Women and work in a transmigration settlement
Gaynor Dawson
This chapter analyses the interface between the reproductive and productive work of women in a poor, remote transmigration settlement.1The transmigration pro-gramme saw the resettlement of millions of poor and landless people from densely populated to less populous regions of the Indonesian archipelago. The relocation of transmigrants to a distant rural settlement, in unfamiliar physical, social and eco-nomic surroundings, and away from extended family support, impacts on gender relations and increases the responsibility and burden for women as they perform the multiple tasks which are essential for their family’s well-being and for keeping the cooking pot full. Their family’s survival depends on how well they undertake their domestic and reproductive work, managing scarce household resources and caring for the family in locations where much of the infrastructure, communication and services are limited in comparison with the places from which they have come.
However, it also hinges on their work outside the home. It depends on how they, together with their husbands, work their farms to produce food for consumption and for the market in conditions far different to those of the fertile soils and wet rice areas that they are used to in their villages of origin. It depends too on whether they are able to find income-earning work to contribute to the household budget in remote areas where industry and income-earning opportunities are scarce. It also depends on how successfully these women are able to form and maintain support-ive social relationships with other transmigrant women who have originated from other regions and have different backgrounds.
In contrast to the situation in their original villages, in many cases women must perform their work without assistance from extended family. They often have no adult relative to care for children or to prepare meals for the family while they work in the fields or in paid labour. They have no help in caring for family members who are ill and nor do they have assistance in situations where medical treatment is expensive and hospitals are distant. While many women are used to working in wet rice cultivation in their home villages, they must learn new agricultural methods and skills to farm the dry plots of land in their new environs. Although many have experience in the informal sector as traders, service providers and in cottage indus-try on Java, their skills and experience are frequently not relevant in the new sur-roundings, where markets are limited and other settlers lack cash to buy their
product. These transmigrant women also have to learn to interact with the local people, who are of different ethnicity, culture and language and to compete with them for work outside the settlement.
This reality of transmigrant women’s work contradicts liberal economic per-spectives of work performed by a self-interested rational male individual; it also contradicts Marxist perspectives of proletarianized male, or ‘sexless’, workers pro-ducing surplus value and engaged in class based struggles in the public sphere (Armstrong and Armstrong 1990: 14, 58; Kabeer 1994: 12, 45–6; Young 1993:
129). The work of women extends from paid and income-generating work to unpaid work which sustains and reproduces human life, attends to community obli-gations and establishes and maintains social networks. In contrast to men’s work, women’s work embraces a multiplicity of tasks which are often fragmented, may need to be performed simultaneously and which cover a longer period of the day.
Unlike men, women cannot devote large blocks of uninterrupted time to the com-pletion of a task. They have to be multi-tasked, flexible and efficient in order to satisfy the competing demands on their time and energy. Their work is unrelenting and often time consuming, and each aspect bears directly on others in the ways and spaces in which they are performed and managed.
This chapter describes the transmigration programme and the settlement to which the women and their families have been brought. It explores the ideals to which women are encouraged to aspire, the gendered power relationships enabled through these constructions and how these transmigrant women manage their work and time within this frame. Finally, the chapter explores the contrast between the situation of women whose husbands work away from the settlement and those whose husbands are present.
Transmigrating
In 1984, 430 families arrived in Harapan Jaya, a transmigration village in Riau Province, Sumatra.2These families were part of Indonesia’s massive transmigra-tion programme which operated to resettle nuclear households from the ‘inner’
islands to more sparsely populated, less developed areas in the ‘outer’ islands.3With significant World Bank and other international donor support, the programme accelerated rapidly in the late 1970s and 1980s during the period of the New Order and became an important element of the regime’s national development efforts.4 One of the many objectives used to justify the transmigration programme was increased food production, in particular wet rice, to achieve self-sufficiency in feed-ing the nation’s growfeed-ing population.5The settler smallholder farmers were to emu-late the intensive food cultivation methods of Java, even though soil, climatic and marketing factors were quite different in most receiving areas. In what is often seen as a process of ‘Javanization’, the transmigrants were also supposed to introduce new and improved techniques of intensive cultivation to indigenous inhabitants, especially where shifting cultivation methods predominated. However, the land available for the settlements was usually in the least habitable, arable and accessible regions, making it almost impossible for many settlers to fulfil state expectations.
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Towards the end of the Suharto regime, which coincided with the economic crisis of the late 1990s, opposition to the programme increased. Criticism grew more vocal about environmental degradation, the continuing poverty and deprivation in the settlements, the failure to alleviate population pressure in sending areas, the lack of suitable land, the impact on indigenous peoples and the increased social ten-sions in receiving areas. International donors’ and lenders’ support cooled and the massive general transmigration programme was closed in the year 2000.6 However, transmigration is still being offered in a limited manner. For example, people living along the banks of rivers and drains in Jakarta were encouraged to transmigrate after massive floods inundated their homes in February 2007. The impacts which arose from the general programme are also on-going. To this day, there are tensions in many areas between transmigrant and local communities, which have resulted in violence and even death. Many transmigrants who remain in the settlements still struggle for an existence in the harsh surroundings and, in many locations, land clearing and inappropriate agricultural practices continue the process of environmental degradation.
