Tria Sutrisna, Krisiandi, Jakarta – The House of Representatives (DPR) is being urged to immediately pass the Draft Law on the Protection of Domestic Workers (RUU PPRT) into law.
The call was conveyed by four national institutions involved in the protection and fulfilment of human rights (HAM), namely the National Commission on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan), the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM), the Indonesian Child Protection Commission (KPAI) and the National Disabilities Commission (KND).
Komnas Perempuan Deputy Chairperson Olivia Chadidjah Salampessy explained that the RUU PPRT has already been in the pipeline for 20 years and there are still no signs that it will be ratified.
Currently, the draft law is actually threatened with being designated as a "non-carry over draft law", so all the stages that have been gone through so far will have to be repeated from the start during the next legislative period.
"If there is no inventory list number in the remaining time of the current legislative period, the RUU PPRT will be categorised as a non-carry over draft law. This means that the RUU PPRT must go back to the planning stage in the DPR for the period 2024-2029", said Salampessy at the Komnas HAM office in Jakarta on Friday July 19.
Komnas Perempuan Commissioner Veryanto Sitohang is of the view that there are no longer any grounds to delay the deliberation and enactment of the bill.
This is because the bill is desperately needed to provide a legal umbrella for domestic workers (PRT) as well as job providers. In that way the rights and obligations of both parties can be better guaranteed.
"So job providers and domestic workers will both be protected", explained Sitohang.
Komnas HAM Commissioner Anis Hidayah added that the RUU PPRT has already been designated as a DPR initiative and the government has already handed over a problem inventory list (DIM) to the DPR to be discussed jointly.
Aside form this, the RUU PPRT is already one of the priority bills in the National Legislative Program (Prolegnas). Based on this, the DPR is obliged to prioritise deliberating and enacting the bill.
"Meaning that if it has already be said to be a Prolegnas priority bill, the DPR has an obligation to prioritise it. Moreover, there is only one step left. Because it was designated as a draft initiative law on March 23, 2023. This means that all that's left is for it to be discussed and passed", she concluded.
The RUU PPRT was first submitted to the DPR in 2004, but the House only included it in the Prolegnas in 2010.
After being included in the Prolegnas, the DPR's Commission IX finally moved to conduct research, public testing and a conduct a comparative study from 2011 to 2012. In 2013, the RUU PPRT finally reached the desk of the DPR's Legislative Body (Baleg) in order to proceed to the next stage.
However, further discussions on the RUU PPRT were unclear and uncertain during the DPR's 2014-2019 legislative period. New developments occurred in the 2019-2024 period.
In 2020, Baleg completed discussions on the fate of the RUU PPRT, after which it should have been handed over to the DPR's Consultative Body (Bamus).
But the draft law again faced obstacles because during a leadership meeting (Rapim) on August 21, 2021, the DPR decided to postpone taking the RUU PPRT to the Bamus.
Criticisms and pressure also come from the public for the DPR to push through the RUU PPRT. Following this, a Bamus meeting finally decided to take the RUU PPRT to a plenary meeting on March 14, 2023.
The following week, at the 19th plenary session for the DPR's IV sitting period for 2022-2023 on Tuesday March 21, DPR Speaker Puan Maharani ruled that the bill would become a DPR initiate.
Unfortunately, as of the end of the DPR's term of service for the period 2019-2024, the RUU PPRT has yet to be passed onto law.
Notes
According to an article in the Jakarta Post on February 1, 2023, a politician from the House said that the legislation body had agreed on the content of the RUU PPRT in 2020 but it was rejected by the Golkar Party and the PDI-P. According to the source, the parties are reluctant to pass the bill as it would lead to the formalisation of domestic workers. This would then become a burden for those employing domestic workers (such as lawmakers) since it would oblige employers to pay domestic workers the minimum wage, provide health benefits, overtime and severance pay. There are an estimated 4.5 million domestic workers in Indonesia and at least 90 percent of them are women and a large proportion are underage.
[Translated by James Balowski. The original title of the article was "DPR Didesak Sahkan RUU PPRT pada Sisa Masa Sidang 2024".]
