Indonesian FDW contract

Lately my family have been back & forth between Malaysia and of course taking our helper aka our Singaporean FDW with us. If you have started a family in Singapore, I recommend you read how to hire a helper in Singapore.

Unfortunately we discovered my helper's Indonesian passport had less than six months validity and we had to get her passport renewed at the Indonesian embassy in Singapore.

What surprised me, is that my helper told me that as her employer I must go with her to the embassy. Her reasons were not clear, but after a couple of Googles it did seem to be the case. So I cleared out an afternoon of non-work to go down with her.

When we arrived to my shock and confusion, the Indonesian embassy said the afternoon is only for collecting passports. I had to now come back the next morning which royally pissed me off. The Indonesian embassy's trainwreck of a Website wasn't clear about these timings and my helper unhelpfully was chuckling to herself; "oh! this happened to me five years ago". More time off work and another taxi ride across town.

First thing Friday morning my helper went alone, in the hope she could queue and get some initial paperwork done without me. Unfortunately it seemed she couldn't get started until I showed up shortly after a 10AM meeting on Friday. Then the processing was surprisingly efficient I thought. Of course I had very low expectations. Roughly an hour passed and I was sat in front of official in a Batik shirt who was asking me to sign two documents.

To my horror after signing the documents.. on the back of the pages was a contract with my obligations to the helper. I looked for this template before whilst initially hiring her and couldn't find it, so this is what they look like:

Biggest surprise in the contract was the very last point (on the back page)... that as her employer I'm obligated to cover the cost of her passport. Thankfully it's not a 80GBP British passport cost. IIRC it was 35SGD, about ~20GBP plus all the pain of taking a day off work. Actually that's a lot more than 80GBP!

Three days later she was able to collect her new passport.

Another word of warning: Make sure your FDW is healthy and has got good teeth. In my latest "unexpected cost of the month" I'm having to pay for her wisdom teeth extraction which is NOT CHEAP!

Found any of my content interesting or useful?