"Please pray for me so that I will be released from this prison soon, mother. Please give me anyone's cell phone number, I will surely make a call to *you*."
Above is an excerpt from a migrant worker's letter to her mother in 2007. She was employed by an outsourcing company in Jakarta.
Thaufiek Zulbahary from the NGO Solidaritas Perempuan said her organization helped the writer of this letter settle her case with the company that outsourced her to Malaysia.
But the letter is illustrative of the trouble she had to go through before the settlement.
The writer's case is just one of the many experienced by Indonesian migrant workers, who are prone to abuse and exploitation starting from their departure from Indonesia, while working in another country, and upon their return.
Recently, Solidaritas Perempuan launched a book documenting migrant worker cases that they helped advocate from 2005 to 2009. The book states that the NGO assisted 211 migrant workers whose rights were violated. Women made up 206 of the 211 workers.
Some of the women whose cases are laid out in the book were mistreated from the very first moment they became migrant workers by the parties who sponsored them. From 2008 to 2009, two of the 211 workers experienced physical violence from their sponsors and 14 had their rights violated through methods such as forbidding them from seeing their relatives.
One of the most common violations experienced by workers is related to pay disputes. From 2005 to 2009, 82 migrant workers whose cases were handled by the NGO reported such violations.
During the same period, the NGO recorded 21 cases of rape or sexual harassment, as well as 48 incidents of violence conducted by employers or other parties in the workplace.
At the launching of the book in Jakarta, Eni, a former migrant worker, shared her story. In her two years as an outsourced migrant worker, she was raped, imprisoned and was involved in an incident that left her limping to this day.
"I was drugged and raped. I didn't get paid for two months. When I tried to escape, the doors and gates were locked so I tried to climb down from the third floor. But I had no energy because I hadn't eaten for three days so my hands slipped from the rope and I fell," Eni recalled.
The fall broke both of her legs and she had to be hospitalized. During her treatment, she discovered that she was two months pregnant.
She was accused of adultery and was sentenced to two years in prison and 200 strokes of the cane. However, she managed to present evidence that proved her innocence and only served one year in prison.
Thaufiek said that the government still viewed migrant workers as a commodity, not a resource that should be protected.
Even the process of claiming insurance was a problem, he said.
"*Workers* have to pay Rp 400,000 for insurance before being sent abroad. But most of them do not even realize that they are insured, and even if they do realize it, the process of claiming that insurance is very difficult," he said.
Six million legal and illegal Indonesian migrant workers make their living overseas.
The official government website says these workers send home Rp 6 trillion (US$6.4 billion) each year.
Indonesia has signed but not ratified the UN Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families.
