Overview

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative. This absorbing study examines the remarkable campaign for domestic worker rights in Indonesia. Drawing on interviews with workers, activists, unionists, journalists, and researchers, Austin provides a compelling narrative of the development of feminist-inspired cross-class alliances. She follows the movement from its beginnings in the student protests of the 1980s and 1990s, through its lobbying, street protests, and networking in the 2000s, ending with the digital activism stimulated by COVID-19. Shifting focus from migrant domestic workers to the five million in Indonesian homes, Austin interweaves theoretical insights with evocative portrayals of individual lives. Informed by the author’s experience of living in Indonesia in the 1980s, Domestic Workers in Indonesia offers a novel analysis of the changing imaginaries of domestic work. Chronicling activism in spaces ranging from the neighbourhood meeting house and domestic worker schoolroom to the smart hotels of transnational activism, Austin locates the movement’s resilience in a feminist politics of presence that has enabled the emergence of a nascent Indonesian domestic worker class. This first full-length study of domestic worker organizing in Indonesia will appeal to scholars, activists, and policy makers concerned about the global gender injustices of informal employment and with the futures for feminist, labour and social movement activism in Southeast Asia and beyond.

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9781802074574

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Mary Austin gained her PhD from SOAS in 2020. She lived in Indonesia from 1980 to 1983, teaching in Jakarta and visiting many parts of the archipelago. After a long career as a teacher, school inspector, and senior education officer, she completed an MA in gender studies before beginning her doctorate. Enjoying interdisciplinarity, Mary has published in Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, Citizenship and democratization in Indonesia, Jurnal Perempuan, and IQAS.

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