After over 20 years of debate, Indonesia’s parliament passed a new law aimed at protecting the rights of its domestic workers. The legislation seeks to bring the country's 4.2 million domestic workers, who were previously unregulated, into a formal legal framework to curb exploitation.

Indonesia’s parliament passed a law on Tuesday to protect the rights of domestic workers after more than two decades of deliberations and multiple delays. The bill was first introduced in 2004 to protect the country’s 4.2 million domestic workers, almost 90 per cent of them women, according to data from the Ministry of Manpower. They were previously not legally classified as workers, meaning they were forced to operate in an informal and unregulated economy, exposed to exploitation and...