/INT’L MIGRANTS DAY/INDONESIA: Hard Knocks Turn Migrant Worker into Entrepreneur

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Richel Dursin

JAKARTA, Dec 16 2003 (IPS) - Her years as a domestic worker overseas taught Nur Safinah one tough lesson – never to be one again. Returning to Indonesia, she then became an entrepreneur.

“I don’t want to be a migrant worker again. I just want to stay here and make our business successful,” she said, referring to the cattle breeding company that she and 31 other Indonesian women migrant workers in Hong Kong set up in her hometown in Banyumas, Central Java.

With Nur Safinah as the manager, the company, known as CV Bumi Mandiri, began operating Jul. 4 in Karang Nanas village, Sokaraja district of Banyumas. Each of the migrant workers invested 5 million rupiah (588 U.S. dollars).

The Indonesian word ‘bumi’ literally means earth in English, but in this case, it stands for ‘buruh migran’ or migrant workers, while ‘mandiri’ means independent.

Born to farmers who own a piece of land of not more than 50 square metres and the second of six siblings, Nur Safinah left her hometown in 1994 to be a domestic worker in Singapore. “I was idle at that time. So I left to work overseas,” said Nur Safinah, a dropout from senior high school.

Today, nearly a decade later, Nur Safinah wants her experiences to be the driving force behind her business.

Now, the company has 21 cows and she plans to sell them in time for the Idul Adha celebration, the second holiest day for Muslims known as ‘Qurban’ or Islamic Day of Sacrifice, next year. On this day, animals, mainly cows and goats, are slaughtered and their meat distributed to the poor.

“Although my background is a migrant worker, not a cattle breeder, I want to make this business a success,” said Nur Safinah, a former chair of the Indonesian Migrant Workers’ Union in Hong Kong.

If the cattle breeding programme is successful, she said, more Indonesian migrant workers would invest in it. “Many of the union members don’t want to put in their savings in this programme because they are afraid that their money would be put to waste,” she said.

Nur Safinah has also been able to buy a motorcycle and some land, which she rents out for 600,000 rupiah (70 U.S. dollars) a year. She was also able to send her youngest sister, who wants to migrate for work, to university.

The Indonesian government does not have reintegration or alternative investment programmes for returning workers. The cattle breeding business put up by Nur Safinah and her friends, who continue to be domestic workers in Hong Kong, is the first of its kind in Indonesia.

Activists say that Nur Safinah’s example is one that many workers would like to follow, especially since the majority of overseas migrant workers are women who worry about their families’ future.

Seventy percent of some four million Indonesian migrant workers, most of them in the Middle East and Asia, are women.”Now, the number of female migrant workers is nearly three times as many as their male counterparts,” said I Gusti Made Arka, director general of overseas employment services at the Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration.

Nur Safinah’s conversion from worker to entrepreneur has its roots in the difficulties she had working in Singapore, then in Hong Kong.

In Singapore, she was promised a salary of 230 Singapore dollars (135 U.S. dollars) a month, but was not paid for three months after her arrival because her recruitment agency in Jakarta held the funds back in payment for her visa and passport application fees and her airline ticket to Singapore.

“My Singaporean employer did not treat me well. I was not allowed to talk to other Indonesian domestic helpers and I was prohibited from performing my daily prayers,” said Nur Safinah, a 31-year old Muslim.

Everyday, she woke up at 5: 30 a.m. and did all the household chores until 10:30 p.m. When she returned to Indonesia after two years, she had no savings.

“My family, especially my grandmother, was ashamed of me because I worked abroad and returned without any money,” Nur Safinah recalled. The ‘shame’ was greater since migrant workers returning to her village in Banyumas are usually able to renovate their houses and buy a piece of land.

In 1997, she took up domestic work in Hong Kong, thinking the conditions there would be better. But among others, she had difficulty communicating with her employer because she could not speak Cantonese.

For seven months after arriving in Hong Kong, her employer deducted 3,000 Hong Kong dollars (386.45 U.S. dollars) from her monthly salary of 3,860 HK dollars (497 U.S. dollars) as payment to her recruitment agency in Jakarta.

Nur Safinah worked six days a week from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. and took time off every Sunday, hanging out with fellow migrant workers.

Soon, she became a member of an association of Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong, a group that in 1999 became the 2,000-strong Indonesian Migrant Workers Union and was registered with the Hong Kong government.

She says the Indonesian government’s indifference toward the plight of migrant workers prompted her and her friends to think about their future after their contracts expired. Migrant workers often find that much of their savings are wasted on consumer goods.

“We wanted a long-term investment,” said Nur Safinah, who came home in 2001.

But returning workers face their own problems as well, including exploitation in their own country that gets 2.8 billion U.S. dollars a year in remittances from them.

For instance, workers returning through the Sukarno-Hatta International Airport Terminal 3 in Jakarta, a special terminal for migrant workers, are vulnerable to extortion from both government and private agents, in the form of demands for illegal fees and through poor currency exchange rates.

Complaints about these are forcing the government to reconsider the use of the special terminal, which makes returning workers easy prey for corrupt officials and agents.

Still, “until now, abuses and exploitation continue, regardless of which way is used,” said Yohanes Wibawa of the Consortium for Indonesian Migrant Workers Advocacy (KOPBUMI).

Likewise, the perception of migrant workers as being laden with money continues. Nur Safinah still gets accosted for donations. “The people in my village always think that migrant workers have lots of money,” she said.