Foreign Policy and the Domestic Worker

Abstract

In 2009, following numerous high profile abuse cases, the Indonesian government placed a moratorium on its citizens taking up employment in Malaysia as domestic workers. From the perspective of feminist International Relations, the emergence of migrant domestic work as a foreign policy concern between these two states is significant – exposing a relationship between foreign policy and the webs of transnationalized social relations of reproduction that underpin the development prospects of middle to low income states. In this article I utilize the example of the Malaysia–Indonesia dispute in order to develop some tentative suggestions concerning the possibility of integrating an analysis of transnational social relations of reproduction into foreign policy analyses. The article initially overviews how the dispute is widely understood in relation to Indonesia's turn to a more democratic foreign policy. The inadequacy of such a reading is explored further. The article suggests that the above-mentioned dispute should rather be understood in relation to the specific configurations of productive–reproductive relations that underpin migratory flows and the role of Indonesia and Malaysia as ‘regulatory’ states involved in the establishment of return-migration systems in which women migrants are viewed as economic commodities and policed via a range of state-sanctioned practices (including commitments to anti-trafficking).

Keywords:

• domestic workers
• foreign policy
• Indonesia
• Malaysia
• return migration
• social relations of reproduction

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, Ian Hall and Lisa Prügl for their comments on earlier drafts. Thanks also to Alimatul Qibtiyah and Paul Belesky for their research assistance and to Greta Nabbs-Keller for her help with some translations and for providing me with an unpublished draft of one of her articles. All errors rest with the author. This research was supported under the Australian Research Council's Future Fellowship scheme (project number FT00991711).

Notes

The Bank of Indonesia states that 77 per cent of Indonesian women migrants are employed in the ‘informal sector’, a category made up of household servants, child carers and drivers.

These agreements include MOUs establishing formalized systems of return migration as well as strategic security partnerships and bilaterally negotiated trade agreements.

For example the Bank of Indonesia (2009) points to the much greater proportion of worker salaries that are remitted by female compared to male migrants.

See, for example, comments made by the Indonesian Minister of Women's Empowerment at a 2008 World Bank Seminar in which women employed overseas as domestic workers are described as unskilled, low educated and of ‘simple appearance’ making them especially vulnerable to traffickers (Swasono in Naovalitha and Trimayuni 2006: xvi).