Responses to Changing Labour Relations: The Case of Women's NGOs in Indonesia

The feminisation of factory work and increases in female labour migration are two widely noted effects of globalisation on the work of women in developing countries in the late twentieth century. While factory labour and domestic service overseas may seem to have little in common, in both cases, women experience a degree of commodification of their labour not found in most other sectors of the economy. In Indonesia, while a majority of women continue to work in subsistence agriculture and the informal sector, the number of women working in the manufacturing sector and as migrant domestic workers overseas has increased significantly in recent decades. Numerous accounts have been written about the parlous living and working conditions of both Indonesian female factory workers and migrant domestic labour. Yet, while it is important to document the hardships faced by women whose patterns of work have been affected by the global economy, it is equally important to focus on those same women’s attempts to mediate their work experiences, and the effects of globalisation on those processes of mediation. This chapter argues that the initiatives of local, middle-class non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have had an important effect on the ways in which factory workers and migrant domestic workers formulate their own strategies of resistance

International Networks and Human Rights in Indonesia

Following Risse and Sikkink, I privilege the point of interaction between local and international campaigns for better access to human rights in my analysis of the socialisation of human rights norms and the establishment of human rights institutions, but in a way that contextualises those interactions within the political context of Indonesia. I begin my attempt to do so with an overview of the shifts in the political terrain in the decades immediately before and after the fall of Suharto's authoritarian New Order regime in May 1998, with a view to charting the impact of those shifts on the observance of human rights. I then turn my attention to three particular sectors within human rights advocacy- namely labour rights, women's rights and the right to political self-determination - in order to describe their quite different trajectories, before returning to the broader implications of this analysis for our understanding both of human rights in Indonesia and of human rights change itself

After Nunukan: The Regulation of Indonesian Migration to Malaysia

Labour migration from Indonesia to Malaysia is a complex phenomenon. Migrants enter Malaysia via a range of formal, semi-formal and informal channels, primarily through Sumatra and Kalimantan. Although Indonesian authorities make little effort to stop semi-formal and informal migration flows, the Malaysian government constantly adjusts its policies towards both documented and undocumented labour migrants according to the condition of its labour market. Periodically these adjustments have involved the mass arrest and deportation of undocumented workers, for example when hundreds of thousands of Indonesian workers were expelled from Eastern Malaysia to the tiny town Nunukan in East Kalimantan in mid-2002. Both the Indonesian and Malaysian governments have failed to recognise the impact of the Malaysian government’s policies on transit zones such as Riau and East Kalimantan, and that more serious efforts at bilateral cooperation must be made in order to lessen the social costs of labour migration in these zones

Migrant Worker Organizing in Indonesia

This article examines attempts by Indonesian migrant labor NGOs, migrant worker organizations and trade unions to promote the labor rights of Indonesian migrant workers employed overseas. In recent years trade unions in Indonesia have increasingly been forced to acknowledge the existence of overseas labor migrants. But NGOs have dominated migrant labor advocacy initiatives, and grassroots migrant labor organizations such as the Indonesian Migrant Workers’ Union (IMWU) have developed independently of existing trade unions. Unions in Indonesia, like unions in other countries of origin, have been only marginally involved in migrant worker issues because of their physical boundedness within the nation-state and their focus on the formal sector. In other words, the fact that unions operate primarily at the national and sub-national scales and the difficulties they have had incorporating workers employed in less structured workplaces, and particularly in the informal sector, limits their capacity to assist or organize citizens employed outside the boundaries of the nation-state. This paper argues that unions must move beyond their traditional structures and spheres of influence in order to address the needs of overseas migrant workers, who represent an increasingly important union constituency in countries such as Indonesia

Who are the Orang Riau? Negotiating Identity across Geographic and Ethnic Divides

Debates about identity have multiplied across Indonesia in the wake of the implementation of regional autonomy. In the ethnically heterogeneous province of Riau, identity is prominent in the public debate and pivotal to struggles over the distribution of resources and questions of political allegiance. This chapter examines the extent to which these public discourses of identity are reflected at the grassroots level, drawing from my own experiences as an intermittent member of a non-Malay Riau household, and on data from semi-structured interviews conducted in June 2002 with community leaders and 40 other people from a range of social and ethnic backgrounds

