41 universities face probe for ‘trafficking’ their students

Forty-one universities in Indonesia are currently being investigated by the country’s education, culture, research and technology ministry (Kemendikbudristek) and by the police for alleged people trafficking under the guise of placing students in overseas apprenticeships as part of a compulsory final-year assignment.

The ministry has said it would sanction the universities involved, but it is still not clear when and what sanctions would be imposed while the police investigation is underway.

Apprenticeship scams are becoming more common in the region and experts say the latest case involving final-year Indonesian students is just the tip of the iceberg.

The students, drawn from a number of Indonesian universities, were offered three-month work-study programmes in Germany in October 2023 with companies that have cooperation agreements with their universities to provide practical experience under the Indonesian government’s Merdeka Belajar Kampus Merdeka (Free Learning Campuses) scheme.

In reality, the companies were nothing more than agents providing German companies with cheap labour, according to one of the student victims. The students worked full-time and were charged for their work permit and letter of acceptance. The companies acting as agents took their own cut of IDR30 million (US$1,860) per student.

Exploitation allegations

Abdul Haris, director general of higher education at the ministry, was quoted on 27 March by Indonesia’s Antara news agency as saying Germany’s three-month “holiday work” or Ferienjobs programme was not related to study or skills. “It’s exploitation,” he said.

“We did our own investigation but then handed the results to the police,” he said. “We will properly sanction the universities involved, but only after the police conclude their investigation.”

Police said 1,047 students from 41 universities were victims of the programme in the second half of 2023. The ministry stopped the programme at the end of last year.

The cases came to light when four students went to the Indonesian consulate in the German capital Berlin to complain about charges they had to pay and the heavy workload. The consulate informed the Indonesian ministry.

The police have named five suspects in the German case. Two are in Germany and three in Indonesia, including two professors at Jambi University. They are accused of violating Indonesia’s regulation on human trafficking eradication and face 25 years in prison and a fine of IDR600 million if found guilty.

They are also accused of violating the regulation on labour safety and protection of Indonesian migrant workers overseas and could face 10 years in prison and a fine of IDR15 billion if found guilty.

A ‘growing problem’

Ai Maryati Solihah, chairperson of the Indonesian Child Protection Commission (KPAI), said deceiving students by offering supposed ‘apprenticeships’ was becoming common in Southeast Asia. The latest case seen by the commission involved eight students who were offered work as machine operators on a seagoing vessel as part of their practical mechanical engineering course. But the work actually required them to catch fish.

“This of course has nothing to do with their lessons they learned at college,” Ai told University World News this week.

According to Ai, another case involved beauty school students who were offered apprenticeships at cosmetics companies in Malaysia but in fact were employed at an establishment breeding swifts for the expensive Chinese delicacy of bird’s nest soup. Swifts nest in caves in high mountains which are dangerous to access.

She pointed to three main indicators for human trafficking: obscure recruitment processes, poor accommodation at the destination, and exploitation. “When these three things occur, it can be human trafficking, or at least it’s not at all part of school or university activities,” she said.

School-leavers have also become the target of labour syndicates. “By nature, fresh school graduates don’t think much about how much money they would earn, as having experience is more important,” Ai said.

Parents’ attitudes make the problem even more complicated. “Generally, parents of low-income families do not worry too much about their children being exploited because they think their children can be financially independent. We need more public education for this,” Ai said.

Involvement of ‘agents’

Another victim, Ramayana Monica, a law student at Jambi University in Sumatra, said she was recruited by her university and an Indonesian private company. After completing the procedures, she and her friends were sent to another company. She only later became aware that the two companies were agents in Indonesia providing workers for European countries.

In Germany, they were sent to another agent when she signed a work contract and was asked to pay €350 (US$376) for a work permit. “I just signed the contract although I did not know what it said because it was all in German,” she told Indonesia’s Kompas TV on 3 April.

But she was baffled when she discovered the work involved only manual labour. “The job had nothing to do with my study field,” she said. “We carried heavy packages up and down stairs. The packages ranged from 1kg to 30kg. We scanned them and put them on trolleys,” she recalled.

On 2 December 2023, the contract was partially terminated. The German company “called me and my friends and asked us to sign the contract termination via email,” she said. But a week later, on 8 December 2023, they were informed of new jobs as agricultural workers. In the new job they often worked overtime, leaving late at night when transportation was not available.

After a month doing agricultural work, she and her friends were paid €77, which is not enough to live on. They subsisted on bread and potatoes, she said.

That contract concluded after a month. She and her friends were then sent to Frankfurt to work as construction workers – painting walls, carrying boards, getting rid of building rubble. That contract ended after a week. “After that we were jobless,” Monica said.

One of the suspects, named by police as Sihol Situngkir from the Faculty of Economics and Business at Jambi University, has denied all the accusations. “My only involvement in this case is introducing work-study in Germany through [a private company]. I didn’t sign [a] contract or letter of agreement. It was all carried out by [the private company],” he told a media conference just after the police issued summons on 2 April.

His lawyer, Fernando Silalahi, denied the allegations of human trafficking. “If there are some breaches of regulations, this is nothing more than a labour regulations, immigration, and overseas worker protection case, not a criminal case,” he said at a media conference.

A problem of misinformation?

Like Silalahi some people have downplayed the allegations, arguing the case is one of “misinformation” rather than the more serious crime of trafficking.

Fachruddin Mangunjaya, senior lecturer at the National University (UNAS) Jakarta, said: “There may be some violations or deviation from academic administration or ethics, but to call it ‘human trafficking’ is an exaggeration,” he told University World News.

Martinus Ariya Seta, a lecturer at Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta, said the problem with the Ferienjob case was that neither the agent nor the university provided students with “true and proper information”.

Saying that Ferienjobs can be part of final-year students’ academic assignment is a form of disinformation, he added. “The agents get universities’ cooperation in this scheme just to get cheap labour,” Seta told University World News.

“They did not inform the students that the Ferienjob programme did not guarantee a specific work placement and so the recruits had to be willing to be placed anywhere,” Seta said, adding that the scheme allowed the company to terminate a work contract if employees do not fulfil the work demand.

Seta said because students and universities were not provided with official information about the scheme by the German authorities, and information was only available in German and was not translated by the agents, it was a case of misinformation rather than trafficking.