I

n the old days, kings and queens employed jesters to bring them down to earth. Court jesters acted as gadflies whose task was not confined to providing amusement, but also to supply satire that often bit to the bones of their masters. But such jesters may not be needed by the President of Indonesia: not because there is no need for him to be in touch with reality, but because jesters have many forms and faces. After a presuming speech at the International Labor Conference on the protection of migrant workers, the beheading of an Indonesian migrant worker called Ruyati binti Satubi by the Saudi government served as unerringly as a prophetic jest.

This is hard to swallow for a government that aspires to be called successful by carefully staging games of appearance. Even harder is the way of ensuring how, when history repeats itself, it is not another tragedy of this sort. No doubt the current talk of a moratorium on sending migrant workers to Saudi Arabia is lofty on paper, but it is bound to be overrun by another flurry of emergencies. The problem of migrant workers in the Middle East is a complicated one, and the choice is not between completely halting and business as usual. Rather, it is about the cognizance that the labor market for migrant workers is the most vulnerable market of any kind.

The term “labor market” is ludicrous even in an economic sense. Human labor is the last bastion in the arsenal of humanity that has been shattered by capitalism. The “smashing” took the form of turning human toils into a commodity on the same level as other commodities. For those who study economics only as the market system — and not as a science of human livelihood, of which the market is only a tool — there is nothing bizarre about this preposterous nature of labor markets. However, a moment’s reflection is enough to realize that in all respects human labor is not a commodity. It is made into a commodity only by academic atrocities.

Alas, we can only start from what history has inscribed. Precisely because human labor is a bogus commodity, a labor market is usually the most regulated market, i.e., social regulations and protection are applied heavily to minimize its dehumanizing effects. This is particularly true with migrant workers whose plight is entangled with the legal systems of the countries of destination.

If the countries of destination are ones with good social regulations in their labor market, migrant workers will have the fortune of thriving well. But in many cases the countries of destination are ruled by despotic systems, in which a contract between an employer and an employee is but another name for a master-slave relationship. A slave is one whose misery of being exploited is considered more palatable compared to the misery of not being exploited at all. Of course this is not a language of the normative.

But why is being exploited more bearable than not being exploited? The answer lies not in the country of destination but in that of origin. This is a dilemma of a government caught in quandary. On the one hand, to not allow migrant workers to seek livelihoods in despotic countries is to invite hard-pressed demands for providing employment at home. On the other, allowing them to work in despotic countries is like the government is inflicting itself with political impotence. In short, government is captive to the unscrupulous logic of both the labor markets and national sovereignty in international relations.

This is what is now giving a headache to the ministries of Manpower and Foreign Affairs. It is rather pointless to rehearse the solutions, for these two ministries and the Law and Human Rights Ministry should know what to do on the ground. The most that can be said is that the lower the workers are situated on the employment ladder, the more urgently they need affirmative action from the government.

This of course is stating a self-evident normative. The bad news is that power has an inherent bias against those inhabiting the lower strata of a political game. Thus we get this unpleasant truth beyond a shadow of doubt: Those who most gravely need affirmative action from government are precisely those most prone to being ignored.

Change in this unprincipled exercise of power is the last thing we can expect. A solution in the form of high-level diplomacy can be expected only if office holders of these ministries are not caught in a similar web of useless public relations. The duty of a political authority is to know that diplomatic trivia is no substitute for a real redress of the physically brutal nature of a tragedy like that which befell Ruyati.

Indeed, the real power of a state office rests in the skill by which its holder can use their authority to get the right things done. Otherwise, political power simply means the pleasure an office holder may get from a purely personal exercise of will, which basically is an act of being a political parasite in the land of the crestfallen.

The writer is a lecturer in the postgraduate program at Driyarkara School of Philosophy, Jakarta.