With the help of the Solidarity Center, unions and NGO partners in Indonesia are supporting efforts to promote domestic worker rights.

	Jakerla PRT, a coalition of domestic worker organizations and advocacy groups, mobilized hundreds of domestic workers in for a rally in Jakarta.

In Indonesia, where an estimated 2.5 million people are domestic workers (including over 850,000 under the age of 17), a growing movement to expand and defend domestic worker rights has steadily gained momentum.  

Like all workers, domestic workers in Indonesia, mostly young women, seek decent work. But isolation and lack of legal rights make domestic workers vulnerable to abuse in the form of excessive workloads, denied wages, no days off, and sexual harassment. Worse still, they are excluded from worker protections under law, in large part because of their legal classification as “helpers” rather than workers. 

The Indonesia Network for Proper Working Conditions for Domestic Workers (Jakerla PRT), a coalition of domestic worker organizations and advocacy groups, promotes a national law that would extend worker rights to domestic workers and improve their access to a living wage and benefits available to other workers. With support from the Solidarity Center, Jakerla PRT has convened workshops and strategy sessions with Indonesian trade unions and key stakeholders. A key part of this work has been building union support for an international standard in the form of an ILO convention on domestic work. The convention, with the potential to extend rights and protections to domestic workers worldwide, is set to be debated by ILO member states in June 2010. With the help of trade union partners such as the Confederation of Prosperous Indonesian Labor Unions (KSBSI), Jakerla PRT has initiated a campaign to promote support for the measure within Indonesia. KSBSI recently boosted the effort by pushing for a full standard-setting convention.