0 ‘Working Couples Overseas Need Support’: BNP2TKI

The head of Indonesia’s Migrant Worker Placement and Protection Agency pledged his support to schemes that place couples working overseas under the same employer. “I throw my support behind the thinking or the conclusion in the form of recommendations, made in relation to the placement of married migrant workers as a couple,” Jumhur Hidayat, the head of the agency known as BNP2TKI, said on Thursday. Jumhur was speaking after attending the doctoral promotion of Kustini, an official at the Ministry of Religious Affairs, at the University of Indonesia in Depok, West Java, on Thursday. 

Kustini, the head of research and development of religious services at the ministry, presented a doctoral dissertation entitled “Strategy of Child-Rearing in the Family of Female Migrants From Sukabumi.” Kustini researched 13 families in Sukawangi village in Sukabumi’s Cibatu subdistrict in West Java, in which the housewives worked as migrant workers in Mecca and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. She found that parents working overseas who were raising children required a joint strategy and support from their extended families, as often the children stay in Indonesia. 

The pattern in Sukawangi is for the fathers and mothers to work abroad while their children are left with relatives, Kustini said. Women workers who went overseas without their husbands usually left them in charge of caring for the children. In her dissertation, Kustini recommended that women wanting to work overseas should be unmarried or childless, while those with husbands should seek employment as a couple under a single employer overseas. This arrangement would also allow the children to join their parents, or at least would facilitate communication between the parents to deal with problems related to the care of their families, Kustini said. 

“These two recommendations I have submitted to the government, in this case, the Manpower and Transmigration Ministry and the BNP2TKI,” Kustini said. She also added that the recommendations should become law so that the placement of migrant workers abroad would be more dignified and improve the quality of the workers’ lives and families. BNP2TKI’s Jumhur said that the recommendations made by Kustini aligned with the aspirations of workers and therefore the government should try its best to accommodate that wish. 

He said that the government has no right to prohibit its citizens from working overseas, including parents, especially when the state could not guarantee adequate employment at home. “Working is the right of every citizen and this is protected by law,” he said. He added that the placement of couples under single employers was already quite common in several countries in the Middle East. He said that usually the pairs were recruited in combinations of domestic workers, such as maids, drivers, cooks, gardeners and guards, with the husband and wife each filling one role.

source : the jakarta globe