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Christine B.N. Chin
1998
4. The Malaysian-Philippine-Indonesian Maid Trade
| The preserve of the few, capitalism is unthinkable without society’s active complicity. |
| —Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, 1977 |
In an era of economic liberalization, deregulation, and privatization, the promotion of more efficient ways for the unobstructed transnational movement of capital dominates mainstream public policy and intellectual discourse. 1 So pervasive is the ideology of neoliberalism that the explanatory framework for capital flow from capital-rich to capital-poor countries is also used for labor movement from labor-abundant capital-poor countries to labor-scarce capital-rich countries:
Countries with a large endowment of labor relative to capital have a low equilibrium market wage, while countries with a limited endowment of labor relative to capital are characterized by a high market wage. . . . The resulting differential in wages causes workers from the low-wage country to move to the high-wage country. . . . The simple and compelling explanation of international migration offered by neoclassical macroeconomics has strongly shaped public thinking and has provided the intellectual basis for much immigration policy. 2
While the “osmosis” metaphor embodies the macro-level neoliberal explanation in which labor movements are likened to natural push-pull processes of equalizing transnational wage differentials, the micro-level explanation focuses on purposive action. An individual’s decision to migrate is based on rational calculations of the costs and benefits involved in migration. Put simply, it is assumed that migrants are rational actors who have unobstructed access to information regarding the migratory process, the availability of jobs, and comparative wages in relation to the cost of living overseas. 3 Consequently, the purposive actions of many, or at least two rational individuals, leads to an equilibrium price, ceteris paribus.
The macro-level explanatory framework that is based on a notion of automaticity conveniently overlooks the purposive actions of states. Why is there the need in the Philippines and Indonesia to promote overseas employment, especially as domestic workers for their female nationals? Who are the key actors involved in domestic workers’ migratory chain from the Philippines and Indonesia to Malaysia? How do they shape the women’s migratory and employment mechanisms, and with what consequences?
I begin this chapter by locating contemporary transnational labor migration within the context of global and regional economic changes. I demonstrate that the theory and practice of labor migration according to the neoliberal push-pull model obscure the constraints of global and regional economic structures and processes, which encourage the incorporation of the “export-import” of labor in export-oriented development paths. Following this is the identification and discussion of key actors—labor-sending and receiving state authorities, domestic employment agencies (DOMs), and employers—who are integral to the domestic workers’ migratory chain.
The key argument in this chapter is that the migratory and employment mechanisms of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers constitute women as objects to be exported-imported, bought-sold, and controlled in the most demeaning ways. A dominant social code of conduct has emerged to govern the actions and perceptions of key actors in the maid trade. The code is premised on the Benthamite principle of utility that allows state and nonstate actors, in the pursuit of their real and perceived greater good, to rationalize the dehumanization of foreign female domestic workers.
Today, the adoption of export-oriented development paths facilitates an acceptance of an almost natural progression in which the trade in goods eventually has come to be complemented by the trade in capital that is constituted as a commodity and, presently, a trade where low-wage migrant workers also are constituted as commodities. The contemporary free trade in goods has found its counterpart in the trade in low-wage foreign female domestic workers.
Overview of Asian Labor Migration in a Global Era of Export-Oriented Development
| The ‘international is personal’ implies that governments depend upon certain kinds of allegedly private relationships in order to conduct their foreign affairs. Governments need more than secrecy and intelligence agencies. . . . [T]hey also depend on ideas about masculinized dignity and feminized sacrifice to sustain that sense of autonomous nationhood. |
| —Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, 1989 |
The migration of peoples is not a new phenomenon in Asian history. What is new is the degree of overt state support for the transnationalization of migrant or “guest” workers. Since the 1970s, a key response of Asian states such as the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India to the processes of global and regional economic restructuring is to institutionalize the out-migration of their able-bodied or productive nationals. The following ascertains that this particular labor policy response is symptomatic of structural problems inherent in the path of export-oriented development that had been prepackaged in the 1940s, and that is now repackaged and sold to states throughout the world.
The global promotion of export-oriented economic growth was institutionalized at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference that signalled the rise of Pax Americana. 4 The “Bretton Twins” or the U.S.-led transnational organizations of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank emerged from the Conference to oversee finance and production.
Noncommunist postcolonial or developing states were born into a system in which states’ and peoples’ search for the good life in the postcolonial era was thought to be best pursued via export-oriented growth. 5 Promotion of this particular path of development could only exacerbate balance of payments deficits, since a majority of developing states emerged from colonialism with export economies, based on natural resources, that had little if any semblance of manufacturing activity.
In the 1950s, most noncommunist states in the developing world in general, and Asian states in particular, adopted Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) policies to help reduce balance of payments deficits. 6 By the 1960s, when inherent ISI contradictions (such as the saturation of domestic markets, and rising unemployment due to capital-intensive industries) could no longer be ignored, a majority of the developing states began to adopt a mixture of ISI and export-oriented industrialization (EOI) policies. 7
To be sure, the “dedomiciling” of capital in the West facilitated the implementation of EOI policies throughout the developing world. 8 Transnational Corporations (TNCs), constrained by rising labor costs in major Keynesian states in the West, and at the very same time bolstered by innovations in technology, began parceling out steps in the production process to developing countries in Asia and Latin America that offered low-wage labor within depoliticized investment environments. 9
Meanwhile, U.S. hegemony began to unravel partly because of fiscal and monetary policies that reinforced capital flight from the country. Gold reserves were close to depletion after the U.S. first financed European and East Asian postwar reconstruction, and then engaged in the protracted war against communist Southeast Asia. Rising labor costs also undercut the ability to compete effectively against exports from German and Japanese economies that were reconstructed with U.S. aid. As a result, interest rates were lowered in the late 1960s to prevent a domestic recession. Lower interest rates, paradoxically, had the effect of stimulating greater U.S. transnational corporate capital flight. In 1971, the U.S. dollar was divorced from gold in response to continuing capital flight and balance of payments deficits.
The absence of a fixed exchange rate meant greater uncertainty in trade and debt payments for the developing world. Export-oriented development since the 1960s primarily has focused on the export of commodities from developing countries endowed with natural resources. Not only were commodity prices slower to rise, but they also were more vulnerable to price fluctuations than those of manufactured goods. Most states in the developing world increasingly depended on foreign aid to facilitate long-term planning, and to sustain economic growth. 10
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) decision to raise oil prices in 1973 affected oil-importing states in the developing world in significant ways. Increases in import prices led to greater declining terms of trade and increases in balance of payments deficits. However, liberal petrodollar loans by transnational banks eager to invest financial windfalls from OPEC actions temporarily delayed economic crises throughout most of the developing world. 11
It is within this changing global economic environment that oil-importing Asian states such as the Philippines, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, began “exporting” all categories of migrant workers from doctors and engineers to construction workers. Labor out-migration was encouraged for two interrelated reasons: to meet the increasing labor demands that emanated from the Middle East without altering existing structures of governance; and to stem real and potential social disruptions (thus, declining state legitimacy) brought about by rising costs of economic development. 12 For example, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos insisted that, “The export of manpower will be allowed only as a temporary measure to ease underemployment and will be increasingly restrained as productive domestic employment opportunities are created.” 13 Approximately two decades later, the World Bank would acknowledge the potential of labor out-migration in mitigating political and economic pressures of unemployment. 14
The policy of “exporting” labor was considered a temporary and relatively costless solution to increasing foreign exchange earnings and to reducing unemployment. Another perceived advantage of labor out-migration was that migrants, conceivably, would gain new skills and work experience overseas that could be transferred back to their countries of origin. 15 In the early 1980s, the oil-exporting state of Indonesia joined the group of Asian labor-sending states because of declining commodity and oil revenues. 16
The question remains as to why the state elite in Malaysia, an oil-exporting Asian country, did not officially implement and pursue a labor export policy similar to that of Indonesia during the early 1980s. It is commonly known that Malaysians in the state of Johor commute across the causeway to work on the neighboring island of Singapore. During the Malaysian recession of 1985&-;87, skilled and semi-skilled construction workers traveled to East Asia to work for substantially higher wages in the booming construction industry. Nonetheless, the Malay/UMNO-controlled state neither openly supported nor prohibited the out-migration of workers to East Asia. Patrick Pillai offers two reasons for the absence of a labor export policy. He argues that, in relative terms, Malaysia did not experience “serious economic or unemployment problems,” and that most of the construction workers were Malaysian Chinese. 17 The latter reason implies that within the context of the NEP, in which an affirmative action development program for Malays was actively pursued, the state elite refrained from promoting the out-migration of Malaysian Chinese (as if to be rid of, or at the very least to reduce, the Malaysian Chinese population). In any event, sustained rapid economic growth in Malaysia since the late 1980s has meant that the economy’s demands for foreign migrant labor, specifically low-wage workers, appear inexhaustible.
The largest labor market from the late 1970s to mid 1980s for Asian migrant workers was the Middle East—in particular, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, and Oman. 18 Bolstered by exponential increases in oil revenues, Middle East states undertook large infrastructural projects that required all categories of migrant workers—from engineers, doctors and nurses, to construction workers. In 1975, there were 360,000 South and South-East Asian migrant workers in the Middle East. By 1983, the official number of migrants had risen to 3.6 million. 19
Asian labor-sending states’ temporary reprieve from economic crises ended when OPEC raised oil prices fourfold in 1979, while interest rates were raised again in the U.S. From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, capital began to return to the U.S., but it had the simultaneous effect of slowing down U.S. and global economic growth. Prices and the global demand for commodities declined. The ability of several Latin American and Asian states to finance their ever-increasing foreign debt reached crisis levels.
In 1982, the Mexican state’s announcement that it could no longer service the massive foreign debt initiated a series of public acknowledgments by other large debtor-states of their degree of foreign indebtedness. Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and the Philippines made similar announcements later in that year. By 1984, a consortium of private transnational banks, the U.S., the World Bank, and the IMF announced the “Mexico Deal,” which restructured the country’s debt package. 20
The Mexico Deal would hasten the expansion of neoliberalism. Since then, states in the developing world, to varying degrees, have been and are subjected to austerity or structural adjustment and stabilization programs. Among the conditions necessary to qualify for further aid/loans were and are reductions in state spending, a greater role for the private sector (especially in industrialization), currency devaluation, and the removal of trade barriers. 21
The 1980s debt crisis and consequent structural adjustment and stabilization policies made labor out-migration even more indispensable to Asian sending states. Labor out-migration and migrant remittances might and did help to cushion against potential political and economic crises hastened by unpopular structural adjustment programs that insisted on economic restructuring as the precondition for future aid/loans. This is not to say that labor out-migration policies were the only or the most important solution to sustaining state legitimacy. Rather, it is to argue that institutionalized labor out-migration has become a unique state response to inherent structural problems in the global economic system.
