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s an effort to provide more protection for Indonesians working abroad, lawmakers are deliberating a bill that will require several of the country’s representative offices overseas to establish special desks to deal with migrant workers’ issues.

The desks will be in charge of handling all issues related to the protection and welfare of the workers, including monitoring, so that workers will know where to go if they get in trouble or want to file a complaint.

Irma Suryani Chaniago, a legislator overseeing labor affairs, said the government’s representative offices overseas that must setup the special desks were Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea and Japan, home to many Indonesian migrant workers.

The special desks would directly coordinate with the Agency for the Placement and Protection of Indonesian Migrant Workers (the BNP2TKI) for the speedy handling of problems involving migrant workers, said Irma, who is a member of the House working committee dealing with the bill’s deliberation.

All this time, she added, the Indonesian embassies were slow to monitor and protect the workers, particularly those working in the informal sector, when in fact they should play a more important role than the BNP2TKI or even the Manpower Ministry in keeping an eye on workers.

The obligation to set up the special desks is stipulated in the migrant protection bill which is being deliberated at the House. The bill will replace Law No. 39/2004 on the placement and protection of migrant Indonesian workers abroad.

The bill is now 60 percent complete and the House aims to finish the deliberation and pass it into law by the end of July.

Furthermore, Irma revealed that the bill would also clarify the respective duties of the BNP2TKI and the Manpower Ministry, whose responsibilities in dealing with Indonesian migrant workers frequently overlap.

“We actually want the BNP2TKI to be a one-stop agency which will handle all operational necessities related to migrant workers, while the ministry only needs to be the regulator,” Irma said. “But we and the government still have different positions on that.”

According to Irma, the ministry should not act as both operator and regulator, as this could lead to confusion and conflicts of interest should problems arise for the migrant workers.

However, the Manpower Ministry would prefer to strengthen the protection of Indonesian migrant workers by not sending unskilled workers to the informal sector but to train them as cooks or child-minders so they have proper positions, working times and salaries.

“We want to increase their competitive standards. No more maids. And we will provide clear information about the vacancies abroad. This is what we need to discuss in the deliberation of the bill,” the ministry’s director general for workers’ training and planning Hery Sudarmanto said.

Meanwhile, workers’ rights NGO Migrant Care policy analyst Wahyu Susilo argued that the bill still left the door open for the dominance of private recruitment agencies who have a poor record in protecting the rights of migrant workers.

Frequently workers are exploited and obliged to pay money to the agencies.

Wahyu also said that there was insufficient protection included in the bill as it did not accommodate all the protection principles stipulated in the 1990 UN convention on the protection of migrant workers and their families.