Last Updated 13/06/2007 3:30:32 PM
There are an estimated 15 million migrant workers from Asia who have left their homeland in search of a better life abroad. Many of the workers are from the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh and China. Often though, the domestic workers - mainly women - arrive at their destination to discover that what they've been promised is not being delivered. Recently, Indonesia's vice president Yusuf Kalla travelled to Hong Kong to assess the plight of some of the 109-thousand Indonesian women working there.
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Presenter/Interviewer: Rob Sharp
Speakers: Indonesian director of the International Labor Organisation, Alan Boulton
BOULTON: There are a great number of Indonesian workers who go abroad to find employment, many of them are domestic workers. And the domestic workers are amongst the worst treated of the migrant workers. That happens in parts of Asia, but also in the Middle East.
SHARP: What do we know about foreign domestic workers and how they are sometimes exploited?
BOULTON: Well, they're many, many stories and I'm sort of concentrating immigration to women who are going abroad largely to do domestic work. And there are many stories of abuse, both within the sending country and in the receiving country. It can be abuse in terms of the agents that will recruit them and then charge them unreasonable fees. The agents who might exploit them. Women go overseas in order to become domestic workers, but find that they're forced into other forms of work, some quite objectionable work in terms of the entertainment industry.
They're are problems in countries, the treatment of these workers, especially if the worker is going and they're not what we call documented. In otherwords, they're illegal workers who are travelling in order to find a job. But they haven't got the proper documents, and these are of course open to even greater exploitation than those who have proper documentation.
SHARP: It's not just financial exploitation though, is it? It's sometimes physical abuse?
BOULTON: Well, it can be physical abuse and there have been a number of quite widely publicised problems which have occurred with Indonesian domestic workers in Singapore and Malaysia. The physical abuse when they might make mistakes or they might damage things in the household, and they might be punished very severely as a result. But things are getting better, and I think in Singapore, in particular, there have been a number of very well publicised prosecutions of Singaporeans for mistreating their maids.
In Indonesia, migrant labour is the second. It's a very significant contributor to foreign income earnings. And so I think it's only surpassed in Indonesia by the earnings from oil and gas exports. So total remittances could be worth up to 5.5 Billion US dollars a year in Indonesia alone. So it's big industry, that means there might be opportunities for exploitation and certainly that does occur. But it's a big income earner for the country and I think there is increasing attention being paid to ensuring that migrant workers are treated properly and get a fair deal when they go overseas.
SHARP: Based on current statistics Alan, do we know whose most likely to be exploited?
BOULTON: The figures from Indonesia are that it's about 75 per cent of the workers going abroad are women and many of these are going abroad to take jobs as domestic workers in homes in the Middle East or other parts of Asia.
These women often come from, well they virtually always come from poor backgrounds, often rural areas. They have relatively low education levels, and it's a group that is subject to exploitation and for that reason it's a group which is targeted by many organisations like the ILO, which is seeking to improve the protections and treatment for this group of workers.