The “quick fix” solution found in labor out-migration policies had the opposite effect to what labor-sending states such as the Philippines had anticipated: the policies delayed, rather than hastened industrialization. A Philippine senator was quoted as having said that:
Today, the temporary labor export industry has become permanently temporary. Moreover it has grown . . . from being a stop-gap measure to being a vital life-line for the nation . . . [T]he labor export industry is really the biggest economic story for the country . . . [T]he success of the labor export industry is the best proof that our industrial policies have been a miserable failure [italics mine]. 22
In 1976, the Philippines “exported” 47,835 male and female migrant workers to countries all over the world (especially in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe). By 1989, the number of migrant workers had increased tenfold to 458,626. 23
What had begun as a temporary solution soon became permanent for many South and Southeast Asian labor-sending countries as labor out-migration was incorporated in development policies. Ministries of Labour or Manpower were given the tasks of promoting and regulating migrant workers overseas:
One of the first steps towards this structural approach was to repeal a number of Labour Ordinances or Labour Codes regulating migration and to establish specific administrative mechanisms within the Ministries of Labour or Manpower, as lead agencies for overseas employment. The Philippine Overseas employment Administration (POEA), the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE), the Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training in Bangladesh, and the Centre for Overseas Employment in Indonesia (AKAN) for instance were created to promote and develop overseas employment. 24
According to the POEA:
Considered as the crux of the overseas program, the expansion and maintenance of current international labor markets remain the dominant consideration in future plans and policies of the government [italics mine]. Backed by in-depth market research activities and joint private and government marketing missions, the systematic development of overseas markets has been intensified and pursued vigorously. 25
The statement confirms the Philippine state’s role in maintaining labor out-migration. Succinctly put, the contemporary transnationalization of labor is not a natural phenomenon. Rather, as Karl Polanyi argued vis-à-vis the emergence of capitalist markets in goods and finance, labor markets also have to be constructed and maintained. 26 As discussed later in this chapter, the real and perceived need to maintain labor markets overseas as a major way to cope with economic, social, and political pressures of implementing export-oriented development paths can and does outweigh several labor-sending states’ ability or even political will to address effectively their female nationals’ welfare overseas.
It is estimated that migrant remittances via official channels to Asian countries of origin amounted to 3 percent per annum of the GNP during the 1980s, or a total of US$10 billion per year. Table 4.1 shows that in 1983, remittances to Pakistan and Bangladesh respectively were US$2.9 billion (equivalent to 97 percent of merchandise exports) and US$642.4 million (the second largest foreign exchange item after the country’s jute export earnings). 27
Table 4.1
Workers’ Remittances to Select Asian Labor-Receiving Countries (US$ millions)
| Year | Bangladesh | India | Indonesia | Pakistan | Philippines | Sri Lanka |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1980 | 285.5 | 2743.6 | — | 2038.0 | 201.7 | 136.1 |
| 1981 | 366.8 | 2274.6 | — | 2056.5 | 251.0 | 203.4 |
| 1982 | 340.0 | 2599.9 | — | 2580.0 | 288.5 | 264.3 |
| 1983 | 642.4 | 2650.0 | 10.0 | 2926.0 | 179.0 | 274.5 |
| 1984 | 500.5 | 2279.0 | 53.0 | 2569.0 | 59.0 | 276.5 |
| 1985 | 502.1 | 2456.0 | 61.0 | 2525.0 | 111.0 | 265.5 |
| 1986 | 576.3 | 2223.0 | 71.0 | 2435.0 | 163.0 | 294.2 |
| 1987 | 747.8 | 2637.0 | 86.0 | 2170.0 | 221.0 | 312.8 |
| 1988 | 763.6 | 2295.0 | 99.0 | 1863.0 | 368.0 | 320.0 |
| 1989 | 758.0 | 2567.0 | 167.0 | 2008.0 | 360.0 | 330.7 |
| 1990 | 778.9 | — | 166.0 | 1997.0 | 262.0 | 362.5 |
| 1991 | 769.4 | — | 130.0 | 1542.0 | 329.0 | 401.3 |
| 1992 | 911.8 | — | 184.0 | — | 315.0 | 461.7 |
Source: Asian Development Bank, 1994.
Of significance is that some of the official remittance figures are contradicted by estimates of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In the case of the Philippines, one of the seven largest debtor-countries during the 1980s, there are large discrepancies between official and unofficial estimates of migrant remittances. Whereas the official total of remittances between 1986–89 was US$1.112 billion (see table 4.1), the Christian Conference of Asia-Rural Urban Mission (CCA-URM) estimated that approximately US$3.8 billion was remitted in that period. 28 In 1992, the unofficial estimate of remittances, according to Asian Migrant Forum, was US$4.3 billion: more than the country’s US$3 billion foreign debt, the US$2 billion trade deficit, or the US$1 billion fresh foreign investments. 29
Annual remittances to Indonesia pale in comparison to the Philippines and other Asian labor-sending countries. George Cremer posits that the relatively small value of Indonesian remittances is due to the lateness with which Indonesia entered the labor export market, and that most Indonesian workers were and are in low-wage occupations. 30
Researchers of transnational labor migration agree that official remittance figures generally are inaccurate because of undercounting 31 and misclassification of remittances by labor-sending states and transnational organizations such as the IMF. 32 In theory, migrant remittances benefit labor-sending states by increasing foreign exchange earnings, national savings and investment, and migrant families’ income. The remittance figures in table 4.1 are significant, at the very least, in the reduction of several labor-sending states’ balance of payments deficits. 33
In the early 1980s, remittances were considered so important to the foreign exchange earnings of Asian labor-sending states that a variety of policies were implemented to maximize the flow of remittances through formal banking channels: e.g., establishing overseas bank subsidiaries that offered special exchange rates and eliminating bank commission fees for migrant remittances. In the Philippine case, President Marcos issued the 1983 Executive Order (EO) No. 857, known as the Forced Remittance Law, that required all migrants to remit between 50 and 70 percent of their earnings through formal Philippine banking channels. State coercion took the form of threatening to confiscate migrants’ passports and denying future exit permits from the country. Two years later, the EO was repealed as a result of rising protests from migrant workers overseas. In 1983, the unofficial estimate of remittances was US$944.45 million. 34
The continuation of labor out-migration policies was questionable during the mid-1980s when Middle East states undertook steps to restructure their economies in response to declining oil revenues, the completion of infrastructural projects, and the growing political and social costs associated with maintaining a system of labor apartheid and rigid control of both citizens and foreign workers. Emphasis was placed on human resource development or higher level skills training for Middle East nationals in order to decrease dependence on foreign labor.
From the perspective of Asian labor-sending states, it was fortuitous that Middle East demands for low-wage migrant labor continued to increase even though demands for higher-wage migrant labor decreased. For instance in 1975, Kuwaitis employed 11,921 female domestic workers from Asia. By 1989, there were approximately 100,000 to 120,000 foreign female domestic workers in a population of less than two million Kuwaitis. 35
In spite of the Gulf War, the migration of Filipino workers to the Middle East continued relatively unabated. The Overseas Workers Investment Fund (OWI) was established in 1991 to facilitate migrant remittances. Filipino workers were encouraged to send remittances to OWI via commercial banking channels. Recipients in the home country could withdraw funds in the form of certificates issued by the Central Bank to be cashed at commercial banks, or kept for more than a year to earn a high interest rate between 18–20 percent. 36
Significantly, as the demand for low-wage labor increased, so too did the in-migration of foreign female domestic workers. The transition from high to low wage, or “skilled” to “unskilled” labor also meant the transition from predominantly male to predominantly female workers. The inextricable association between female servants and low-wage “unskilled” labor results from the patriarchal belief that housework performed by women is unskilled work at best, or invisible work, at worst. Nonetheless, it is assumed that women are more skilled than men in performing “unskilled” work.
The labor-sending states of Bangladesh and Pakistan banned the out-migration of female servants in 1983, in response to escalating public demands for the protection of women from abusive employers overseas. The labor gap was quickly filled, in part, by Indonesian women. At that time, the Indonesian state had just entered the labor export market and subsequently encountered difficulties in placing its nationals within an increasingly competitive low-wage migrant labor environment. In lieu of the South Asian policy shifts, the Indonesian state began rigorously to promote Indonesian women as servants.
In that year, women constituted 63 percent of all Indonesian migrant workers in the Middle East. Four years later, 81 percent of all Indonesian migrant workers were women, and it was estimated that more than 80 percent of the women were domestic servants (see table 4.2). 37
Table 4.2
Indonesian Migrant Workers
| 1983 | 1984 | 1985 | 1986 | 1987 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Women All Workers | Women All Workers | Women All Workers | Women All Workers | Women All Workers | ||||||
| Region | % | N | % | N | % | N | % | N | % | N |
| Middle East | 63 | 17,899 | 65 | 28,702 | 81 | 48,289 | 84 | 42,107 | 87 | 48,837 |
| Outside of Middle Easta |
7 | 28,960 | 19 | 37,857 | 11 | 56,687 | 4 | 46,194 | 17 | 59,362 |
Source: adapted from Cremer, “Deployment of Indonesian Migrants” p. 75
aIncluding Singapore, Malaysia, Netherlands, and others.
The data for Indonesian female workers outside of the Middle East do not accurately reflect the number of illegal Indonesian female workers in Malaysia. In the early 1980s, it was estimated that between approximately 100,000 and 300,000 Indonesian women and men worked illegally in Malaysia. 38
The low-wage foreign migrant labor demands of the Middle East were matched increasingly by Asia as Japan led a pack of Asian industrializing countries in the race to capture transnational capital and markets. The “flying wild geese” phenomenon encouraged Hong Kong, and later Singapore and Malaysia, to upgrade their economies and workforce to higher value-added and skill-intensive work. Rapid economic growth has created labor markets in these Asian countries in which “guest” workers are segregated in what the Japanese call “3D” jobs (dirty, dangerous, and difficult) in construction, agriculture, entertainment, and domestic service. 39
Specifically, the growth of the middle classes in Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong, continues to stimulate the mass out-migration of domestic workers, especially from the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. In the late 1980s, approximately 76 percent of all Asia-bound Indonesian women, and 60 percent of all Asia-bound Filipinas, migrated as servants. 40 By 1993, approximately 1.4 million women from Bangladesh, Brunei, Indonesia, People’s Republic of China, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, worked as servants throughout Asia and the Middle East. 41
Within the last few years, NGOs concerned with foreign female domestic workers’ welfare report rising transnational incidence of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse by employers. Abuse occurs within a context of noninterference by most labor-sending and labor-receiving states. 42 To be sure, the absence of national labor legislation and bilateral and multilateral agreements on foreign female domestic workers’ rights allow many forms of employer-related abuse to continue unchallenged. 43
Aside from the phenomenon of abusive employers, the migratory and employment mechanisms also contribute to the dehumanization of foreign female domestic workers. The rest of this chapter examines the mutually reinforcing processes of the dehumanization and commoditization of Filipina and Indonesian domestic servants that inhere in the policies and actions of state and nonstate actors involved in the Malaysian-Philippine-Indonesian maid trade.
