Gender, Family & Labour

At ICAS 2, Marcel van der Linden and Ratna Saptari organized the CLARA panel, 'Gender, Family, and Labour Movements in Asia: Historical and Comparative Perspectives', to enhance debates on the interface between gender, family, and labour between 'the political' and 'economic' and between the 'public' and the 'private'. These are issues that will remain among the primary foci of CLARA's activities in the future. Through looking at examples from Indonesia and India, the participants brought up a number of interesting viewpoints which helped to stimulate a lively discussion.

* By RATNA SAPTARI

The conventional argument in scholarship on labour movements has been that 'non-class' factors such caste, kinship, and religious loyalties of workers constitute an obstacle to the growth of class consciousness. However, it has increasingly been shown how family, community, and neighbourhood are often sources of solidarity for the development of collective action and the emergence of class-consciousness. Within labour studies there is growing interest in the role of family in shaping relations. Workers' relations that, it must be said, do not necessarily imply submission and conformity, since concepts of the family and women's roles in them also shift in time.

Rachel Silvey (University of Colorado, USA), in comparing the changing forms of women's demands, concentrated on differences in labour activism among workers in two communities in West Java, Indonesia id est in Rancaekek, which is located just outside of the city of Bandung, and in Bekasi, which lies within the Jakarta-Bogor-Tangerang-Bekasi (Jabotabek) urban corridor. Differences in militancy and involvement in collective action were linked to the different gender identities and social networks in these two places. In Bekasi, there are more women who have migrated from further away areas such as central Java and they are consequently less able to rely on social networks linking them with their families in their places of origin. Communal gender norms, on the other hand, were less restrictive and gave these women the space to become involved in collective political action. In Rancaekek, a higher number of women workers are mothers. They are more embedded in local family networks and, in as far as women's political activism exists, it is organized around the trope of motherhood. Since the reformasi, in both places, the economic retrenchment brought about an upshot of the sort of protest that focuses on women's role as a mother. The content of women's activism has shifted toward more 'conservative' themes, specifically that of manifesting their family role. Yet this shift has crystallized in the same way in both places.

G.G. Weix (Montana University, USA), focused less on the nature of women's involvement in collective action but on women's daily subjectivities as defined by the close interrelationship of work and family. She links language and material interest through ethnographic description of the circumstances of women's labour. Examples are drawn from various studies done on Indonesian women workers but from particularly her own research on cigarette factory women in Kudus, central Java. These women used broad metaphors of kinship in their work relations, where family could be seen in personal and corporate terms. This rhetoric can also be seen in forms of recruitment, in the process of gaining social debt. Also, the dilemmas of making arrangements for childcare are described in relation to the shift from piece-rate work to wage work in factory settings. Both issues transpose wage labor as extending familial obligations, despite the capitalist relations of production that prevail.

Nandita Shah and Nandita Gandhi (Akhsara, India) presented their work on women workers in two industries, namely plastics processing and diamond polishing and jewelry making in Mumbai, India. They both looked at the intra-household responses of women workers as they experienced macro level changes. In response to these changes women workers develop their own set of strategies which are culturally bound and class specific. They identified the following: a) 'income increasing strategies', where the deployment of household members into the labour market often break the gender barriers that normally prevented young women from leaving their homes, particularly among the lower income households; b) 'expenditure reduction strategies', which also meant: attending to food and daily requirements, sharing clothes, reducing expenses on ready made food, sharing lunch, delaying repair of the house, cooking once a day, and, for some, picking children up from school; c) 'strategies for developing and using social networks', mutual support systems which may take an institutional form or less institutionalised forms such as the utilization of political patronage, charity, and even good relations with the local mafia. As many of them are young unmarried women, this places them in contradictory situations when their needs are sometimes at odds with 'the family's' needs. Since social networks are often developed through reciprocal exchanges, various other social obligations, which further affect their position within the households but also how other members of the household allocate their time, result from their having received help to obtain a job.

Karin Siegmann (University of Bonn) presented her research that is still to be conducted in Indonesia. She focused on gender-differentiated employment and income distribution in rural Indonesia and argued that, although the overall significance of agriculture in the economy has decreased, the female share of agricultural labour has risen. Agriculture, moreover, continues to be the major employer of both women and men which also manifested itself in the feminization of poverty. She juxtaposed two main arguments: on the hand, the macro-economy has an impact on intra-household power relations and the integration of women into the labour force leads to a strengthening of the bargaining power of the wife and thus to gender relations within the household; on the other, market integration does not change intra-household relations in Indonesia. Although her own standpoint leans more towards the second argument, this still needs to be proven by the evidence she will collect in the course of her fieldwork. *

For more about the CLARA Research Programme and its activities, please turn to p. 55 in this issue's Pink Pages.