Indonesian Worker Cruelly Treated in Saudi

Sukabumi, Indonesia (News Today) - An Indonesian female migrant worker named Reny had returned to the country from Saudi Arabia with injuries on her body. The 26-year-old resident of Subang Jaya village, Cikole sub-district, Sukabumi, West Java Province, might have been victim of cruelty of her employer.

Reny told journalists here Tuesday that she worked as a housemaid with a Saudi Arabian family in Dammam city for only two months. She, however, quit because she felt uneasy with her employer’s ill treatment. Reny said her employer did not pay her wages.

Instead, her employer might have given her wages to her job recruiting company, which facilitated her employment in Saudi Arabia. During her stay in that country, Reny said she felt she had worked well but her poor Arabic language had made her difficult in understanding the employer’s orders.

"Frankly, I cannot speak Arabic well. My employer is an impatient and angry person," he said.

Reny said she was treated badly by her first employer who often beat her and tried to strangle her. One day, she said she was asked by her employer to work for another Saudi Arabian family for a day.

"I stayed one night at the house of my employer’s friend. Due to the ill-treatment that I had received from my employer, I told my employer’s friend that I did want to return to Indonesia," she said.

"After hearing my testimony and knowing my physical condition, my employer’s friend allowed me to go home through the recruitment company that had sent me to Saudi Arabia," she said.

Reny said she was traumatized by the ill treatment she received from her Saudi Arabian employer. Reny’s experience has represented the fate of certain unfortunate Indonesian migrant workers.

Teguh Wardoyo, the Foreign Ministry’s director for protecting Indonesian people and entities, recently said many migrant workers were not paid by their employers. He said about 80 percent of 2,116 troubled migrant workers who had returned to Indonesia from the Middle East had stopped working because they had not received their wages.

"We are doing our best to have their rights respected. If their (former) employers refused to pay the workers’ wages, the Indonesian embassies and consulate generals will report their employers to the police," he said.

Indonesian workers do not only fill the casual workforce market in many Middle Eastern countries but also in Asia, such as Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

Source : kompas

Posted in: