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

Abstract

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.