Jakarta – The newly inaugurated Minister of Manpower and Transmigration, Hanif Dhakiri, pledged on Saturday to audit all migrant worker placement agencies in a bid to crack down on widespread extortion of some of the country's most vulnerable people.
"I will not tolerate anyone playing dirty, be it the agencies or the staff in my ministry," Hanif told Indonesian news portal Tempo.co on Saturday.
The sector is nominally regulated but criminal gangs have long established that the placing of poorer members of society in countries such Dubai and Saudi Arabia makes for good business. Migrant workers frequently fall victim to extortion at the hands of these agents.
"Hopeful migrant workers are asked to deposit guarantee money and told they would receive training but what happens next is they don't get the training and the agents run away with their money," Hanif told Tempo.
The lot of the migrant worker is a major political issue in Indonesia. While remittances sent by construction workers and domestic workers from abroad has had an important impact on raising hundreds of thousands of families out of poverty, migrant workers are often victim to mental and physical abuse and in many cases have to surrender their passports to either agents or employers.
Extreme cases such as the recent murders of two women in Hong Kong, allegedly at the hands of a British banker, occasionally make international headlines, but the domestic press is never short on stories of abuse perpetrated by agents, employers – even the governments of workers' destination countries.
There are around 45 Indonesian domestic workers on death row in Saudi Arabia, while 375 Indonesians workers were facing the death penalty worldwide in 2012, according to data from Migrant Care, a Jakarta-based advocacy group set up by labor activists.
While migrant workers are frequently extorted when they are first recruited – the villages of West Java being particularly fertile ground for placement agents – the return journey home has historically been an opportunity for members of the military, police and airport authorities to take a cut of workers' wages.
The KPK and the National Police conducted a joint raid on July 25 at Soekarno Hatta International Airport in Jakarta and arrested 18 people – including a soldier and two members of the National Police.
The men were running a decade-long racket at the airport where returning workers would be forced to pay up to 10 times the market rate for a taxi to their chosen destination. A foreign exchange scam would also relieve the workers of large sums of money. One worker testified that she had been forced to pay $250 for a taxi.
The vast scale of the extortion racket is instructive of a systemic lack of protection.
Migrant Care director Anis Hidayah said earlier this year that every day some 400-500 migrant workers were extorted on returning home, describing the scam as "systemic" and estimating that the figure represented 45 percent of the total number of workers re-entering Indonesia.
In addition to addressing the entrenched exploitation of workers, Hanif also plans to improve the facilities where migrant workers are housed before they leave the country. "The fact is; they look more like detention centers," Hanif told Tempo.co.
"I have seen some migrant workers stay in these shelters for eight months," he added. Hanif pledged to ensure that all Indonesian migrant workers receive proper protection from when they are recruited to when they return home.
Ministry data show there are 520 registered placement agencies in the country. "We will conduct an audit for all these agencies," Hanif said.