This talk addresses Indonesia’s active role in sending Indonesian domestic workers to Hong Kong. Like other ‘labor brokerage states’ in the region, Indonesian state authorities regard sending the country’s labor power abroad a strategy of development. In competing with other labor sending countries, Indonesia has specialized on sending female migrants to work in private households and perform care labor, i.e., doing household chores as well as caring for children and the elderly.

Sending domestic workers bears a number of contradictions for Indonesia as a sending state: restrictions with regard to labor and residency rights in the migrant workers’ receiving countries render the workers vulnerable to violations of their rights. In Indonesia, severe cases of abuse experienced by female migrants are publicly scandalized as a violation of the nation’s dignity. Furthermore, some parts of Indonesian society consider paid domestic work as an unskilled labor that is held in low esteem. Brokering domestic workers hence causes sentiments of shame among some members of the Indonesian bureaucracy. Authorities have thus attempted to modernize the Indonesian labor migration program.

These attempts of modernization set the starting point of the talk. I focus on how recruitment agencies, government authorities, and other stakeholders involved in Indonesia’s labor migration program shape the workers as ‘ideal migrants.’ I discuss the plurality of practices of shaping migrant workers’ subjectivities as an endeavor to upgrade the workers, thus making Indonesian migrant workers, the Indonesian labor migration program, and the nation more respectable. I also shed light on migrant domestic workers’ lived experiences. This perspective suggests that endeavors to upgrade Indonesian migrant workers, need, not least, to be understood as a reaction to migrant workers’ own claims to respect. At times, migrant workers’ lived subjectivities are at odds with authorities’ notions of respectability.

In my talk, I build on a 14 months-fieldwork that I carried out in Jakarta, East Java, Indonesia, and Hong Kong in 2014-2015 as part of my dissertation project. In addition, I present insights from conversations with Hong Kong based domestic workers carried out in 2020 and 2021, in order to give an outlook and discuss in which ways the Covid-19 pandemic affects how the contradictions of Indonesian labor brokerage are currently dealt with.