Post Ramadhan syndrome is back: Thousands of upper and middle class families in Jakarta are complaining that their domestic helpers who departed for Idul Fitri celebrations have deserted them, abandoned their posts, simply disappeared. The situation has brought plenty of discontent. Now some Jakarta businessmen and women have to drive their own cars to work, sweep the floor and even take care of their own children.
To a short-term visitor from a developed country the entire situation would appear hilarious. Indonesian society appears to be outrageously and hopelessly feudalist, bringing back memories of required reading; of classic novels from bygone centuries.
Undeniably, I had been brought up in a very privileged family in Central Europe. My father was a nuclear scientist, my mother an architect. We never had a maid. My father would vacuum carpets on the weekend; I would help with the dishes and shopping, sometimes running to the neighborhood pub with big jar to be filled with draft and foamy beer. My mother did most of the cooking. The difference in incomes between my father who was the head of a research team and the cleaning lady at his plant was only three times.
I recently visited one of my best friends who is working in Turin, Italy. He is Danish, employed by the European Union with more than a generous salary of close to US$128,000 a year. Twice a week he employs a Romanian lady who cleans his more than 100-square-meter apartment in just two hours. He pays approximately $18 an hour, the going rate for this sort of service. I calculated that if he would employ her for an entire month, working 10 hours a day six days a week (the norm in Jakarta), he would have to spend over $3,600 a month, close to half of his salary after taxes!
In Europe, professionals cannot afford maids not because their salaries are low (they are much higher than those of Indonesian professionals), but because minimum wages and wages paid to domestic workers are much higher than those in countries like Indonesia.
There is also a strong stigma attached to those who employ domestic workers in many developed countries. Maids and chauffeured stretch limos are something out of the lifestyle of movie stars and pop singers, or the eccentric and mostly of very bad taste, like pink tuxedos and crocodile skin shoes. In the country with the most equally distributed incomes on earth -- Japan -- these are mostly reserved for company presidents and high members of the Yakuza.
In Indonesia, it is quite the opposite. There is no shame felt by those who exploit others; for maids, nannies and drivers are actually a status symbol. For outsiders, some images can be shocking: maids carrying infants to expensive restaurants, then sitting at the end of long tables eating nothing, while their ""masters"" are enjoying themselves a few feet away. Members of the elite sitting on uncomfortable back seats of expensive sports cars designed for driving pleasure; plush front seat occupied by underpaid chauffeurs!
There are several arguments for having maids and drivers; arguments developed by the members of Indonesia's upper and shrinking middle class.
One is that employing these poor people from the kampong creates jobs which are so scarce outside major metropolitan centers. This argument would hardly survive closer scrutiny. Jakarta is an extremely fragmented and inefficient city with almost nothing left that can be described as public. There would be hundreds of new jobs available if the trend would be reversed: private drivers could drive public buses and trains (if those were available) for the good of the majority. They could be building wide promenades and sidewalks and later maintain and clean them, receiving above minimum wages. Instead of cleaning toilets in private villas, they could maintain public bathrooms, parks and squares. Public sidewalks would decrease the need for excessive use of private cars, at least in the city center but also in the neighborhoods, improving air quality and overall quality of life. Instead of serving a small minority of city dwellers, newcomers from the kampong could be working for the entire society.
The second argument is that the houses in polluted Jakarta have to be maintained by outside help: there is simply too much dust and upper class dwellings are too big to be serviced by the family itself. First, as previously mentioned, dust and pollution would decrease with improved public services (transportation, sidewalks, recycling of garbage). Second, the reason for dwellings being so big is that the privileged class are counting from the start on employing teams of ""servants"" for absurdly low salaries; much lower then those miserable minimum wages (maids in Jakarta have to work for approximately $40 to $60 a month in the city where minimal wages in the city are approaching $100). If the wages of domestic workers would dramatically increase, the dwellings of the rich would shrink in size.
The main problem is not disloyalty of domestic servants, or the so-called post Ramadhan syndrome. It is disparity of incomes. Nothing good can come out of a situation where maids live under the same roof as their masters who are enjoying an income one hundred, sometimes on thousand times higher than the domestic helpers.
-- Andre Vltchek
