Stories of child domestic workers hunting for ‘small change’

Finding a child domestic worker under 17 years old is not difficult. Some agents, who are supported by brokers, still provide under-age workers to meet the requests of future employers. These agents are hunting for future child domestic workers until rural areas.

Based on the investigation by CNN Indonesia, official agents still provide under-age children to be domestic workers, depending on the request from future employers. This happens among several agents in Yogyakarta.

One of the agents, B.K/B.S, is located in the southern part of Yogyakarta. At first, a staff at B.K/B.S will say that they do not employ domestic workers under 18 years old. But there are some candidates of employers who need domestic workers with cheaper salaries and trainable.

The staff will be immediately awake. He will offer domestic workers aging 16 years old from Magelang, Central Java, with salary of Rp1.2 million plus administrative fee of Rp1.5 million. By the cost, future employers will be guaranteed to exchange domestic workers for three times and working agreement of one year at minimum.

The guarantee makes some future employers seek domestic worker service through agents. If they do not have chemistry with their domestic workers or the domestic workers do not feel comfortable with their employers and ask to quit, the employers can get replacement without spending more.

“Besides getting replacement, it is also safe to hire from agents. When something happens, it can be traced to the agents,” Nita Indriaswara, who hires her domestic worker through an official agent, said.

However, there are also other future employers who seek for child domestic workers through independent agents, who wander around villages to recruit workers. Endang, for example, who always uses the service of domestic worker, said that she usually asks helps from people in her hometown to find a domestic worker.

“I trust more domestic workers who comes from my hometown and the communication with them will be good. And they will be cheaper than those from the agents,” Endang said. “I don’t need to pay millions of rupiah of administrative fee and a one-year working contract.”

Such independent agents are known as sponsors because they are obliged to pay the transportation fee of the domestic workers to their employers’ houses. The sponsors are usually local villagers who once worked in urban areas, also as domestic workers.

Because they were frequently asked to find domestic workers when they returned to their hometown, they see it as a chance to do a business. A number of independent sponsors can be found in the districts of Mirit and Ambal, Kebumen Regency, Central Java.

Sudarmi (35), one of the sponsors from the village of Blengor Wetan, Ambal, Kebumen, has provided a service for five years to offer young domestic workers to employers in big cities, such as Yogyakarta or Jakarta.

Darmi – the way Sudarmi is called – has never found any difficulties to get child domestic workers in her hometown because there are many poor children who dropped out from school. Dropping out from elementary or junior high school that become the signs of the low level of education background makes them have no other choice, except working at the informal sector.

“I usually seek (children) who apparently do nothing. They don’t go to school, but they don’t work either,” Darmi said at her residence.

It is easy for Darmi to find the whereabouts of children who do not go to school because each villager know each other.

“I visit their houses and ask them, ‘You want to work or not?’ If the children say yes and their parents allow them to work, I’ll bring them with me,” Darmi said.

Darmi ‘targets’ domestic workers with the minimum educational background of junior high school. “I don’t want to take the more younger ones. I’m afraid they won’t feel at home,” Darmi said.

Because of being busy now in taking care of her children, Darmi does not have a lot of time to find child domestic workers any longer. Last year, she only brought five girls, aging between 15 and 16 years old, to Jakarta.

Another story came from Ningsih (35) who lives in the village of Kejayan, Ambal District, Kebumen. Last year, once she went to Jakarta, she could bring 14 children to work, not only at houses, but also at karaoke bars.

Ningsih usually left for Jakarta along with her husband who is a truck driver transporting sand. They rent a car at a certain price to carry the domestic workers.

The fee from employers for the independent sponsors are very tempting. Darmi, for example, gets commission between Rp1 million and Rp1.5 million per child after being deducted with return transportation cost from Kebumen to Jakarta. It means she can earn between Rp700,000 and Rp1.2 million for every worker she brings to Jakarta.

“Their (domestic workers’) salaries are not deducted. I get the commission from the employers,” Ningsih said.

The commission is a lot enough, even higher than expected, although he must pay the transportation cost to bring the domestic workers to Jakarta by himself.

Some independent sponsors also supply the need for domestic workers to agents in the cities. The transportation cost they have to pay is adjusted to the villages of origin of the domestic workers. For example, for domestic workers from East Nusa Tenggara, each sponsor can get commission up to Rp5 million per person from the agent because of expensive transportation cost.

For the sponsors, it is not difficult to bring children to work in the urban domestic sector. There is no tight control from the government, such as working conditions for migrant workers sent overseas.

“To work overseas, there must be identification card (KTP) and now, age cannot be falsified any longer,” said Siti, a woman who changed her job from being an agent for Indonesian overseas workers to be a domestic worker agent.

Sponsors like Siti, Darmi and Ningsih, who seek profit in the business of domestic worker recruitment, will still travel around as long as the cycle of poverty still twists around villagers.

This article is the first in-depth article on child domestic workers a series of four in-depth articles by Abraham Utama and Utami Diah Kusumawati of CNN Indonesia and published on 19 September 2015. The article is part of the ILO’s media fellowship programme on domestic workers and child domestic labour, jointly conducted in collaboration with the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) Jakarta and eight selected leading, national mass media. The media fellowship programme was part of the campaign conducted by the ILO through its Promoting Decent Work for Domestic Workers to End Child Domestic Work (PROMOTE) Project. Funded by the United States Department of Labour (USDOL), PROMOTE Project aims at reducing child domestic workers significantly by building institutional capacities of partners to promote Decent Work for Domestic Workers (DWDW) effectively. The Project works to increase the knowledge, skills and expertise on reducing child domestic workers and promote DWDW.