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Abstract
The dissertation examines the massive mobilization of female labor that accompanied export-oriented industrialization (EOI) through an exploration of the feminization of factory labor in Indonesia between 1970 and 1997, focusing primarily on the garment, plywood, textile, and automobile industries. The dissertation introduces a “labor formation” approach that encompasses three “nodal points”—supply factors that determine the availability of gendered workers, institutions that mediate between employers and potential workers, and capitals varying preferences for women workers. Changes at the supply and institutional nodal points in the 1970s and early 1980s expanded the supply of potential women workers and reduced the institutional obstacles to their deployment in factory work. When Indonesia shifted to EOI in the mid-1980s, capital's demand for female labor grew. Since an attractive pool of female labor was available and institutions placed few limits on their use, a massive wave of feminization ensued. Feminization, however, varied both within sectors and between sectors with the same structural characteristics, and the dissertation argues that a fuller understanding of feminization requires an analysis of gendered discourses of work that shape how factory managers design labor processes on the shop floor. Feminization also proceeded unevenly in Indonesia, with the more labor-intensive and low-wage sectors feminizing most strongly, and the dissertation finds that the dynamics of capitalist development alone are unlikely to open up the higher wage sectors to women workers. Through this multilevel analysis, the dissertation shows the multiple ways that gender shapes industrialization, providing different opportunities and constraints to men and women workers.
The labor formation approach also provides a useful comparative framework for exploring the differences in feminization across national contexts. Variations between countries in developments at the three nodal points explain both whether feminization occurs and the degree of feminization that unfolds. The dissertation also calls into doubt common explanations for feminization, in particular women's lower wages and docility. The unique findings of the dissertation are a result of the research methodology that combined qualitative and quantitative methods, careful case selection for the sectoral case studies, and different levels of analysis.