The transmigrants who arrived in Harapan Jaya in 1984 were originally sent to Siak, a tidal swamp area on the coast. However, the land was frequently flooded and even when the settlers had good crops, traders found access to the settlement diffi-cult so that produce was left to rot. They were unable even to maintain a subsistence livelihood, and exhausted any precious capital they had brought with them from Java. The government was forced to supply food rations for two years before a deci-sion was made to move the transmigrants several hundred kilometres inland to Sungai Pagar. Harapan Jaya is the central village of seven which make up the settlement. Each household in the settlement was given 2 hectares of land:
0.25 hectare for a house and house garden; 1 hectare of cleared land ready for imme-diate planting; and 0.75 hectare of uncleared land in the surrounding forest for later development. They were provided with a rough house of wooden planks, corrugated iron roof and earth floor; agricultural tools and inputs such as hoes, seeds and fertil-izer; a little furniture, a few kitchen implements and basic rations for one year.
Housing design and the availability of facilities such as water, sanitation, fuel and power are particularly important in the lives and work of women, issues to which the planners and implementers paid minimal attention. Water was a major problem. The government had failed to ensure that all domestic wells provided by the contractor held water. Water had to be collected from the dam or from public wells in the lower areas of the settlement for drinking, cooking, cleaning, bathing small children and watering livestock. Most people bathed in the dam or at wells which held water, or travelled several kilometres to a river in the next village.
Sanitation was poor. Families were not provided with a toilet and some families used a convenient open spot in the house garden or fields, or went to the river to defecate. Other families dug pits in the house garden with some privacy afforded by a hessian or plank screen. The problems were compounded by corruption and lack of accountability in the preparation of the settlement.
The transmigrants had to adjust to their new physical, economic and social envi-ronment. While Siak had flooded, Harapan Jaya proved to be the opposite. It was Keeping rice in the pot 43
hot and dry, with uncertain rainfall, and the soils and climate made it difficult to grow food crops. The settlers classified the red soils as ‘hot’ and infertile compared with the black ‘cool’ and fertile soils of Java. In addition, many of the plots of land which were supposed to be cleared and ready for planting when they arrived were overgrown with grass and had massive tree stumps in them which needed to be removed before the land could be ploughed. Most of the settlers had been farm labourers or tenant farmers on Java. They were familiar with wet rice cultivation, and those from the cool mountainous areas on Java had grown crops such as coffee, cacao and vegetables. However, due to poor design, the dam and irrigation canals in the settlement did not function properly. In addition, plagues of rats and ele-phants and wild pigs, which lived in the surrounding forest, destroyed any rice crops which did grow.7In the face of the failure to cultivate rice, secondary (palaw-ija) crops became the dominant source of agricultural income for the settlers. These crops were mainly soybeans, chillies, cassava, maize, mung beans, peanuts and water melons. However, after initial good crops, yields declined rapidly as the nutrients leached out of the soil. Many families raised small livestock such as chickens, although these were regularly decimated by disease. Some household heads were given cattle through a cattle distribution scheme funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). Fruit trees, such as rambutan and jack fruit, also became a secondary source of food and income for some families.
The marketing of farm produce, which is critical to an agricultural settlement’s economy, requires good access and a confluence of buyers and sellers. Unlike Java, transportation and communication were difficult. The settlement was located 12 kilometres from the main road. Access was along a gravel track which entered the forest about 60 kilometres south of Pekanbaru on the main road to Teluk Kuantan. The track was difficult to traverse in the wet season when rains turned the surface to mud and floods covered the low-lying sections.8Although there was a market in the settlement, it was not one that had developed naturally over time at a crossroads or other place where traders met. The traders who entered the settlement were from other ethnic groups, principally Minang, Batak and Malay. The transmi-grants had to establish relationships with them and were in a poor bargaining posi-tion. There was sometimes the feeling that they were being cheated and that prices were too low. Transmigrant traders, both women and men, who went outside the settlement to sell and buy in the local rotating markets also had to familiarize them-selves with different produce and prices, and establish relationships with buyers from other ethnic groups.
Situating transmigrant women
In the production and reproduction of gender relationships and inequalities, the institutions of family and household are core locations. However, families and households are not discrete entities. They are part of a wider society. As elements of that wider society they are both conduits for, and products of, its social, economic and political forces and values. Within family and household, intimate and personal 44 Gaynor Dawson
relationships mesh with these external forces to organize the ways in which women and men go about their daily lives and to shape the power relationships between them. Social meanings are constructed and conveyed which mould the ways women and men think about themselves in their particular historical time, location and envi-ronment. Differences are created in how women and men are able to mobilize and use the resources available, and social controls are exercised over women’s labour, bodies, sexuality, reproduction and choices (Kabeer 1994: 58, 66).
