Widodo: Halting domestic worker exodus will take at least five years

Indonesian President Joko Widodo has laid down an ambitious vision to improve the skills of workers from his country and to ramp up economic progress so that one day no citizen will leave home for a domestic helper’s job overseas.

Widodo will be in Hong Kong today for a two-day visit that will see the city under a security blanket because of the high threat level, with at least 1,500 extra police officers deployed to protect him. Sources said the focus would be on anti-terrorism measures rather than public order, unlike during visits by China’s state leaders.

Watch: Widodo's message to Hong Kong's Indonesian workers

In an exclusive interview with the Post’s This Week in Asia in Jakarta, the first self-made entrepreneur to be elected to Indonesia’s highest office said the country needed more than five years to “prepare” Indonesian workers with the skills they need.

“What we’ve stopped is domestic workers going to the Middle East,” he said, referring to a region where abuses are common. “And we hope that while we improve and upgrade the qualities and skills of our workers and their professional training, we will head in that direction. Once investments in Indonesia have grown and our economy has grown further, then we won’t need to have our workers overseas.”

Widodo laid bare that he wanted Chinese investors in his country to be long-term partners creating jobs for locals.

At present, Hong Kong is home to some 350,000 foreign domestic workers, with 156,000 of them coming from Indonesia and the rest mostly from the Philippines. Five years ago, there were about 149,000 Indonesian domestic workers in the city.