Actors and Migratory Mechanisms in the Malaysian-Philippine-Indonesian Maid Trade
As previously stated, the in-migration of several hundred female servants began in the late 1970s and has increased exponentially since the mid-1980s. Table 4.3 delineates the number of work permits issued to Filipina and Indonesian servants by the Immigration Department in Malaysia.
Table 4.3
Domestic Servant Work Permits Issued by the Immigration Department
| Nationality | 1985 | 1986 | 1987 | 1988 | 1989 | 1990 | 1991 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Indonesians | 192 | 394 | 86 | 437 | 524 | 498 | 585 |
| Filipinas | 3,743 | 60 | 2,902 | 534 | 1,158 | 5,340 | 6,460 |
Source: adapted from Pillai, People on the Move, p. 51.
The Philippine and Indonesian labor attachés who were interviewed for this study respectively argued that in early 1994 there were approximately 30,000 Filipina and 40,000 Indonesian women working legally as domestic servants in Malaysia. The incredible increase in foreign domestic workers from 1991, or even from the mid 1980s, to 1994 is a controversial issue that can be resolved if and when the Immigration Department releases data by nationality and year. The Department, which is controlled by the Home Affairs Ministry, continues to be extremely secretive of the data, especially given the modern history of interethnic relations. 44
Below, I discuss the five major sets of actors—representatives from the labor-sending and labor-receiving states, DOMs, employers, and foreign female domestic workers—to ascertain how Filipina and Indonesian servants are treated, and why there is a relative absence of moral outrage.
Labor-Sending State Representatives
Since the site of fieldwork was in Kuala Lumpur, I was not able to interview policymakers in the Philippines or Indonesia. I did, however, interview labor attachés at the Philippine and Indonesian Embassies in Kuala Lumpur. 45 The attachés, both of whom were men, said that it was their responsibility to report the demands for, and the working conditions of, migrant women back to their home countries. They also argued that their respective countries’ sluggish economies coupled with the relatively higher wages offered in Malaysia, were responsible for the in-migration of their female nationals.
The labor-sending state representatives consistently used the noun “deployment,” with its militaristic connotations, in reference to the out-migration of their female nationals. Increasingly, the term is favored by many scholars and policymakers in discussions of labor out-migration policies. 46
The noun “deployment” conjures images of female migrants sent abroad by the Philippine and Indonesian states for the purposes of combating economic crises. 47 Competition between the Philippine and Indonesian representatives to promote their female nationals as domestic servants in Malaysia was evident in the interviews. Below are examples of the male interviewees’ perceptions of their womenfolk:
Our women give less problems than maids from other countries . . . you won’t get any problems if you hire our maids, unlike the problems with [—] maids.
[—] women maintain the edge in the domestic service market because they are educated, they work harder and they are better trained, which is why employers prefer them.
When I asked if male nationals could travel abroad to work as domestic servants, the answers were emphatically in the negative. Instead of identifying the particular gender and the occupational sector(s) for which the Malaysian state only would issue work permits, the labor-sending state representatives explained in a characteristically gendered manner that “men are not dexterous enough,” “men are not docile,” and “men do not know how to do housework properly.”
The promotion of female nationals as servants betrays at least one official rationale for encouraging overseas employment. Upon returning to their home countries, migrants are expected to serve as agents of change or modernization by “diffusing” new skills training that they have learnt while working abroad. If state promotion of the out-migration of female domestic labor is based on women’s “natural” ability to perform housework, then what else can women learn in terms of improving their skills? To argue that women voluntarily migrate as servants is to obscure the fact that domestic service is one of a handful of low-wage labor intensive occupations legally open for them in Malaysia. 48
Explanations and policies based on the push-pull/equilibrium perspective are inherently flawed since they are premised on the belief that free market forces will bring about equilibrium in population distribution and wages. The theory and practice of transnational labor migration according to an “osmotic”-like movement masks the role of states and DOMs in the transnationalization of migrant female domestic workers. Within the context of labor-sending states’ reliance on migrant remittances, and the emphasis in the private sector on the accumulation of profits, states and DOMs filter information in a manner that privileges the positive aspects of overseas work. I am not arguing that labor-sending states do not try to address female nationals’ complaints of abuse. Rather, the responses of the Philippine and Indonesian state representatives were shaped or constrained, for the most part, by the perceived advantages accrued from labor out-migration and, to be sure, the fact that domestic workers’ relations with Malaysian employers are beyond the jurisdictional boundaries of the Philippine and Indonesian legal systems. Given the choice between marketing female domestic workers or protecting their welfare, labor-sending states almost always privilege the former. 49
Labor-sending state representatives in Malaysia have the responsibility to investigate female nationals’ complaints of abuse. The Philippine representative tries to arbitrate relations between Malaysian DOMs and Filipina servants. Even though he is not empowered by Malaysian law to discipline abusive employers, still he insisted that he could blacklist DOMs in Kuala Lumpur and Manila by refusing to authenticate Filipinas’ travel documents. Yet, he failed to give me an approximate number of DOMs that had been blacklisted thus far. Many Filipinas with whom I spoke on this subject insisted that they did not report abusive employers and DOMs to the embassy, as they had no expectations that the embassy would help them.
The Indonesian representative informed me that he personally traveled to employers’ houses to investigate complaints. In the several cases that he cited, he insisted that although Malaysian employers were abusive, Indonesian servants also were lazy. The impression I received from the interview was that the servants’ attitudes and/or behavior incited abuse.
Discussions on ways to circumvent abuse ultimately took the form of downplaying incidences of abuse: “Only a few cases,” “Of course, there are bad employers, but it is rare,” “They can always come here [to the embassy] or report to us if they are not well treated by their employers.” Indeed in theory, foreign domestic workers can leave their employers’ houses to take a taxi or bus ride to their respective embassies with the intent of reporting abusive employers. In practice, servants who are not given any rest days and who are prohibited from using the telephone, receiving visitors, or leaving employers’ houses, are physically unable to report incidences of abuse.
There are no official statistics on employer-related abuses. NGOs involved in counseling foreign female domestic workers argue that there are anywhere between five and ten unreported cases of abuse for every documented case. 50 In 1993, the Malaysian Immigration Department released statistics on employers who were prosecuted under Section 56 (1) (d) of the Immigration Act 1959/1963. A total of 174 employers were prosecuted in 1985. By 1992, the number had risen to 978. Employers were prosecuted for various offenses such as “stealing” other employers’ servants, hiring illegal migrant servants, and neglecting to renew foreign domestic workers’ work permits. 51 There are no available statistics on the specific number of employer-related abuse cases, the nature and frequency of abuse, and/or cases that were prosecuted for abuse.
The POEA established basic requirements such as servants’ base salary and number of rest days per month. Work contracts must be signed prior to women’s departure from the Philippines. 52 Since the Malaysian state is not legally bound to recognize contracts that are signed overseas, Filipina servants generally are given lower salaries and fewer rest days. Indonesia has yet to negotiate a standardized contract similar to the POEA contract (see following section on DOMs). As of 1994, Indonesia had not negotiated a standardized contract similar to the POEA contract. Overall, the labor-sending state representatives argued that incidences of employer-related abuse were statistically insignificant in comparison to 30,000 Filipina and 40,000 Indonesian domestic workers in Malaysia.
Labor-Receiving State Representatives
Just as the Philippines and Indonesia stand to benefit in economic and noneconomic terms from the out-migration of their female nationals, Malaysia also benefits in a variety of ways. According to a Malaysian male official who insisted on anonymity as the precondition to speaking with me in 1994, the labor in-migration policy allowed only Filipina and Indonesian women (not Sri Lankans or women from other nationalities) to enter and work as domestic servants because of “economic cooperation” between Malaysia and the Philippines and Indonesia. Particularly in the last few years, there have been high-level official talks on establishing “growth triangles” such as the Singapore-Johor-Riau growth triangle in which Singapore supplies the infrastructure and skilled labor, while Johor (Malaysia) and Riau (Indonesia) respectively offer low-wage labor, in addition to land. 53
The history of interethnic relations in Malaysia is the other important but unacknowledged reason for the in-migration of servants from the Philippines and Indonesia. It is quite probable that the mass in-migration of Sri Lankan, Indian, Thai, or Chinese servants is discouraged especially since it could tilt the population distribution in favor of Malaysian Indians and Chinese.
The in-migration of male servants is strictly prohibited on the grounds that “it would create social problems.” 54 When I mentioned that there appeared to be more Indonesian than Filipina servants working legally and illegally in Malaysia, I was told by the same state official that: “We let more Indonesians in because Indonesians are more skilled at doing domestic service. So, it depends on comparative advantage. . . .” 55 If we are to believe the Malaysian representative’s statement, then a person’s ability to perform paid housework depends not only on gender but nationality as well. The irony is that the presumably higher-skilled Indonesian servants are paid RM300–330 per month, while Filipina servants earn RM500 per month.
The Malaysian state allows, if not encourages, the in-migration of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers for political and economic reasons. Foreign servants serve as boundary-markers of and for the expanding Malay and non-Malay middle classes in a development era in which the NEP, hence the Malay/UMNO-controlled state, had been criticized for failing to improve the socioeconomic welfare of Malays in particular, and Malaysians in general.
From an economic perspective, the in-migration of domestic workers ensures “low reproductory costs” since the state does not need to pay costs incurred in migrant labor subsistence prior to migration. Subsequently, foreign servants underwrite working-class Malaysian women’s participation in the formal economy. Filipina and Indonesian servants’ presence delays political pressure on the state elite to provide public child care centers or to encourage Malaysian employers’ patronage of privately owned child care centers (see chapter 6).
