Tina Suprihatin

Millions of Indonesians have left their country to work overseas, and more leave each day. The wages they earn in Asia and the Middle East and send back home contribute greatly to individual households as well as to regional and national economies. Some workers go legally; others risk their life to seek a better living without following legal procedure. Legal and illegal workers alike face various problems familiar to migrants worldwide: preparing for their journeys, staying in touch with loved ones, sending money safely, relating to their governments, maintaining the family across great distances, and managing money. All such issues facing migrants could be aided by a strong citizen sector focus on the issue–a possibility that presses the question: How should Indonesia's citizen sector organize itself deal with the lives and livelihoods of migrant workers?

Tina has a compelling vision for the future of the migrant labor field. She is creating legal and organizational structures necessary for migrant issues to be handled locally, on the provincial and district levels, rather than centrally, from Jakarta, as they are largely addressed today. She is aligning the interests of local governments with those of both the workers and the agencies that recruit and process them. By creating a local regulatory framework in which the agencies must operate, which includes fees paid to local government, Tina is also generating money for worker support programs. However, she is not promising the workers government regulation; regulation provides two important structural incentives for citizens and citizen organizations to improve services to migrants. Increased revenue for programs is one incentive, but more fundamental is the new opportunity for local recourse. Such recourse means that organizations are no longer forced to take up every case, every complaint, or every bureaucratic entanglement with the government labor department or company offices in the capital. This shift enables local citizen groups to form and to serve people better, and therefore to expand and develop.
The second half of Tina's work is to create and model the kinds of services possible for workers within a new localized framework. These include pre-departure education, legal advocacy and casework, and family services. These services operate under the aegis of her own program, House of Solidarity, as well as through a radio program aimed at the rural communities where migrants originate and eventually return.

Among the provinces of Indonesia, East Java has the largest number of migrant workers abroad, and Blitar is the district that sends the second greatest number. An average of 200 people a day leave Blitar for this purpose. Until recently there has not been any legal protection system that guarantees the migrant workers' security and well-being. They face many problems, such as document forgery, death from unidentified causes, extortion (formally, by the government officers and migrant worker agencies; informally, at the hands of illegal recruiters, employers, and others), violence, kidnapping, torture, detention, unfair dismissal, deportation, salary cuts, deception, abandonment, harassment, and other unfair treatments that occur from the time migrant workers leave the country to the time of their return home. When these migrant workers file their complaints with the government or the agency that has sent them abroad, they rarely get positive responses or action on their cases. Ironically, they are often blamed for what has happened.
The strong connection between the department of manpower and the labor agency at both local and national levels, including brokers and the agencies hiring migrant workers, makes it even more difficult for any migrant workers to secure their rights. In the current system, each recruiting agency that wants to obtain a license to operate must contribute $83,500 to the Department of Manpower in Jakarta. Although this supposedly assures that funds will be available for cases and for the protection of migrant workers, this is not provided. Many illegal agencies also operate along with numerous scams that seem to be beyond the power of the government to control.
The present centralized system of managing and solving the cases of migrant workers proves to be ineffective and inefficient, and quite often jeopardizes the migrant workers. Besides the long, hard, and expensive process of settlement, the result of such an effort cannot be predicted and controlled by both the civilian community and local government. In a larger sense, the centralization of migrant issues is a structural impediment to citizen sector action.

Tina is working with the motivations and interests of three groups: private employment agencies, government, and citizen sector organizations. She is taking advantage of a moment in the Indonesian economy that favors competition among migrant worker agencies. The employment firms are already moving toward localizing their operations, albeit without legal structure. Responding to market forces, some agencies have already begun decentralizing their operations. When few workers were going abroad, there were few agencies. While the business was profitable, it was often shady. There were few market-based incentives for agencies to switch from their practice of using independent local agents to a more defined organizational structure, and abuse was common. Unscrupulous agents, who might take down payments from aspiring migrants but never deliver a job, operated with little oversight from the contracting agency and little fear of legal action by the workers they cheated. But, as working abroad became more popular, greater competition developed among agencies. As an alternative to independent agents, larger firms began setting up permanent suboffices in worker-rich districts. Workers preferred these to the lone agents claiming to represent a firm in far-off Jakarta. Tina recognizes that this shift represents an opportunity to create local accountability.
Accountability is possible through the legal system and local government. Working with the law faculty of a local university, Tina designed a regulation that would require agencies to pay a registration fee to any district where they set up an office. The fee of 75 million rupiah, or about $7,500, is not too high to discourage a legitimate firm from doing business, but it is large enough to begin adding money to a local migrant-service fund. Naturally, Tina finds champions in government who look favorably on any opportunity to increase local revenue. The regulations stipulate that the fees must be used for programs to aid workers, and that there should be collaboration between government and nongovernment parties in setting up such services. Moreover, registration brings the firms into local jurisdiction, so that the government has a record of a company's existence, its officers, and so on. This means that complaints to district police or officials will no longer be deferred because there is no local defendant. Tina expects the first local regulation in her district in 2003. Meanwhile, she is working within the network of organizations interested in labor to help them replicate her legal work in other parts of the country.
Tina's approach to the citizen sector organizations is to model best practices for them and help them re-imagine their role to concentrate more on systemic services for workers. There will always be a need to intercede on behalf of migrant workers who have been abused somewhere in the system.

Tina is the daughter of impoverished farm laborers. Because she wanted to help her parents, in 1987 she left for Saudi Arabia as a migrant worker. Once there, she started to experience unjust treatment, violence, and harassment. When working in Hong Kong in 1990, she also experienced abuse, which drove her to run away from her employers. She asked for a protection from the Asian Migrant Center, an organization concerned with migrant workers' rights. Eventually, she joined the organization and spent two years helping other workers who had endured similar hardships. Soon, together with colleagues, Tina started a union that became the embryo of the present Migrant Worker Organization in Hong Kong.
In January 1994, and back in Indonesia, Tina joined Women's Solidarity and continued in casework. Gradually, however, she saw that the migrant worker problem needed to be handled more comprehensively. In 1996 she set up Blitar Migrant Worker Solidarity Organization. Although Tina spent most of her time working on her organization and programs in Blitar, she still made use of her time to extend a cooperation and networking with other institutions at the local, national, and international levels.
Tina experienced hard times when she started her initiatives. The first problem was that previously there was no woman activist concerned with migrant workers in Blitar. Tina and her family faced various terrors when they started their work–including stooges of employment agents, local government, and the migrant worker families who did not understand her initiatives. The next problem was dealing with funding and budgeting. In the beginning, there was no agency interested in supporting Tina's work. The difficulties grew tougher when local autonomy was introduced. Tina had to provide awareness and empowerment programs to the local government. Her relatively low formal education and employment background were two barriers that made it difficult for her to persuade the government officers. At the time, her idea was considered insignificant. The paradigm shift in the government–from centralized to autonomous local systems–did not bring about an immediate enlightenment regarding the problems of migrant workers.
Despite various problems and difficulties, Tina remained firm in her ideas. She works relentlessly on her initiatives and is determined to realize her vision. She has succeeded in developing a network with citizen organizations that can function as a pressure group in fighting for change, especially in terms of policymaking, on the local, national, and international levels. These efforts are expected to bring about mutual contribution and empowerment for both individuals and organizations.