The way the state constructs and operationalizes ‘the household’ and the roles of its members in the transmigration programme reinforces prevailing ideologies on the distinct roles of women and men. This separation in the roles, where men are the income earners and public representatives of the family while women are con-cerned with domestic matters, appears to be a natural outcome of biological difference. In these complementary roles, women are ‘embodied’ as mothers and reproducers of human life, the managers of the domestic realm with responsibility for the minutiae of everyday life. On the other hand, men are released by women’s labour and concern with the ‘dirt’ and detail of life so that they are above everyday concerns and can undertake work which accrues status and behave as if they are
‘disembodied’ rational, self-interested agents of development in liberal economic theory (Armstrong and Armstrong 1990: 14, 58; Errington 1990: 6–7).
Within the transmigration programme the family/household is a primary target and instrument for government. Transmigration policy and documents reflect a conventional bureaucratic conceptualization of the nuclear family household as uniform, constant and discrete. This ideal is a hierarchical and asymmetrical arrangement in which the man is located at the apex as head (kepala keluarga or KK) with priority in entitlements to its material resources. As household head, he has the designated role of income earner and representative of the household in the public domain.9On the other hand, the woman rarely emerges except to be assigned the subordinate position of household manager with responsibility for domestic work and child care. The identification of the male household head enables a sim-ple direct line of authority and communication to be established between the state and the household through which directives and resources from the state can be channelled. The household head is identified as the landowner on the land title given to the transmigrants and he is asked to participate in projects introduced to improve the settlement’s economy. The household head also has authority to speak for other household members in the public domain on matters including labour commitments to development activities, and to make unilateral decisions concern-ing farmconcern-ing activities. In this way women’s labour can be spoken for and commit-ments made in her name. In addition, she can be excluded from income-earning opportunities in which her husband, who is viewed as the household’s income earner, represents her.
While this concept of a male-headed nuclear family household has been the stan-dard for transmigration policy and programme implementation, in reality, house-hold composition and structure in the settlement varies over time, shifting in relation to the life cycle of household members and according to socio-economic pressures and opportunities. This has implications for gender power relations. For Keeping rice in the pot 45
example, men often leave to seek income-earning opportunities outside the settle-ment. Women whose husbands are away are situated in different power relations within their household and in the public domain compared with women whose hus-bands are always present. Married daughters and daughters-in-law, especially those whose husbands are absent, who live with parents and parents-in-law also have different obligations and pressures to those women living with their husbands in their own household.
By the 1990s, the structure and composition of households in the settlement had shifted in contrast to the nuclear family household model used by transmigration planners to calculate labour availability.10While the majority of households in Harapan Jaya were still nuclear households with husbands living and working in the settlement, there were a significant number of households where the woman was the head. Poverty and poor agricultural conditions meant that many married men took opportunities to earn money outside the village. During a period of a year, over a quarter of male heads of households worked away for various periods of time, some only briefly and others almost continuously. Women in these house-holds became de facto female heads in their husbands’ absences and the main source of agricultural labour for the family. In addition, about 5 per cent of house-holds were headed by widowed or divorced women as de jure heads of household.
The standard male-headed nuclear household model had implications for the allocation of state resources. Decisions as to who was to be included in projects, such as the cattle distribution project, were at the discretion of village authorities and relevant government officials. Participation usually correlated with the power and influence wielded by the household head and the strength of his links to local authorities. Women who were de jure household heads were entitled to participate in village development activities but they were usually not invited or were not con-fident enough to attend or list their interest. Furthermore, these women were not considered farmers in their own right, nor to have the farming expertise required to participate, even though they might be quite capable and want to be involved. One woman explained her objection to women’s exclusion from the cattle distribution project and her determination to confront this narrow thinking: ‘The government thinks that we [women] are less responsible – for instance, they think that if the cow escapes at night a woman would be frightened to go looking for it. However I have bought a cow myself privately – not from the project. If I lose it, it’s my loss.’
In addition to male-headed nuclear, extended and female-headed households, another form of household within the village was the polygynous household, where men spent part of their time with each wife (8 per cent of married women had been a co-wife at some time). The prospect of a husband taking another wife was greatly feared by women in the settlement. It meant loss of status, indignity and the likeli-hood of economic and emotional disadvantage. It also had significant impact on women’s labour, usually increasing it to make up for the loss of some of the hus-band’s labour time. In polygynous relationships, it was unusual for wives to live in the same residence. However, in one case in a neighbouring village, two co-wives lived together, apparently harmoniously, with their husband. The first wife in this unusual case had not been able to have children. She had agreed to her husband 46 Gaynor Dawson