State-designated short-term contracts (a two-year contract with an extension of an additional and final year) deny foreign domestic workers the right to change employers without prior official approval, keep wages low, and facilitate the repatriation of migrant workers during economic downturns. 56 To offset administrative costs, annual immigration levies are imposed for all categories of foreign workers. In 1994, every foreign female domestic worker or her employer was required to pay a levy of RM360 per annum. 57
Even with these various control mechanisms in place, Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers’ activities in public space are monitored closely. Intent on reducing the population of illegal male and female migrant workers, police and immigration officials conduct raids on known illegal migrant hideouts. 58 The raids, considered as preventive measures in anticipation of future economic downturns, are intended to reduce the number of illegal migrants who could become a social, economic, and political burden. Illegal male and female migrants who are captured are sent to one of eight immigration depots to await deportation, or potential Malaysian employers. 59
Illegal migrants have been identified as perpetrators of the majority of crimes such as murder, theft, and rape that are committed by foreigners in the country. 60 Newspapers report that both legal and illegal domestic workers, in particular, have participated in “house theft rings” and prostitution. 61 During the period of my field research from January to June 1994, state authorities raided farmers’ markets, discotheques, shopping malls, churches, and mosques in search of servants who had failed to register with the Immigration Department; who moonlighted as prostitutes; and/or who operated illegal hawker stalls. 62
State surveillance of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers’ public behavior extends to the control over women’s bodies. Foreign servants are required to undergo three medical examinations: once before arrival in the country, once during the first six months of employment, and once before the end of the two-year contract prior to the renewal of a third and final year of paid housework. The medical examinations are designed to prevent pregnancy and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. 63 According to the Immigration Department, a foreign servant would be subject to deportation within twenty-four hours of the disclosure of pregnancy because it is “not only morally unacceptable but also against immigration laws.” 64
Male migrants, especially construction workers, who enjoy even greater mobility than domestic workers since they work in public space, and who engage in sexual relations with Malaysian women and/or foreign servants, are not subject to immediate deportation if and when their sex partners become pregnant. Most assuredly, the health policy for foreign female domestic workers, which protects Malaysians and migrant women against diseases, also frees Malaysian and foreign men from taking legal and moral responsibility for their acts of consensual sex with, or their sexual offenses against Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers.
Malaysian newspapers play an important role in sustaining the public’s association of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers with prostitution. Newspaper articles that report the sex-for-sale acts of some are generalized by the public to include all foreign female domestic workers. 65 For example, one Sunday, a friend of my family who was driving past a church in Kuala Lumpur saw a Malaysian friend and me conversing with a Filipina servant. He drove onto the church’s driveway, opened his car door, and asked us to get into his car immediately. 66 When we did so, he admonished us for “hanging around low class prostitutes.” According to him, certain churches and shopping malls in Kuala Lumpur were known as “get-together” sites for men in search of “foreign” sex. I asked him where and how he had gotten this kind of information. He replied, “the newspapers.”
On a different Sunday evening, while I was having dinner with several Filipina servants in a shopping mall restaurant that was filled to capacity, the restaurant manager walked up to our table and said to the women, “Are you finished yet? Don’t you see that there are people waiting in line for a table? Hurry up!” Louisa, a Filipina servant replied, “What! I don’t have any money, ah?” My attention immediately shifted up from my field notebook to the manager who had not seen me earlier. He quickly and apologetically said to me, “Oh miss, I didn’t know you were still eating with your friends. Please, take your time.” Later, as I walked past the cashier counter, he muttered to a waitress, “I don’t know what that young lady was doing with those prostitutes.”
Official efforts to reduce the number of illegal and legal foreign female domestic workers who engage in criminal activities, coupled with sensationalized newsprint reports linking the women and “sex-for sale” acts, simultaneously sexualize and dehumanize migrant women’s presence in Malaysian society. The net effect of consistent public discourse associating foreign female domestic servants with the lack of hygiene and morality, constructs and represents the women as workers who are undeserving of public sympathy, and as “social pariahs” who should be captured and placed in “depots” segregated from public space and activities. In spite of these negative representations, the Malaysian middle classes continue to demand the paid reproductive labor of Filipina and Indonesian women.
Middle Class Employers
The analysis in chapter 2 ascertained that the growth of the Malaysian middle classes since the 1970s was tied to the shift from a small to an expansive state, with greater demands for administrative and bureaucratic labor, as the expansion of the electronics and other related service industries was fueled by changes in the transnational economic structures and processes. While the NEP may have focused mostly on nurturing the Malay middle classes per se, the overall export-oriented development path has increased the number of Malay and non-Malay middle strata workers such as corporate managers, computer scientists, accountants, and other credentialed professionals.
Middle-class Malaysian demands for servants occur within the larger context of a national development path in which working- and middle-class women are given more opportunities to participate in public space. However, the practice of public patriarchy in Malaysia is evidenced from the fact that women, on the whole, continue to earn less than their male counterparts, and that women tend to predominate in occupations that emphasize and reaffirm notions of their perceived nurturing capabilities.
The practice of private patriarchy, similarly, reinforces the belief that women who work beyond the home are responsible still for housework and childcare. In the era of the transnationalization of migrant female domestic labor, many middle-class women merely have transferred this responsibility to foreign female domestic workers, and in the process middle class women become household supervisor-managers of Filipina and Indonesian servants. The gendered middle-class intersubjectivity that affirms women’s domestic role is given legitimacy by key state policies and legislation. Chapter 6 demonstrates that in addition to pending legislation in 1994 to establish creches in working-class neighborhoods, specific pieces of state policy and legislation encourage middle-class working mothers to employ foreign female domestic workers as a solution to the issue of childcare.
Of importance is that as far as the majority of the sixty-eight employers interviewed in this study were concerned, foreign female domestic workers were more than substitute homemakers. Filipina and Indonesian servants were crucial to middle-class pursuit of distinctive lifestyles: the employment of foreign female domestic workers fell into one of three major categories considered indispensable for the construction of middle-class identity and entry into the “imagined community” of the Malaysian middle classes. Foreign female domestic workers simultaneously are substitute homemakers and symbols of Malaysian families’ achievement of middle class-hood (see chapters 5 and 6).
Nearly 90 percent of the middle-class employers perceived hiring Filipina and Indonesian servants as similar to possessing or owning material items. The dehumanization of foreign female domestic workers is reflected in statements made by some middle-class employers:
I pay her a salary every month. She lives in my house, so if I tell her to do something, she should do it.
So long as she sleeps in my house, and I pay the bills, I own her.
She prays ten times a day, nothing else gets done. This is my hard-earned money, you know. I told her that unless she finishes her work, she cannot go to sleep.
Unlegislated live-in domestic service perpetuates the perception that employers should have near absolute control over their employees. And indeed, some of them do. The absence of labor legislation clearly delimiting the conditions under which domestic workers perform paid housework reinforces employers’ beliefs that they have the moral right to extract more labor from servants—especially since live-in domestic service requires employers to provide board and lodging in addition to monthly wages.
In order to recoup costs incurred in providing Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers with board and lodging, some employers even resort to conducting household food inventories and accordingly charge the servants for what they consume. Over the course of lunch in a Japanese restaurant, three middle-class friends, who employed foreign servants, engaged in a friendly banter about the perceived excesses of their servants, and how they had succeeded in curbing the servants’ tendency to eat food in their refrigerators.
| Suet Ling: | Why must we pay her a higher salary, she uses the electricity, eats our food, she sleeps in our house? It is not fair. | |
| May Lan: | Hah, you think yours is bad—ah? Mine is worse. She eats our food all the time. The other day, I came home and half the ayam goreng [fried chicken] was missing. So, I scolded her. | |
| Sandy: | Hey, I count the number of eggs in the refrigerator every night. If she wants to eat, she can pay for her own food. |
The structures and processes of state-led export-oriented development that, conceivably, have freed many middle-class women from the burden of working both within and beyond the home, simultaneously have imprisoned some women’s consciousness vis-à-vis members of the same sex who hail from a different class and nationality. At least 70 percent of 136 Filipina and Indonesian female domestic workers interviewed in this study complained of long work hours, lack of adequate food and proper sleeping accommodations, and no rest days. Employer mistreatment and abuse of foreign domestic workers is facilitated and reinforced not only by the absence of labor legislation, but also by the attitude and advice of DOM representatives.
Private Domestic Employment Agencies
DOMs are indispensable actors in the migratory chain. In neoliberal terms, DOMs are the free market institutions that, based on the free flow of information, accordingly meet employers’ demands by supplying Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers.
DOMs can either be extra-legal or legal companies. Prior to state regulation, extra-legal DOMs were travel agencies that doubled as employment agencies. 67 Filipinas entered Malaysia on social visit passes, and proceeded to work illegally. In rare cases, employers could and did petition the Immigration Department to change their foreign servants’ immigration status from that of a visitor to a worker.
The illegal route was and continues to be a more life-threatening way by which some Indonesian women contract with taikong or illegal labor brokers (who bypass all bureaucratic channels involved in the migration process) to bring them to Malaysia. 68 The illegal route or jalan bawah (underground road) entails long bus rides (generally in the middle of the night) from the interior of Java island, for example, to the coastal areas where migrants travel by boat across the ocean to the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Migrant women are sold (jual) by taikong to employers to repay their passage. 69 It may take months, or even a year or more, before the women repay the debts incurred from their passage, during which time they receive no wages.
The Philippine Ministry of Labour, the Indonesian Ministry of Manpower, the Malaysian Ministry of Human Resources, and the Immigration Department regulate DOMs as a way to curb illegal migration, and to prevent the loss of revenues to the state and legal DOMs. 70 Legal DOM fees for services provided to employers and domestic servants, are determined by the labor market. Filipina and Indonesian women respectively pay between RM1000-RM2000 and RM800-RM1500 to DOMs in the labor-sending states for processing travel and work documents. Many migrant women would borrow money or mortgage farm land and houses to pay for their passage.
In this era of the transnationalization of capital and production, DOMs are the informal banking institutions that finance transnational low-wage labor migration. Philippine and Indonesian DOMs buy the women’s debts, which they then sell the debts to their Malaysian counterparts. The latter, in turn, deduct a certain amount from the women’s salaries each month until the debts are cleared. Steep interest rates, between 3 to 10 percent per month, are added onto principal loan amounts. Some servants work for nearly six to eight months, if not more, before they actually receive their entire monthly salaries (even then, RM30 may be deducted per month to pay the immigration levy, if the Malaysian employer refuses to pay the fee).
Philippine and Indonesian DOMs prepare biographical data packages for Malaysian employers to peruse before making decisions on hiring migrant women. In one case, a DOM representative showed me a model contract that described a domestic worker’s expected household tasks: “The Agency supplies the Maid only as a domestic maid to carry out the normal housekeeping duties such as washing, cooking, cleaning, babysitting, etc., and for no other purpose.” The “etc.” is precisely that which many foreign female domestic workers are compelled to perform. Included in a biographical data package given to me was a twenty-item questionnaire prepared by the DOM and completed by a Filipina or Indonesian woman. Among the questions were: “Are you willing to work if 50 per cent of your salary is deducted to pay your debt?” and “Are you willing to wash cars?” Some of the questions anticipate the nature of unlegislated domestic service, and expand the tasks required of a household servant to include physical work such as washing cars and cleaning storm drains outside of the house. It can be said that in the 1990s, there is no longer a gender division of labor in domestic service. Many female domestic workers today have and/or will assume the work of male chauffeurs and gardeners in Malaysia.
The legal process of hiring a Filipina or Indonesian servant in Malaysia is as follows. A prospective employer approaches a DOM which, in turn, communicates with its overseas affiliate. The Philippine and/or Indonesian DOMs will forward a completed biographical data package on each domestic worker (health examination, application form, completed survey questionnaire, and photograph) to the Malaysian DOM. The prospective employer reviews all biographical data packages and then chooses a worker, after which DOMs at the sending and receiving ends initiate the processes of obtaining exit and entry permits. State regulations insist that air travel for Filipina women must be contracted with national air carriers such as Malaysia Airlines or Philippines Airlines. Women from the nearby archipelago of Indonesia are allowed to travel by ferry (privately owned companies) or by air (Malaysia Airlines or Garuda Indonesia).
DOMs are responsible for ensuring that Filipina and Indonesian women fulfill the state’s health requirement for work in Malaysian households. The following was stipulated in a contract that was given to me: “The medical examination will be held at approved clinics appointed by the Agency [i.e., DOM. The emphasis is mine].” Several domestic workers in this study admitted that they paid between RM50 and RM80 for health certifications without having to undergo any medical check-up. Some medical establishments and/or personnel profit from the in-migration of Filipina and Indonesian servants without so much as having seen the women.
Malaysian DOMs charge potential employers between RM2000 and RM2500 for a Filipina servant, and between RM2300 and RM3900 for an Indonesian servant. In 1994, a Filipina servant’s salary was fixed at RM500. POEA had previously set the salary at US$250 (or, approximately RM725) but DOM representatives argued that employers were refusing to pay the POEA-determined salary. 71 The “compromise” was RM500. Since the Indonesian state had yet to propose a base salary for Indonesian female domestic workers, DOM representatives insisted that Indonesian women’s salary of RM300–330 per month be determined by “the market.”
The relatively higher agency fees incurred in hiring an Indonesian woman were explained by representatives of several DOMs: “[B]ecause the Indonesian salary is less,” and “We are buying them to tell you frankly.” The logic is reversed in these cases: since employers pay less per month for Indonesian domestic servants, then DOMs are compelled to charge higher fees as self-compensation for the difference between Filipina and Indonesian women’s salaries. One DOM’s method of profit-making involved collusion with a potential employer. I was told the following in a telephone conversation: “Give RM2500, and also RM1400 for ‘company fees.’ So, altogether it is RM3900. You see, the RM1400 you get back from the maid. You deduct RM100 every month from the maid. Her basic salary is RM300 per month, so you just give her RM200, OK? I can give you two months extra, so she’ll work 26 months for 24-month pay [emphasis mine].”
DOM-employer interactions are shaped by the use of specific language that makes the entire process of hiring a domestic worker similar to that of purchasing a product. I spoke with representatives of several DOMs just before the Raya holiday (Hari Raya Puasa) in which there was a rise in demand for Indonesian servants. Three DOM representatives respectively told me the following:
I am out of stock this month, why don’t you go for a Filipina?
Call back in a few days, I’m working with the agency over there to replenish my supply.
Oh my god, Christine! I’m so sorry. . . . I didn’t forget you—lah. It’s just because my people over there keep promising that I’ll get a few soon. They don’t know how to do business, you know or not? If they promise to give me the supply, then they must do so—lah. If they cannot, they must let me know in advance because I have customers waiting. OK, why don’t you call my friend, maybe she’ll help you. I’m so sorry.
Lani, a Filipina servant who operated a hawker’s stall on her rest days (two Sundays a month) outside a church, said to me, “It’s common sense, don’t you know? If you open a business, the first thing is to make money. Look at me, I’m doing it also. But I’m different because I’m selling this [she points to magazines, soap, make-up, food, and so forth.]. They [DOMs] are selling us [emphasis mine].”
The business metaphor of exchanging goods for cash and profit is shaped by and shapes the way in which DOMs and employers relate to foreign domestic workers. Of interest is what happens when an employer does not like her “product.” No DOMs offer refunds. Rather, they have what amounts to an exchange policy. Most offer a three to four month “probationary period” (according to several DOMs) in the event that an employer and an employee are not compatible. Beyond that, some DOMs do not provide any alternatives, while others encourage employers to send the servants back to the DOM for counseling, or in one case, “reeducation.” I was told by a client (employer of a Filipina servant) of the particular DOM that “reeducation” meant an overnight stay at an agency house wherein the servant would be instructed to look down and away from the employer if and when the latter reprimanded her (regardless of the circumstances, the servant would always have to apologize to her employer). 72 A DOM representative could and would “slap” the migrant woman if she was sent back to the agency house for stealing her employer’s possessions, or having sex with male household members.
DOMs encourage employers to perceive and treat foreign female domestic workers in specific ways. In the aftermath of the state’s 1991 deportation threat, and heightened public discourse on the illegal/immoral sexual activities of Filipina and Indonesian servants, at least half of the twenty DOMs that I interviewed told their clients to give the domestic workers (with legal work permits) RM10–30 in lieu of a rest day away from the workplace. Representatives from three DOMs respectively advised me to treat my prospective servant in the following manner:
Why let the girl out? Once a month is OK, but she doesn’t really need a day off because she’s staying in your house. And if she gets sick, take her to the doctor.
Don’t let your girl use the phone, and don’t let her out of your house. It’ll be better for you—lah.
OK, I’ll tell you the conditions. Keep her SPLP [restricted passport for exclusive travel between Indonesia and Malaysia], don’t let her go to pasar malam [open-air night markets], and open a bank account for her and put her salary there, don’t give it to her.
At best, DOMs construct Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers as children incapable of making decisions or as untrustworthy foreigners. At worst, DOMs construct and treat the women as commodities that are sold for profit. Aside from the nouns of “maid’ and “servant,” representatives of Chinese (Cantonese-speaking) owned and operated DOMs referred to the women as “girls” and “mui tsai.” DOM representatives and many Chinese employers’ choice of the nouns “girls,” and “mui tsai” reinforces the perception that adult migrants are children who do not have any rights, and who cannot not be trusted. Indonesian women and Filipinas respectively were called “yan lay mui” and “Bun Mui.” 73
The mui-tsai system, as previously discussed, originated in China and was transplanted to Malaysia during colonial rule. Presently, Chinese-operated DOMs and Chinese employers’ references to Filipina and Indonesian women as girl-slaves resurrect a feudal institution and attendant social relations. The following chapter examines in greater detail the ways in which some employers treat foreign female domestic workers as nothing more than slaves or personal property.
It should be noted that not all DOMs perceive workers this way and treat them in a dehumanizing manner. Representatives from at least two DOMs insisted that they occasionally called their servant-clients to check if the women needed advice or help in adjusting to a foreign environment. DOMs, in any case, play a major role in the maid trade. Their existence and profit margin depend on their ability to supply Malaysian demands for foreign female domestic workers.
Foreign Female Domestic Workers
Approximately 85 percent of 136 Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in this study were young, single, and respectively came from rural areas of South and Central Luzon island in the Philippines, and the island of Java in Indonesia. Contrary to a 1988 study conducted on Filipina domestic servants, almost 90 percent of Filipina respondents (80 out of 89 Filipina women) in this study only had a secondary school education. 74 Also, unlike a more recent 1992 study on Indonesian servants, 90 percent of Indonesian respondents (42 out of 47 Indonesian women) in this study were single. 75 The discrepancies in age, marital status, and education level between respondents in my study and that of the other two studies conducted on foreign servants in Malaysia point to a growing belief among DOMs and employers that inexperienced young single women are easier to train and control than married or older women with more life experience. The advice of one employer to her friend who was agonizing over the selection of a foreign worker best captured the general sentiment of employers on the most suitable and productive servants: “Get them young, get them stupid, and train them.” 76 Prior to migration, rural Filipinas farmed land with their families, while their urban counterparts worked as office clerks, street hawkers, school teachers, and nurses. Indonesian women, most of whom only received a primary school education, either were farmers (“kerja kebun”) or were not employed (“duduk dirumah saja,” “tak buat apa-apa,”). 77 The two exceptions were an Indonesian university student who had to leave school because her father passed away; and a government worker in Jakarta who filed a sexual harassment complaint against her male superior, only to lose her job shortly afterward.
Married Filipina and Indonesian women’s reasons for migration stemmed from the need to escape socioeconomic powerlessness. 78
| Amy: | My husband has many girlfriends and he doesn’t care about the children and me any more. So I took the children to his mother’s house and asked her to take care of them while I came over here to work. | |
| ’Bu Yati: | My husband left us because he could not find a job to support his family [the bank repossessed his land when he could not service his loan]. I don’t know where he is now. My cousin told me that I could find work here so I borrowed money to pay the taikong. | |
| Renaldo: | [Husband] drank a lot of alcohol. He would always beat me. I was very tired of it. His mother used to scold me because she said that I did not take care of him properly. How can I take care of him if I have no money and he doesn’t give me any money. | |
| Yas: | He only cares about himself. He doesn’t care about his parents who are getting old. He doesn’t care about me. I have no choice. My children have to eat. |
Married respondents’ reasons for migration are revealing of the consequences of capitalist and/or patriarchal oppression. 79 In the case of ’Bu Yati, capitalist expansion dislocated and disrupted rural social relations, in part, by undermining her husband’s ability to care for his family. A consequence of the practice of patriarchal ideology helped to delimit how and why Renaldo (whose mother-in-law failed to empathize with her problems), felt that she had no other alternative but to migrate in order to escape shame, humiliation, and poverty.
Single migrant women cited two major interrelated reasons for working in Malaysia: higher pay and a more “comfortable” life. A comfortable life continues to be the picture largely conjured by DOM representatives in labor-sending states who travel to villages and urban squatter settlements with promises to the women that they will be working in wealthy households complete with “nice” employers and the latest modern amenities. As discussed shortly, some foreign female domestic workers reinforce this picture.
Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers insisted over and over again that DOMs were proficient in the art of lying to potential migrants and their families. Three Filipina servants said:
| Mathilde: | They come and tell us . . . give us so much sweet talk . . . [Y]ou can have a good life and a very nice life overseas, good pay, television, videorecorder. . . . | |
| Ruth: | They told me fantastic stories about making money. . . . They [stories] are not true. Deduct this, deduct that. . . . [A]t the end, no more money in my pocket. | |
| Angelina: | They are all the same, they cheat and they lie. They will do and say anything to make money. |
Mathilde and Angelina added that:
| Mathilde: | Agency staff holds your neck. They pick you up at the airport, take your passport, and you don’t see it anymore until you leave the country. | |
| Angelina: | I’m not afraid of my employer. I’m afraid of the agency. They hold your passport. |
Contrary to state regulation which insists that foreign female domestic workers retain possession of their legal travel documents, DOMs keep the women’s passports (for Filipina women) and Sijil Perjalanan Laksana Paspot (for Indonesian women) as insurance against women who run away from their employers (presumably to prostitute themselves, or to work for different employers). 80 Contractual relations between employers and DOMs stipulate that either the agency or the employer retains the servant’s legal travel document: “The Client is to ensure that all the maid’s documents is [sic] in safe custody and to be kept at all times by the Client.”
