Malaysia Rejects Indonesian Migrant Workers' Minimum Wage

The prosperity of Indonesian workers who work in the informal sector in Malaysia apparently will not yet improve. The reason for this is that the Malaysian government still rejects Indonesia's proposal regarding setting the minimum wage for workers in the informal sector."Because the country doesn't acknowledge a minimum wage system," said Foreign Affairs Minister Hassan Wirajuda after delivering an annual speech at his office yesterday (8/1). The result is, he said, that wages received by Indonesian migrant workers (TKI) are only based on negotiations with employers.

This is in line with the market mechanism and has caused the position of TKI who work in construction and plantation as well as house maids to be very weak and prone to abuse. This market mechanism makes TKIs' incomes lower compared to that of more-skilled workers from other countries.Malaysia acknowledged its country does not apply a minimum wage system. However, said Foreign Affairs Minister Syed Hamid Albar, this did not mean there was discrimination that would cause losses to informal sector TKIs. "This is a matter of the basics that we practice. We don't discriminate between Malaysian workers and those from other countries," he told Tempo via telephone.Albar said he realized that the TKI issue often created tense relations between the two countries.

However, he confirmed that the Malaysian government never plans to lower the incomes of workers from Indonesia. Wahyu Susilo, Migrant Care's policy analyst, said he will continue pushing the government to pay more attention to the fate of TKIs. One of the efforts he has asked for is that this issue be made into an agenda to be discussed at the annual meeting between President Yudhoyono and Prime Minister Badawi. "There shouldn't be any chitchat. The meeting must become a momentum in the protection of TKIs in Malaysia," he stressed.

Comments

Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens

Billionaires Among Thousands of Indonesians Found in Secret Offshore Documents By Nicky Hager April 9, 2013, 8:15 pm Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens, holding ownership of more than 190 offshore trusts and companies, secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists show. The nine families, worth an estimated $36 billion among them, are at the top of a wealthy class that dominates Indonesia’s politics and economy. Six were closely tied to the late dictator Suharto, who helped a special circle of Indonesians grow rich during his 31-year rule by granting economic fiefdoms to family and friends. The billionaires are among nearly 2,500 Indonesians found in the files of Singapore-headquart ered offshore services provider Portcullis TrustNet, which ICIJ has been analyzing and began reporting on last week. Although there is no evidence in the files of illegality by any of the ni...

Debate Islam in Indonesia

http://www.thejakar taglobe.com/ opinion/interloc utors-of- indonesian- islam/560447 Interlocutors of Indonesian Islam Ahmad Najib Burhani | December 08, 2012 A few months ago, the Japanese anthropologist Mitsuo Nakamura told me that studying Nahdlatul Ulama as an organization was beyond the imagination of any American scholar from the 1950s to the ’70s. But he is not the only academic to have noticed this. George McT. Kahin of Cornell University stated the same thing. Even NU-expert Martin van Bruinessen was not expecting to study NU as his primary focus when he came to Indonesia for the first time in the 1980s. During the early decades of Indonesian independence, NU was relatively unorganized and its management was largely based on the authority of religious teachers ( kyai ). Of course there were a number of scholars who studied NU-affiliated religious schools ( pesantren ) and its kyai, but not NU as an organization. Even though NU was one of the ...

is that true in Indonesia there freedom of religion?

The problems began shortly after Tajul Muluk, a Shiite cleric, opened a boarding school in 2004. The school, in a predominantly Sunni Muslim part of East Java, raised local tensions, and in 2006 it was attacked by thousands of villagers. When a mob set fire to the school and several homes last December, many Shiites saw it as just the latest episode in a simmering sectarian conflict — one that they say has been ignored by the police and exploited by Islamists purporting to preserve the purity of the Muslim faith. Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, has long been considered a place where different religious and ethnic groups can live in harmony and where Islam can work with democracy. But that perception has been repeatedly brought into question lately. In East Java, Sunni leaders are pushing the provincial government to adopt a regulation limiting the spread of Shiite Islam. It would prevent the country’s two major Shiite organizations from ...

INDONESIA A NEWS

Search This Blog