While the high-level officials are busy pointing fingers, 27-year-old Erna, not her real name, has been receiving a 550 ringgit (US$141) salary per month in Kuala Lumpur since she left her hometown in Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara, five years ago.

That is a far cry from the expectations raised by the agent who brought her to Malaysia, who convinced her family she would be paid up to 1,500 ringgit, which was more than three times the minimum wage in her hometown.

Erna had stayed in one of the shelters in Kuala Lumpur run by Tenaganita, a Malaysian NGO that gives assistance to migrants who have experienced forced labor and trafficking. She was waiting to get her unpaid salary back and completing the documents before she could go back to Indonesia.

In the beginning, with not enough training to begin with, she signed a contract with her first employers who were willing to pay her only 500 ringgit per month. “But they did not pay the first three months because they took it as compensation for the fee they paid to the agent,” she said.

Meanwhile, 21-year-old Mirna from Central Java said she thought the agent who promised her jobs that paid more than 1,000 ringgit per month was legal.

However, she realized she was wrong as she was not given training or informed about any documentation before she entered Malaysia on a visiting visa. She only worked in Penang for two days for her before she had to sign a two-year contract that only paid 850 ringgit per month.

Just like Erna, Mirna said she was not paid in the first few months, even though she worked 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. doing household chores with no days off.

Indonesia and Malaysia are in a tug of war over domestic workers, with the Indonesian Manpower Ministry, the leading institution responsible for their well-being, reluctant to actively push efforts to increase their protection of the workers.

The two countries have yet to discuss the renewal of a 2011 bilateral agreement concerning the placement and protection of domestic workers that expired in May 2016. Indonesia has claimed Malaysia caused the delay by not responding to two separate official letters requesting talks.

Only in early March did the death of Indonesian migrant worker Adelina Sau in Penang last February lead to the Indonesian Manpower Ministry and the Malaysian Ministry of Human Resources agreeing to jump-start the negotiations with a meeting in Kuala Lumpur on April 23.

Adelina’s death, allegedly caused by the neglect and abuse of her employers, briefly sparked a debate in Indonesia revisiting the idea of a moratorium on sending domestic workers to Malaysia.

Indonesian Ambassador to Malaysia Rusdi Kirana argued the countries had to restructure the employment administration process to mend their diplomatic relations, strained by repeated abuse cases.

Indonesia had previously imposed a ban on sending maids to Malaysia between 2009 until 2011, which was ended with an agreement ensuring all salaries were paid using bank transfers and that the maids had access to means of communication.

However, this time the Manpower Ministry was reluctant to re-issue the ban. “We should conduct further study on it,” said Manpower Minister Hanif Dhakiri.

Responding to Hanif’s reluctance, Rusdi, a deputy chairman in National Awakening Party of which Hanif is an active member, said even a short six-month ban would be enough to improve the process.

Talking shop: Malaysia’s director general of immigration, Haji Mustafar (left), speaks with Indonesian Ambassador to Malaysia Rusdi Kirana (center) and Indonesia’s immigration chief, Ronnie Sompie, in Kuala Lumpur on March 21. The Malaysian immigration office has vowed to speed up the process of deporting 4,000 Indonesian illegal migrant workers before Ramadhan this year.(JP/Fadli)

“We could apply a direct hiring mechanism in which an employer could just go to the labor export companies in Indonesia,” he said. “Therefore, our workers would not have to have their salaries in their first few months taken away because their employers have to be reimbursed the amount they paid to the worker’s agent.”

Malaysia does not stipulate a minimum wage for domestic workers, a notable exception to Malaysia’s 2013 minimum wage order.

The Manpower Ministry’s director for the protection and placement of Indonesian migrant workers abroad, Soes Hindharno, said that before the agreement expired the two countries had established a joint task force team that had met 11 times to discuss minimum wages, the number of days off, overtime, communication access and other worker rights. The last meeting was in 2014.

“From the record of the discussion, it was agreed the wage should be 1,200 ringgit and paid through banks, the workers would get to hold on to their documents and get one day off a week and have communication access to family or the embassy,” he said.

The record of the discussion, albeit not legally binding, was an improvement over the 2011 agreement, which only mentioned that salaries should be set “according to market mechanism”.

“The new agreement has to be a different and new compared to the previous ones because Indonesia’s legal basis has just recently changed from the 2004 migrant worker law to the recently passed 2017 protection of migrant worker law,” said the Foreign Ministry’s Indonesian citizen protection director, Lalu Muhammad Iqbal.

Malaysian Ambassador to Indonesia Zahrain Mohamed Hashim said renewing the agreement alone was not good enough. He said clear guidelines had to be based on standard operating procedures.

“We must not only look at the worker’s side. We must also defend and protect the employer. There are cases in which employers get cheated,” he said, adding that sometimes employees left before completing their contracts even when the employers, mostly homemakers, have had to pay 15,000 ringgit for ‘administration fees’.

In addition, he said, the Malaysian government also had to cover healthcare costs if foreign workers get sick and are unable to pay.

He said the foreign workers, mostly Indonesian, went to general hospitals and cost the Malaysian government millions of ringgit every year.

In 2015, in a bid to control the widespread illegal trafficking of migrant workers, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak agreed to create a “one-channel” policy.

Zahrain said the one-channel policy should not be in a business-to-business scheme, but government to government because if it continued to be done by the private sector, “people would become unscrupulous when the bottom line is not the welfare of the worker or the employer, but about making money. That’s why when they can’t register, they come illegally”.