Some nine million Indonesians work abroad, providing labour for plantations, construction sites, logging operations, factories and, most of all, for households as domestic servants. The majority of these overseas workers are in Malaysia (55 per cent), Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, but another large group is in Saudi Arabia. By and large, these women and men are reluctant migrants, driven by poverty at home to seek better livelihoods outside Indonesia. Overwhelmingly, they succeed, becoming a source of higher incomes for themselves and for their families at home. Their yearly remittances of nearly US$9 billion (2016) help children stay in school, stimulate local businesses, and foster myriad material improvements throughout the country (World Bank, Indonesia's global workers: Juggling opportunities and risks, 2017).
Enabling these hopeful pilgrims is the business of hundreds of private companies that identify recruits in Indonesia's poorer communities and shepherd them through the gauntlet of logistics and red-tape that lead to jobs abroad. These recruiting companies charge fees for their services (e.g., identifying employers, executing paperwork, providing transit boarding houses), and often advance the costs to clients in return for payments docked from their wages overseas. The companies also make money through lucrative arrangements with travel providers, insurance companies, and other contractors. All of this is very profitable. Exercising control over these companies, and the migrants themselves, has long concerned the Indonesian state. Indonesia's Overseas Labour Migration Programme, 1969–2010 by Wayne Palmer, describes and analyses the country's attempts to do so from the New Order forward. Palmer's goal is to reveal the ‘complexities associated with implementing national government programs through a diverse network of officials, agencies and tiers of government in a large geographically dispersed country’ (p. 171). In his study, ‘the lot of Indonesian migrant workers’ lies outside the scope of study (p. 166). Instead, Palmer focuses on how, in matters of labour migration, Indonesian officials act both to line their own pockets and also to achieve the aims of their agencies.
Beginning in the New Order, government management of overseas labour migration fell to the Ministry of Manpower. The ministry's operations were highly centralised and subject to the discipline of the regime's military-led patron–client hierarchy; for many years the ministry was led by senior admirals. This meant that the regulation of overseas labour — including licensing and harvesting bribes from the recruiting companies — occurred within a fairly tight pyramid. All this changed in the era of reformasi. Democratisation made labour-migration policy a matter of public debate and party politics. Decentralisation diluted the authority of Jakarta's central ministries and devolved aspects of policy implementation to regional governments and local elites. This complicated things immensely. Moreover, in 2004, reform efforts initiated by President Megawati Sukarnoputri led to a new law that criminalised egregious recruiting practices and to the establishment, in 2007, of an independent agency to execute labour migration policies. This was the Badan Nasional Penempatan dan Perlindungan Tenaga Kerja Indonesia (BNP2TKI, Agency for the Placement and Protection of Overseas Indonesian Workers). Under the new arrangement, the Ministry of Manpower retained regulatory functions (including the authority to licence and discipline recruiting companies) while operational activities were delegated to the new agency. In practice these responsibilities overlapped in many areas.
Other entities were involved as well, including the National Police, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its consular officials. The result was a sea of contention in which officials engaged in turf wars and bureaucratic skirmishes that pitted agents from Jakarta against local power-holders, and BNP2TKI officials against their counterparts in the Ministry of Manpower. The protagonists fought over who had the authority to issue worker IDs, to vet and discipline recruiting companies, to organise pre-departure training, to verify travel documents, to execute contract renewals, and to process worker complaints. Much was at stake in these rivalries, including access to the largesse of recruiting companies (a large financial incentive, albeit illegal) as well as promotion for high-performing officials. But Palmer also observes that many officials also strove earnestly to achieve their agency's policies and goals. These included the efficient management of migrant paperwork such as visas, ID cards, and contracts; curtailing the abuses of recruiting companies and overseas employers, including trafficking in underage girls; and helping deported undocumented migrants return to work overseas with proper papers or to go home.
Through a series of case studies in Jakarta, Semarang, Surabaya, Medan, Tanjung Pinang, Nunukan, and abroad in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia, Palmer shows how the centre vs periphery and ministry vs agency rivalries played out somewhat differently in each setting.
One common factor, however, was bending the rules. He argues that what makes such a conflict-ridden system work is discretion, the authority each official assumes to get his/her job done even if this means short-circuiting standard procedures, violating inter-government protocols of cooperation, and tolerating anomalies. Some common examples would be turning a blind eye to passports and other documents with false dates and names — called aspal, meaning authentic documents (asli) with false information (palsu), a common practice, evidently — and permitting labour recruiting companies illegally to confiscate workers’ passports as security on their loans. The rules — and more abstractly, the Law — are instrumental, says Palmer. Being strict about the rules would mean ‘depriving poor Indonesians of much needed gainful employment’ (p. 162). Besides, without such discretion the whole system would collapse in dysfunction. Indeed, Palmer says, discretion is the key to Indonesia's ‘culture of administration’ (p. 169). This non-judgemental conclusion, which mirrors anecdotal observations of Indonesia's bisa di atur way of doing things, is grounded in Palmer's rigorous scholarship. It merits the attention of Indonesia scholars and further research in the social sciences.
Indonesia's Overseas Labour Migration Programme, 1969–2010 is framed as a study of organisational behaviour and public policy. Its businesslike tone and theoretical passages reflect this. It will likely find an appreciative audience in these fields. But readers interested in Indonesia will also be rewarded by this book and its enlightening portrait of the Indonesian state as it negotiates the complex institutional and bureaucratic consequences of its profound turn to democracy in the twenty-first century.
