those with residency permits, which Doctors Without Borders says could be as many as half, were free to leave. Alessandra Tramontano, the director of Doctors Without Borders’ seasonal workers program in Italy, said the group was “worried” about where the immigrants would go and “how they will manage the winter, which historically had been spent in Rosarno.”

Meanwhile, early Tuesday morning, a special team of Italian firefighters was using demolition equipment to take down the factory where many had been squatting in conditions widely denounced as inhumane.

Mr. Campolo, one of Rosarno’s commissioners, said that even before the riots, the city had received state money to remove the immigrant encampment, which sits next to a middle school, and build a playground and sports fields.

It also plans to build a meeting center, with some health care facilities and dormitories, for the migrant workers. Mr. Campolo said the city planned to go ahead with the project. “Of course,” he said, “for the immigrants, when they come back.”

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting from Rome.

Sep 1, 2009

Thousands of migrant workers stranded overseas - The Jakarta Post

Image via Wikipedia

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Tue, 09/01/2009

More than 1,600 Indonesian migrant workers are living temporarily at the country’s embassies and consulates abroad as the government says it can not afford to send the troubled migrants home.

The Ministry of Manpower reported Tuesday that 257 of the migrants are in Saudi Arabia, 404 are in Jordan, 506 are in Kuwait, 35 are in Qatar, 276 are in Malaysia, 113 are in Singapore, six in Brunei Darussalam and 37 are in Taiwan.

As of June this year, the government has facilitated the return of 13,839 Indonesians detained at the immigration center in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

“Many of our migrant workers work illegally,” the ministry said on its website. The migrants hold haj visas, tourist visas or student visas but work overseas.

Some of the stranded migrant workers had fled from their employers, it added.

The government said it was hard to acquire exit permits from countries such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, because the Indonesians had not settled legal issues they were involved in, which generally include unpaid salaries and criminal offenses. “The other issue is that the budget to deal with theses issues is limited,” the ministry said.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Teuku Faizasyah admitted that lack of funding posed a huge problem to the government, who would like to send these people back home.

On Monday, the Indonesian Parliament Caucus for Labor estimated that there were 15,000 migrant workers stuck abroad, unable to return home. “This is the responsibility of the state. If the president is serous about dealing with the issue the problem can be solved,” caucus member Badriyah Fayumi said, as quoted by kompas.com.