ICAS-IIAS panel
Berlin, Germany
Saturday, 10 August 2001

Gender, Families and Labour: Reflections on the Asian Experiences

By Ratna Saptari

This panel was organized by CLARA (Marcel van der Linden and Ratna Saptari) to enhance debates on the interface between gender, family and labour; of 'the political' and 'economic' and of 'public' and 'private', issues that remain to be one of the primary foci of CLARA's activities in the future. Through looking at examples from Indonesia and India, Rachel Silvey (University of Colorado, USA);G.G. Weix (Montana University, USA); Nandita Shah and Nandita Gandhi (Akhsara, India) and Karin Siegmann (University of Bonn, Germany) brought up a number of interesting viewpoints which helped to stimulate a lively discussion.

The conventional argument in the scholarship on labour movements has often 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 often are 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 which does not necessarily imply submission and conformity since concepts of family and women's role in it also shift in time.

Rachel Silvey, in comparing the changing forms of women's demands concentrated on differences in labor activism of workers in two communities in West Java, Indonesia. i.e. 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 the two places. In Bekasi more women are migrants from further away areas such as central Java and are less able to rely on social networks linking them with their families in the places of origin. Communal gender norms were less restrictive and gave women the space to become involved in collective political action. In Rancaekek, where more workers are mothers, and are more embedded in local family networks, women's political activism if existing, is organized around the trope of motherhood. Since the reformasi, in both places, the economic retrenchment has involved growing numbers of the sort of protest that focus on women's roles as mothers. The content of women's activism has shifted toward more 'conservative' themes, specifically that of manifesting their family role. Yet this shift has not played out in the same way in both places.

G.G. Weix, 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 particularly from various studies done on Indonesian women workers but particularly her own research in Kudus, central Java on cigarette factory women. 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, both presenting their work on women workers in two industries, namely plastics processing and diamond polishing; and jewellery making in Mumbai, India 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. These strategies are what they classify as: a) income increasing strategies where the deployment of household members into the labour market often break the gender barriers which normally prevented young women from leaving their homes, particularly among the lower income households; b) expenditure reduction strategies which meant also: attending to food and daily requirements; sharing of clothes, reducing expenses on ready made food, sharing lunch; delaying repair of the house, cooking once a day, and for some, withdrawing children 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 in tension with 'the family's' needs. Since social networks are often developed through reciprocal exchanges, their obtainment of jobs lead to various other social obligations which further effect their position within the households but also how other members of the household allocate their time.

Karin Siegmann presented her research that is still to be conducted in Indonesia. Her main focus was on gender differentiated employment and income distribution in rural Indonesia. She argued that although the overall significance of agriculture in the economy has decreased, the female share of agricultural labour has risen and agriculture continues to be the major employer of both women and men which also manifested itself in the feminisation of poverty. She juxtaposed to main arguments namely the view that 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 one hand; and on the other that 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 her fieldwork.

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