Malaysian employers also did not escape the domestic workers’ criticisms. Ami, an Indonesian servant, was so disillusioned with her working environment that she made a promise to herself to forbid her younger sister to work in Malaysia: “I will never do this again. I will not renew my contract. I told my cousin [who was on his way back to Indonesia] to tell my mother that my sister must not come here to work as a servant [pembantu rumah]. I will make sure that she does not come over.” 81
Unlike Ami, most foreign domestic workers are not known to convey their negative experiences (dealing with DOMs and employers) back to their friends and/or family members in Indonesia or the Philippines. Ami and Margaret (a Filipina servant) reasoned that the servants would “lose face” if they did so. Caridad Tharan, a counselor and an activist for Filipina servants’ rights, argues that:
The desire to belong to the “in” group of balikbayan or the maka-abroad is strong. It means attaining a certain status or prestige among village folks and countrymen as a whole . . . He or she is someone who after a year or two of work overseas comes back with a stereo, video recorder, gold jewellery, imported food, apparel and household goods, etc. Hence, translating this image into a reality becomes a goal among many of the maids. 82
The continuing out-migrating stream of Filipina and Indonesian female domestic workers contributes to sustaining the economic livelihood of their families and/or to conspicuous consumption. More than 90 percent of the women in this study remitted a portion of their salaries, anywhere from one-fifth to one-half of monthly earnings—whenever possible—to their families back home. 83 The most frequent avenue of remittances was that of family (especially in the case of Indonesian servants) or friends who were on their way back home. Interviewees said that remittances were used to purchase anything from construction costs for housing, to basic necessities (food and clothing) and the most modern consumer items such as cameras and compact disk players.
“Economic Soldiers, Commodities, and Prostitutes”: Contemporary Representations of Foreign Female Domestic Workers
Since the 1970s, the global move to encourage open markets and free trade for manufactured goods also has come to involve the creation and maintenance of open markets for foreign migrant labor. Analysis of the Malaysian-Philippine-Indonesian maid trade illustrates the manner in which the market for female domestic workers in Southeast Asia is constructed and maintained by states and key nonstate actors.
The Philippines and Indonesia establish agencies to oversee the out-migration of their female nationals. Labor attachés of diplomatic missions in Malaysia monitor and report Malaysian demands for domestic workers back to the home country. DOMs that are licensed by labor-sending and labor-receiving states assume the responsibility for supplying servants to Malaysian employers who, in the context of unlegislated domestic service, buy not only the services but also the persons of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers.
Analysis of the migratory and consequent employment mechanisms of foreign domestic workers explains how and why the women are dehumanized as they leave their home countries to work in Malaysia. For the different actors in the Malaysian-Philippine-Indonesian maid trade, the social construction and representation of domestic workers as economic soldiers, commodities, and/or prostitutes are effective in obfuscating, and paradoxically, morally legitimizing the demeaning ways in which the women are treated. Phrased differently, while I (and, to be sure, many Filipina and Indonesian servants) would argue that various aspects of the transnationalization of migrant female domestic workers are morally reprehensible, state and nonstate actors in the maid trade would insist that their policies and actions in fact are morally sound.
The Philippine and Indonesian attachés’ statements portray migrant women as economic soldiers deployed to battle personal and national economic problems. Men do not qualify to migrate as servants because they do not possess women’s perceived natural ability to wield brooms, mops, and dish sponges.
Labor out-migration policies demonstrate how the Ricardian concept of comparative advantage has come to intersect the gender ideology of housework as naturally women’s work in an era of open markets and free trade. Labor-sending states export what is perceived to be their comparative advantage, i.e., female domestic servants. To borrow a phrase from Ferdinand Marcos’s speech on the Philippine state’s policy of promoting overseas employment in 1983, female domestic workers indeed are the “new heroes” of the emerging new world order which is to be constituted primarily from harmonizing gendered national economies with regional and global economies. 84 In this context, it is no wonder that labor-sending states are not effective in addressing the exploitative migratory mechanisms, or the conditions in which foreign female domestic workers exchange labor for wages since their continued out-migration is premised on the greater good of the labor-sending states, economies, and societies.
In spite of reports that document abuse, labor-sending states justify the continued out-migration of female nationals on the grounds that such a policy facilitates migrant women’s ability to be gainfully employed as it relieves the political, economic, and social pressures of restructuring national economies. In sum, labor out-migration policies are expected to help peoples to pursue the good life as defined and promoted by neoliberalism. Other free market institutions, such as commercial banks that handle migrant remittances, transportation corporations, and medical institutions that provide health certificates, can only accrue economic benefits from the maid trade.
The perception, attitude, and behavior of DOMs are even more destructive in the sense that Filipina and Indonesian female domestic workers are spoken of and treated as “goods” that are sold, bought, owned, out of stock, or that need replenishing. This particular metaphor of domestic workers as commodities legitimizes and sustains the construction and treatment of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers as inanimate objects that are traded on the transnational and national markets.
The complicity of labor-sending and labor-receiving states in this process cannot be denied since state agencies are responsible for licensing and regulating (or not) the conduct of DOMs. The absence of bilateral agreements between states, combined with the labor-receiving state’s refusal to extend legislative protection to domestic workers, essentially give DOMs the carte blanche to conduct business as deemed appropriate. DOMs in this study not only justify their high brokerage fees as compensation for the time and effort expended in ensuring an uninterrupted supply of domestic workers, but also freely dispense advice to employers on how to manage foreign servants. Denying servants the right to keep their travel documents, rest days, telephone privileges, and so forth are not considered abusive behavior. Rather, DOMs and employers perceive their actions as morally acceptable since they conceivably prevent servants from interacting with criminal elements in society.
In postcolonial Malaysia, state authorities opened the immigration gates so that Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers could subsidize the labor force participation of working- and middle-class Malaysian women. This is especially important in a social context in which many male employers are known to refuse to assume their share of the responsibility for performing domestic labor, while the state elite are unprepared to encourage the middle classes to use childcare centers and/or to hire day or part-time domestic workers. Official regulation of the in-migration and employment of foreign domestic workers is part of the strategy of consent that constructs the boundaries of the Malaysian middle classes, and that persuades the middle classes to pursue a particular version of the good life characterized by the consumption of goods and services, including commodified foreign female domestic workers supplied by the transnational maid trade.
The ever-increasing numbers of Filipina and Indonesian female domestic workers have prompted state authorities to circumscribe the movement and activities of foreign servants in public space. Malaysian public discourse that constructs foreign servants as criminals, particularly as prostitutes, is legitimized by, and legitimizes the official policy of public surveillance of foreign female domestic workers. The control of Filipina and Indonesian servants is seen as necessary for the greater good of Malaysian society and foreign domestic workers.
In the following chapter on employer-domestic worker relations in the household, I ascertain further how and why the interplay between negative public discourse of foreign servants, and the uneven distribution and exercise of power inherent in unlegislated live-in domestic service, reinforce public and private notions that Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers are objects to be controlled and/or used as employer-owners so pleased. Filipina and Indonesian servants however are not passive recipients of abuse. They respond in a variety of ways that challenge employers’ perceptions and consequent treatment of foreign women as lesser humans.
Notes on the Epigraphs
(In order of appearance): Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, trans. by Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 63; Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 196.
Some Scenes from Everyday Life in Kuala Lumpur
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| Proprietor of a roadside market displays her wares. Photo by the author |
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| Filipinas buying miscellaneous goods and food from roadside business setup by compatriots. Photo by the author |
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| Filipina lights candles. Photo by the author |
Malaysian vendors in an open-air market, east of downtown Kuala Lumpur. Photo by the author |
Endnotes
Note 1: This is the view taken by publications such as The World Bank, The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy: A Summary (Washington D.C.: The World Bank, 1994); Bela Balassa, The Newly Industrializing Countries in the World Economy (New York: Pergamon Press, 1981); Helen Hughes, ed., Achieving Industrialization in East Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Michael Michaely, et al., Liberalizing Foreign Trade: Lessons of Experience from Developing Countries, vols. 1–7 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). Back.
Note 2: Donald J. Massey, et al., “Theories of International Migration: A Review and Appraisal,” Population and Development Review 19, no. 3 (1993): 431. For critiques of the push-pull perspective, see also Charles Woods, “Equilibrium and Historical-Structural Perspectives on Migration,” International Migration Review 16, no. 2 (1982): 298–319; and James H. Mittelman, “The Global Restructuring of Production and Migration,” in Global Transformation: Challenges to the State System, ed. Yoshikazu Sakamoto (New York: United Nations University Press, 1994). Back.
Note 3: Larry Sjaastad, “The Costs and Returns of Human Migration,” Journal of Political Economy 70, no. 5 (1962): 80–92; Michael P. Todaro, Internal Migration in Developing Countries: A Review of Theory, Evidence, Methodology and Research (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1976); and Paul R. Shaw, Migration Theory and Fact: A Review and Bibliography of Current Literature (Philadelphia: Regional Science Research Institute, 1975). Back.
Note 4: Although there is not absolute agreement on this issue, I accept the argument that from the nineteenth century to the 1960s, there have been successively two distinct world orders, Pax Britannica and Pax Americana, in which Great Britain and the United States institutionalized the expansion of international liberal economic systems (for critical analyses of hegemonic succession, see Robert W. Cox, Production, Power and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History [New York: Columbia University Press, 1987]; and Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981]). The decline of Pax Americana since the late 1960s, however, has left the world without an undisputed hegemon (for the argument that international regimes make possible cooperation in the era of declining American hegemony, see Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984] ). In spite of and because of this, a key feature in the contemporary emerging new world order is the expansion of neoliberalism or the belief that the best path of development is export-led growth that is constituted by and constitutes the drive for globally integrated open markets and free trade. Back.
Note 5: In theory, the good life meant that noncommunist states and peoples eventually would benefit from capitalist development. In practice, not only did former colonies continue to export raw materials to, and import manufactured goods from the West and Japan under unfavorable terms, but also state and private sector elites in former colonies were better positioned than the masses to accumulate material wealth that is generated from development. Back.
Note 6: ISI was conceptualized and proposed by Raul Prebisch who led the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). He argued that open markets and free trade served only the more developed countries since postcolonial states continued to experience declining terms of trade as a result of colonial legacies of specializing in commodity exports. The solution then was greater protectionist policies (see Celso Furtado, Development and Underdevelopment, trans. Ricardo W. de Aquiar and Eric Charles Drysdal [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964]). ISI was designed to develop manufacturing industries behind trade/tariff barriers. Lacking capital and control over technology, most developing states depended on foreign knowledge and capital. ISI may have slowed the penetration of imported manufactured goods, but the policy continued to allow the free flow of capital. Transnational corporations (TNCs) flourished behind protective barriers by producing goods for domestic consumption while repatriating profits. Back.