Women's Labor Activism in Indonesia

In her discussion of working‐class women’s labor activism in Thailand, Mary Beth Mills argues that an understanding of the “diverse ideological effects, structural constraints, and contested identities within women’s labor struggles requires close attention to participants’ own gendered and place‐based politics” (2005, 140). In the Indonesian context, geography and life experience are indeed important, but class remains a major determinant of women’s approaches to gender politics within the labor sphere. Labor became a strong focus for middle‐class feminists in Indonesia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when women’s groups began to organize campaigns around issues concerning female industrial workers and international labor migrants (Ford 2002). More recently, however, there has been a dramatic increase in women workers’ activism on their own behalf. This new wave of activism presents a dilemma for feminists because it is not always framed in feminist terms. In contrast to middle‐class feminist activists in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), who regard female factory and migrant laborers as women first and then as workers, many union women believe the international feminist agenda is secondary, or even irrelevant, to their struggles for better conditions at work

The Making of Industrial Relations in Timor-Leste

As a new nation, Timor-Leste offers a unique case where formal industrial relations mechanisms have been developed as part of a broader project of state formation. In other words, the transformation of employment relations in the formal sector has taken place as part of regime establishment rather than regime change, as has been the case in other post-authoritarian contexts in Southeast Asia. As this first account of industrial relations in Timor-Leste demonstrates, the state has been concerned first and foremost with encouraging sustainable forms of accumulation, and the employment opportunities that accompany them, rather than with regulating labour relations. Although it has responded to pressure from international organisations to establish what could have been best-practice industrial relations institutions in the country’s tiny formal sector, these efforts have foundered as a consequence of a failure to secure employer buy-in and weak enforcement

The Global Union Federations and Temporary Labour Migration in Malaysia

Since the mid-2000s, the Global Union Federations have played a pivotal role in the reshaping of Malaysian trade unions’ attitudes towards temporary migrant workers, providing the conceptual tools and material resources – and, in many cases, the motivation – required to reach out to this most non-traditional of non-traditional constituencies. This article documents the different approaches taken by a number of Global Union Federations as they seek to apply lessons learnt from the experience of their European affiliates in the Malaysian context. It argues that while Global Union Federation agendas are largely determined by donor and head office priorities, those agendas are mediated, and sometimes transformed, as they are rolled out through the Global Union Federations’ regional offices and to local affiliates in ‘target countries’ like Malaysia. This finding not only has consequences for temporary migrant workers in particular destinations, but also for our understanding of the structures of the international labour movement and the practices of trade union aid

A Challenge for Business? Developments in Indonesian Trade Unionism after Soeharto

This chapter discusses debates on unionism and business from a labour movement perspective. It begins by briefly outlining developments in unionism in New Order Indonesia and sketching changes in the regulatory environment and union activity in the first five years after the fall of Soeharto, before turning to the central question regarding the extent to which ‘militant’ unionism has been a challenge to business. It argues that, while the new industrial relations climate does indeed present challenges for employers, those challenges lie in developing effective mechanisms through which they can work with unions rather than in the spectre of a strong and militant labour movement bent on the destruction of business

Contested Borders, Contested Boundaries: The Politics of Labour Migration in Southeast Asia

This chapter examines the political economy of labour migration in the region, with a focus on its implications for collective action. It argues that the pivotal role of temporary labour migrants in Southeast Asiaposes intellectual and practical challenges to the way we think about work, mobility and the nature and exercise of labour rights both by individuals and collectively. While temporary labour migration is a serious short-term threat to already weak trade unions in the region, internationally-driven responses to the challenge it presents also offer hope of reinvention and renewal. If even only partially successful, attempts to broaden union constituencies and develop alliances across sectors and national boundaries stand to better equip trade unions to deal not only with temporary labour migration but with the other challenges to organized labour posed by neoliberalism