Govt slow in handling workers’ deaths

A high demand of Indonesian migrant workers abroad, coupled with a “dubious mechanism” to protect them, has triggered a large number of illegal (undocumented) workers.

“But what we need to emphasize is not the legality of a migrant worker but how quick the government responds to an event that takes a toll on a migrant worker by making sure that the family of the deceased is informed and the body is sent home, for example.,” Migrant Care executive director Anis Hidayah
said Monday.

She said many Indonesian migrant workers chose to work illegally by overstaying a visa or entering a country from the very beginning without official documents because, among others, they still did not entirely believe in the government’s mechanism to guarantee, for example, their safety and the payment of their salaries.

The latest case of an Indonesian migrant worker’s death came to the public’s attention last Thursday when six Indonesian construction workers died and one was injured in an accident at a highway construction site in Taiwan’s Nan Tou county.

They were killed when workers were grouting concrete in the final step to join the new structure to the freeway. Supporting scaffolds 55 meters above ground collapsed, sending 1,000 tons of steel and concrete down and burying workers about 10 stories underneath, The China Post reported last Friday.

Anis said there were some 35,000 Indonesian migrant workers in Taiwan, including those undocumented. It is roughly estimated that half of the 6.5 million Indonesian migrant workers worldwide are undocumented. “There was a construction accident. Unfortunately, six Indonesian workers died and one was injured,” Taipei Economic and Trade Office in Indonesia (TETO) representative Andrew Hsia said Monday in an interview. “We found out that they all overstayed there, so in that sense they’re illegal workers.

“It may be the bureaucracy at the KDEI that holds them back from extending their visas,” she said, implying a possible reason for the six Indonesian construction workers to overstay their visas.

“We cannot make sure that the KDEI is helpful to our fellow migrant workers to make such a process easily accessible.”

He said four of the six had been identified, while the other two’s identities remained unknown as of Monday.

According to TETO, the four are Suprapto, 31, arriving in Taiwan on April 4, 2008; Sirmanto, 20, arriving in Taiwan on March 5, 2010; Sutarji, 29, arriving in Taiwan on April 12, 2007; and Sunaryo, 24, arriving in Taiwan on Feb. 2, 2009.

Despite their illegal status, Hsia said the Taiwanese government and local NGOs would pay the victims’ compensation.

In the meantime, he said the Taiwanese government was still trying to locate the victims’ families and would provide facilities if any of them were willing to go to Taiwan and take the deceased bodies home.

“We’ll inform their families. It will take a while because most of them are not from [Greater Jakarta],” he said.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Teuku Faizasyah said Monday the government had yet to make any follow-up moves in regards to the case, pending on an official, written report from the Indonesian Economic and Trade Office in Taipei.

“The only information we’ve got so far is that there are six Indonesian [construction] workers who died in Taiwan, and four of them have been identified. That’s all,” he said.

Anis criticized the government for taking such a long time to make any movements on this case, or any other cases.