Note 7: Richard Higgott and Richard Robison, eds., Southeast Asia: Essays in the Political Economy of Structural Change (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); and Stephan Haggard, “The Newly Industrializing Countries in the International System: A Review Article,” World Politics 28, no. 2 (1986): 343–370. Back.
Note 8: Richard Leaver, “Reformist Capitalist Development and the New International Division of Labour,” in Southeast Asia, eds. Higgott and Robison, pp. 149–171. Back.
Note 9: Folker Fröebel, Otto Kreye, and Jürgen Heinrichs, The New International Division of Labour: Structural Unemployment in Industrialized Countries and Industrialization in Developing Countries, trans. Peter Burgess (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Back.
Note 10: For data on foreign aid and development, see the entire section of Annex C in John W. Sewell et al., Growth, Exports and Jobs in a Changing World Economy: Agenda 1988 (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1988); and Stephen Hellinger, Douglas Hellinger, & Fred M. O’ Regan, Aid for Just Development: Report on the Future of Foreign Assistance (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1988). Back.
Note 11: We also know today, that petrodollar loans “alleviated” economic problems, partly, by financing ill-conceived “white elephant” projects, and by adding to the private treasuries of state elite and supporters in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. For a concise explanation of the structural causes of, and key actors in the debt crisis, see Debt Crisis Network, From Debt to Development: Alternatives to the International Debt Crisis (Washington D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 1986), p. 25. Back.
Note 12: “The labor emigration policies of most of the Asian labor exporters are essentially the result of governmental reaction to the massive increase in labor demand in the Middle East. . . . The reasoning was that labor export would serve as a ‘safety valve,’ reducing the pressures on the domestic labor market.” C. W. Stahl and Ansanul Habib, “Emigration and Development in South and Southeast Asia,” in The Unsettled Relationship: Labor Migration and Economic Development, eds. Demetrious G. Papademitreou and Philip Martin (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1991), pp. 163–164. See also C. W. Stahl, “South-North Migration in the Asia-Pacific Region,” International Migration 28 (1991): 163–193; and Ronald Skeldon, “International Migration Within and From the East and Southeast Asian Region, Asia and Pacific Migration Journal 1, no. 1 (1992): 19–63. Back.
Note 13: Christian Conference of Asia-Rural Urban Mission [CCA-URM], Asian Labor: Migration From Poverty To Bondage, Report of the Workshop on Asian Labor Migration, Hong Kong, August 9–15, 1990, p. 10. Back.
Note 14: World Bank, World Bank Development Report 1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 93–94. Back.
Note 15: Stahl and Habib, “Emigration and Development,” p. 164. Back.
Note 16: Patrick Guinness, “Indonesian Migrants in Johor: An Itinerant Labour Force,” Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 26, no. 1 (1990): 117–131; Azizah Kassim, “The Unwelcome Guests: Indonesian Immigrants and Malaysian Public Responses,” Southeast Asian Studies 25, no. 2 (1987): 265–278; and Richard Dorall and Shanmugam R. Paramasivam, “Gender Perspectives on Indonesian Labour Migration to Peninsular Malaysia: A Case Study,” Paper presented at the Population Studies Unit’s International Colloquium, “Migration, Development and Gender in the ASEAN Region,” Coral Beach Resort, Kuantan, Pahang, October 28–31, 1992. Back.
Note 17: Patrick Pillai, People on the Move: An Overview of Recent Immigration and Emigration in Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: Institute for Strategic and International Studies, 1992), p. 25. Back.
Note 18: Reginald Appleyard, ed., The Impact of International Migration on Developing Countries (Paris: Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1989); Fred Arnold and Nasra M. Shah, eds., Asian Labor Migration: Pipeline to the Middle East (Boulder: Westview, 1986); George Cremer, “Deployment of Indonesian Migrants to the Middle East: Present Situation and Prospects,” Bulletin for Indonesian Economic Studies 24, no. 3 (1988): 73–86; Stahl, “South-North Migration”; and Shahid Javed Burki, “Migration from Pakistan to the Middle East,” in The Unsettled Relationship, eds. Papademitreou and Martin. Back.
Note 19: Cremer, “Deployment,” p. 74. Back.
Note 20: Debt Crisis Network, From Debt to Development, p. 33. Back.
Note 21: For a good and clear description of the “standard menu” in World Bank and IMF structural adjustment and stabilization policies, see Ecumenical Coalition for Economic Justice, Recolonization or Liberation: The Bonds of Structural Adjustment and Struggles for Emancipation (Toronto: Ecumenical Coalition for Economic Justice, 1990). Back.
Note 22: Philippine Senator Bobby Tanada in a speech at the International Conference on Human Rights of Migrant Workers, Manila, November 19–20, 1992, quoted in “Migrant Workers and Trade Unions,” Asian Migrant Forum no. 6 (1993): 19. Back.
Note 23: Stahl, “South-North Migration,” p. 184. Back.
Note 24: Malsiri Dias, “Mechanisms of Migration Including Support Systems With Special Reference to Female Labour,” Issues in Gender and Development no. 5 (1993): 2. Back.
Note 25: “Government Performance in the Middle East Labour Market,” Philippine Migration Review, reprinted in Newspaper Clippings and Reprints of Periodicals Asian Regional Programme on International Labour Migration (Bangkok: International Labour Organization, 1991), n.p. Back.
Note 26: Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944). Back.
Note 27: Appleyard, Impact of International Migration, p. 30. Back.
Note 28: CCA-URM, Migration From Poverty to Bondage, p. 13. Back.
Note 29: “Making the Export of Labor Really Temporary,” Asian Migrant Forum, p. 19. Back.
Note 30: Cremer, “Deployment,” p. 77. Back.
Note 31: Migrants have been known to rely more on informal (such as friends or families traveling back to their home countries) as opposed to formal channels of remittances. Back.
Note 32: “There are several measurement problems: worker remittances are often lumped together with migrant transfers and other private transfers (such as gifts and inheritances) as ‘unrequited transfers’; reporting of worker remittances by some countries is minimal or sporadic, and remittances below some cut-off point may not be reported; and commercial banks may not report remittances to the central bank so that they can use the foreign exchange from remittances without the usual government controls (Stahl and Habib n.d.).” Fred Arnold, “The Contribution of Remittances to Economic and Social Development,” in International Migration Systems: A Global Approach, eds. Mary Kritz, Lin Lean Lim, and Hania Zlotnik (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 205. See also Sharon Stanton Russell, “Remittances from International Migration: A Review in Perspective,” World Development 14, no. 6 (1986): 677–696; and Sharon Stanton Russell and Michael S. Teitelbaum, International Migration and International Trade, World Bank Discussion Papers no. 160 (Washington D.C.: World Bank, 1992).
The difficulty in accessing economic data, together with transnational organizations’ and labor sending states’ different methods of categorizing remittances, contribute to the lack of accurate statistics on migrant remittances. See Russell and Teitelbaum, International Migration for further discussion on the issue. Back.
Note 33: Scholars of migration have been debating the use of migrant remittances, i.e., for consumptive or productive purposes (Kritz et. al., International Migration Systems; and Mary Kritz, Charles B. Keely, and Silvano M. Tomasi, eds. Global Trends in Migration: Theory and Research on International Population Movements [Staten Island: Center for Migration Studies, 1981]). Empirical studies on the use of Asian migrant remittances indicate that most of the income migrant families receive are used to repay debts, purchase consumer goods, and renovate or buy homes, as opposed to investing in industrial activities. The argument that remittances have not and do not directly benefit development is based on the assumption that labor out-migration policies should be implemented directly and visibly to promote industrialization rather than represent labor-sending states’ neo-Malthusian method of coping with the pressures of under/unemployment, overpopulation, and balance of payments deficits.
On the other hand, there are scholars who call for a reconceptualization of the relationship between remittances and development (see Stanton Russell, “Remittances”; and Stanton Russell and Teitelbaum, International Migration and International Trade). It is argued that remittances that are used to pay off personal debts can indirectly promote development by providing recipients with the context eventually to invest in the formal sectors of the economy. Remittances initiate a “chain reaction” that strengthens industrialization. Additional theoretical and empirical research is required further to clarify the relation between remittances and development.
If applied to the case of foreign female domestic workers, then the debate will focus on whether or not the women’s remittances contribute to industrialization. I would argue that to frame discourse solely around the issue of remittances, at this point, is to sidestep the normative dimension and consequences of the transnationalization of migrant female domestic labor. Back.
Note 34: CCA-URM, Migration From Poverty to Bondage, p. 10. Back.
Note 35: Nasra M. Shah, Sulayman Al-Qudsi, and Makhdoom Shah, “Asian Women Workers in Kuwait,” International Migration Review 25, no. 3 (1991): 467. Back.
Note 36: “Bill for Remittances of OCWs [Overseas Contract Workers] Passed,” New Chronicle May 27, 1991, reprinted in Newspaper Clippings, Asian Regional Programme on International Labour Migration. Back.
Note 37: Cremer, “Deployment,” pp. 76–82. Back.
Note 38: Richard Dorall, “Foreign Workers in Malaysia: Issues and Implications of Recent Illegal Economic Migration From the Malay World,” in Asian and Pacific Development Centre, The Trade in Domestic Helpers: Causes, Mechanisms and Consequences (Kuala Lumpur: Asian and Pacific Development Centre, 1989), p. 300. Back.
Note 39: Pang Eng Fong, Regionalisation and Labour Flows in Pacific Asia (Paris: OECD, 1994). Back.
Note 40: Stahl, “South-North Migration,” p. 186. Back.
Note 41: Noeleen Heyzer and Vivian Wee, “Who Benefits, Who Profits? Domestic Workers in Transient Overseas Employment,” Issues in Gender and Development no. 5 (1993): 10. Back.
Note 42: Patricia Weinert, Help Wanted!; Asian and Pacific Development Centre, Trade in Domestic Helpers; Asian Migrant Forum, Special Issue: Migrant Workers and Trade Unions, no. 6 (1992): 1–37; Issues in Gender and Development, Special Issue: International Migration of Women, no. 5 (1993): 1–39; and Middle East Watch: Women’s Rights Project, Special Issue: Punishing the Victim: Rape and Mistreatment of Asian Maids in Kuwait, 4, no. 8 (1992): 1–44. Back.
Note 43: Patricia Weinert in Help Wanted! identifies the list of labor-receiving countries in Asia, Western Europe, and the Middle East that do not legislate domestic service. Back.
Note 44: See my comments on conducting field research in chapter 1. Linda Low’s study of migrant workers in Singapore also made a similar argument about the difficulty in obtaining accurate statistics (“Population Movement in the Asia Pacific Region: Singapore Perspective,” International Migration Review 29, no. 3 [1995]: 745–764). Back.
