The Politics of Bondage in the Recruitment, Training and Placement of Indonesian Migrant Domestic Workers

Abstract

Summary Indonesia is one of the major labour sending countries in contemporary Asia. While Indonesians, and especially the Javanese, have a long tradition of mobility, what has been called the “institutionalisation” of labour exporting started in the 1870's, under Dutch colonial rule. At that time, migrant workers originating from Java were mostly male “coolies” sent to work as indentured labourers on mines and plantations on the Indonesian Outer Islands. Nowadays, women represent the overwhelming majority of migrant workers departing from Indonesia, and most of them are sent abroad as domestic workers. Interestingly, even though indentured labour has officially been abolished in Indonesia in 1932, the contemporary system of contract labour migration is in many ways very similar to nineteenth and twentieth century indentured labour. By looking in particular at the practices of state and non-state actors involved in the “export” of Indonesian maids to Malaysia, this paper seeks to analyse the processes tha...