Note 45: The interview with the Philippine representative took place on January 25, 1994 at the Philippine Embassy, Kuala Lumpur; and the interview with his Indonesian counterpart occurred on February 21, 1994 at the Indonesian embassy, Kuala Lumpur. Back.
Note 46: A cursory examination of the articles on labor migration that are cited in this chapter will reveal the frequency with which the words “deployment” and “deployed” are used uncritically. Back.
Note 47: Jean Bethke Elshtain, in her study Women and War, discusses the use of metaphors and tropes that constitute and represent women in a variety of roles and images to sustain national war efforts (New York: Basic Books, 1987). Cynthia Enloe’s study offers more contemporary examples of how women assume particular roles—e.g., prostitutes for military servicemen in the Philippines, wives of diplomats, and so forth—in the service of national and international politics (Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989]). See also the following for more detailed conceptualizations of the relationship between language and politics, see James Der Darian and Michael J. Shapiro, eds., International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings in World Politics (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1989); and Michael J. Shapiro, Language and Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1984). For further details on how patterned verbal and nonverbal social interactions over time construct reality, see the classic texts by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. Manscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953); Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958; and J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).
What is significant today is how female servants are taking center stage in the restructuring of national and regional economies. To “deploy” servants in the economic “war” effort is to expect, on some level, that some migrants will be sacrificed for the sake of the country and peoples. The frequent and uncritical use of the noun “deployment” defines or shapes the boundaries/parameters that guide labor-sending states’ responses to foreign female domestic workers’ complaints of abuse. In other words, the sacrifice of some for the good of many is perceived as not too high a price to pay for state legitimacy and social stability. Back.
Note 48: In 1994, the other occupations were low-wage restaurant, plantation and construction work. Back.
Note 49: In 1995, the state in Singapore convicted and executed a Filipina servant for (allegedly—since there was insufficient evidence, according to her defense attorney and activists) murdering her employer’s child. The Philippine state did not immediately ban the out-migration of female nationals to Singapore. Instead, a flight was chartered to bring back to the Philippines any Filipina who had wanted to leave Singapore: “According to news reports, the embassy often has been accused of indifference in responding to the complaints of Filipinos who allege mistreatment” (New York Times March 18, 1995). Back.
Note 50: Personal communication with Agile and Irene Fernandez of Tenaganita on January 26, 1994; Caridad Tharan of International Council on Management of Population Programmes on January 17, 1994; Ivy Josiah of Women’s Aid Organization on January 31, 1994. Back.
Note 51: Malay Mail January 13, 1993. Back.
Note 52: For more indepth discussion of Philippine state agencies involved in the out-migration of Filipinas, see Vivian Tornea and Esther Habana, “Women in International Labour Migration: The Philippine Experience,” in The Trade in Domestic Helpers, Asian and Pacific Development Centre, pp. 63–125. Back.
Note 53: Interview on January 28, 1994, Kuala Lumpur. Back.
Note 54: The Immigration Department’s ruling on male domestic servants was made public in New Straits Times April 30, 1993. Back.
Note 55: Arguably, economic cooperation between Malaysia and Indonesia has its historical origins: prior to colonialism, Malaysia and Indonesia were part of the “Malay world.” Since the construction of the two separate geopolitical units, political and economic relations between the Malaysian and Indonesian states have been fair, with the clear exception of Indonesia’s 1960s konfrontasi policy. Back.
Note 56: Several Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers mentioned that some women have bypassed the state’s two plus one additional year work contract. They would complete their work contracts after the third and final year, travel back to the Philippines or Indonesia, and wait approximately six months to a year before applying as new applicants for work permits. Back.
Note 57: In 1993, the Immigration Department collected RM276 million in levies from all categories of migrant workers (New Straits Times February 6, 1994). Back.
Note 58: Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad admitted in 1993 that Malaysia was home to approximately one million illegal Indonesian migrants (The Sun December 12, 1993). The 1993 Operasi Nyah I (Operation Go Away I) involved patrolling the coastline of Peninsular Malaysia to deter illegal migrants who arrive by boat. In 1994, Operasi Nyah II (Operation Go Away II) targeted public places frequented by migrants. Back.
Note 59: For the Immigration Department’s guidelines on hiring migrants from depots, see Business Times April 28, 1993. In 1994, it was reported that the eight depots housed 4,886 illegal migrants (New Straits Times February 27, 1994). Back.
Note 60: New Straits Times November 25, 1993. Back.
Note 61: See for example, New Straits Times October 25, 1991, May 11, 1992, and September 7, 1993; and Malay Mail November 30, 1993. Back.
Note 62: The state explained the March 1994 raid on St. John’s Church in Kuala Lumpur in terms of the need to stop Filipina servants from selling goods without a business license, and from prostituting themselves (New Straits Times March 28, 1994). Back.
Note 63: Foreign female domestic workers’ undergo medical tests for venereal disease, Hepatitis B, tuberculosis, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, and pregnancy (New Straits Times January 3, 1991). Back.
Note 64: The Star April 16, 1994. Back.
Note 65: The Star November 20, 1992; New Straits Times September 7, 1993; Malay Mail May 11, 1992, November 30, 1993, and December 1, 1993. Back.
Note 66: He was well-prepared to engage in a shouting match with us, which would have then attracted the kind of attention that my research did not need in an environment filled with fear and suspicion. Back.
Note 67: Personal communication on January 17, 1994 with Caridad Tharan from the International Council on Management of Population Programmes, and on January 20, 1994 with Needra Weerakoon, a researcher of transnational migrant female domestic labor at the Asia and Pacific Development Centre, Kuala Lumpur. Back.
Note 68: Ernst Spaan, “Taikongs and Calos: The Role of Middlemen and Brokers in Javanese International Migration,” International Migration Review 28, no. 1 (1994): 93–113. Back.
Note 69: See the interview of Benny Jacoeb Tumbo, director of ATMI (Asosiasi Tenaga Kerja Migran Indonesia) a nonprofit organization concerned with Indonesian migrant workers’ rights in Malaysia, in a newspaper article titled “Sindiket Jual Gadis Indon” (Utusan Malaysia October 22, 1991). In my interview with Mr. Tumbo on March 29, 1994, he stated that his organization, in an attempt to undermine the taikong enterprise, offers to process illegal Indonesian female workers’ work permits and to place the domestic servants in prescreened Malaysian families for a nominal fee. Back.
Note 70: During the mid 1980s, there were only a handful of legal DOMs in Malaysia. By 1994, the Immigration Department’s list of legally registered DOMs included the names and addresses of well over 100 companies. Elsewhere in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, there were respectively 55 and 4 DOMs in 1977. By 1980, the numbers had risen to 300 and 544 DOMs. In the Philippines there were 650 DOMs in 1980. Within five years, there were 964 DOMs. There is scant publicly available or accessible information on the number of Indonesian DOMs. See Manolo Abello, “Contemporary Labour Migration: Policies and Perspectives of Sending Countries,” in International Migration Systems, eds. Kritz, Lim, and Zlotnik, p. 271. Back.
Note 71: New Straits Times August 1, 1992. Back.
Note 72: “One maid complained to her agency about the verbal abuse and ill treatment she received. ‘They told me it was my mistake and not my employer’s fault. As long as my employer has paid the fees, the agency doesn’t bother what happens to us.’ ” New Straits Times September 16, 1993. Back.
Note 73: “Yan lay” is Cantonese (Wade-Giles system) for Indonesia/n, and “bun” is the third syllable of the Cantonese word for Philippine. Back.
Note 74: More than 70 percent of Filipina servants in another study were university or college graduates. See Jojie Samuel M. C. Samuel, Pembantu-pembantu Rumah Wanita Filipina diMalaysia: Satu Kajian Kes diKawasan Kuala Lumpur dan Petaling Jaya, Ijazah Sarjana Muda Sastera, Fakulti Literatur dan Sains Sosial, Universiti Malaya, 1987/8. Back.
Note 75: In Zakiyah bte Jamaluddin’s study of Indonesian servants, most of the women were married or divorced (Pembantu Rumah Wanita Indonesia diKuala Lumpur dan Petaling Jaya, Ijazah Sarjana Muda Sastera, Fakulti Anthropologi dan Sosial, Universiti Malaya, 1991–92). Back.
Note 76: This occurred over the course of a dinner organized by a female employer. The dinner guests were three female employers, a Malaysian woman who was in the process of selecting a foreign servant, and myself. All of the employers agreed that the younger and less experienced the domestic worker, the better it would be for the employing families. Back.
Note 77: Married and single Indonesian women freely mentioned that they “sat at home and did nothing.” However, when I asked them to describe a typical day in the house, most of the women talked about performing household chores. Migrant women who looked for work beyond their homes but who did not succeed in doing so (prior to migration), also did not consider household labor as “work.” The Indonesian women’s perception of housework as “nonwork” reflects the pervasiveness of patriarchal-capitalist definitions of what should legitimately constitute work. Back.
Note 78: For more description, see Caridad Tharan, “Filipina Maids,” in The Trade in Domestic Helpers, Asian and Pacific Development Centre, p. 277. Back.
Note 79: Mirjana Morokvasic argues that what are generally perceived as personal reasons in fact are structurally determined (“Women in Migration: Beyond A Reductionist Outlook,” in One Way Ticket: Migration and Female Labour, ed. Annie Phizacklea [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983]; and “Birds of Passage are also Women . . . ,” International Migration Review 18, no. 4 [1984]: 886–907). Back.
Note 80: The Star January 25, 1994. Sijil Perjalanan Laksana Paspot (SPLP) is issued by the Indonesian state to its nationals for exclusive travel between Malaysia and Indonesia. Back.
Note 81: Her bedroom used to be the employer’s storage room, thus there was no proper ventilation. And, she was not allowed to eat food from the refrigerator unless her employer gave her permission. Many times, her employer would leave the house for hours without ensuring that Ami, who was prohibited from leaving the house, had enough food to eat. Back.
Note 82: Tharan, “Filipina Maids,” p. 276. My experience supports Caridad Tharan’s observations. Field interviews in this study were greatly facilitated by the presence of hundreds of servants at shopping malls on Sundays in Kuala Lumpur. Interviews were conducted while the women tried on new clothes, ate in mall restaurants, selected cameras, and so forth. Back.
Note 83: According to the CCA-URM report, nearly 6 percent of Philippine households rely on remittances as the main source of income. Elsewhere, Sri Lankan maids remit as much as 92 percent of their earnings (see J. W. Huguet, “International Labour Migration from the ESCAP Region,” in Impact of International Migration, ed. Appleyard, p. 100). Back.
Note 84: CCA-URM, “From Poverty To Bondage,” p. 13. Back.
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