W

ith a middle eastern motif decorating its gargantuan green facade, from a distance one might mistake the Tanah Abang market for a large mosque.

However, instead of prayers and contemplation, the building is a monument to commerce. Standing inside the textile and apparel market, the sound of hundreds, if not thousands of vendors and customers negotiating, fills the air. The markets 6,800 traders make a collective daily turnover that would make an upscale mall envious.

"The market's transactions can generate up to Rp 600 billion *US$60 million* in revenue every day," Hery Supriyatna, spokesman for the Tanah Abang market, told The Jakarta Post recently.

Hery says the market has been around since 1735, its position as a distinguished player in the textile and garment business cemented long ago.

After a fire raged for five days in 2003, destroying most of the kiosks in the market, in 2005, the municipal authorities, along with state-run market managing company PD Pasar Jaya, renovated Tanah Abang, particularly the severely damaged Blok A section, turning it into the ornate green building it is today.

But the market is just one link in a chain of transactions. From factories in the north and west of the city, the clothes are brought by porters to the market where they are sold on to buyers who receive their purchases via a delivery service before selling the products in their own shops.

Right near the entrance of the market, a middle aged man sat Monday between packages of clothing wrapped plastic ties, with names and addresses in blue marker indicating the goods were destined for as far away as Vivian in Lampung.

"The buyer came to the market today to shop and she will sell this clothing to her customers," Maman, whose job is to safeguard the packages as the porters package and stack them, said.

Buyers flock to Tanah Abang for the wholesale prices, which are considerably cheaper than elsewhere. Using an express delivery service, the products, ranging from batik to children's apparel, are delivered across the nation each day.

"The porters," Maman said, gesturing at the young man dressed in the official green Tanah Abang porter t-shirt next to him, "have the duty of taking these packages to the buyers' cars or the delivery trucks."

A few hundred meters away, in the Jatibaru neighborhood, the porters, along with drivers and other workers at the delivery service's headquarters, were busy loading the packages onto massive trucks.

The porters are just one small player in the intricate web of the Tanah Abang market, urban expert Abdoumaliq Simone says.

"In much of the business there you see they take a certain volume and they break it down and they re-wrapped it and send it on. And then whoever receives it bundles it again into another size," he explained.

This system is the key to Tanah Abang's ability to sustain the livelihoods of so many people, Simone explained.

"It's all about pluralizing and diversifying scales," he said, "And that diversification of scales provides literally thousands of jobs."

According to Hery, the traders in Tanah Abang mostly came from West Sumatra, and many have inherited the business and kiosks from their parents.

"They live in areas that are mostly far from Tanah Abang, such as Kedoya and other areas in the west and north," he said.

Areas such as Kedoya in West Jakarta and Pademangan in North Jakarta are home to those at the other end of the chain: the workers who produces the textiles.

"Apparel made from t-shirt material is usually made in the Kedoya area," Ferdian, who owns a kiosk in the market, said.

"But most of the traders here, especially those selling clothes similar to these, get their supply from Pademangan," he said, motioning to his wares: mostly women's work clothes.

Over in Pademangan, the whirring sound of sewing machines greets those who wander the area's dusty streets.

For decades, the area has been home to hundreds of thriving home textile industries. These factories usually employ less than 20 people and use machines long outdated by the technology used in bigger, more formal factories.

The Tanah Abang-Pademangan network provides all businesses involved with a great deal of room for negotiation, Simone said.

"You can have 25-30 people who work in different lines of whatever is fashionable - so they don't specialize any one particular kind of apparel. And then you have household operations that specialize in one particular thing," he explained, "And then you have entrepreneurs in Pademangan that are mostly Chinese who invest in the businesses."

This makes for a largely decentralized industry, which straddles the line between the formal and informal sectors. "And it's not entirely just but it provides a network in which people from different classes can deal with each other," Simone said.

Lung Han, who owns one of the textile businesses in Pademangan, said that his minimum order is 60 dozens, an amount his 16 workers can finish in a day.

His workshop is a scarcely ventilated five-by-five meter room, but the workers don't seem to mind too much, chatting merrily as they do their job.

"I usually receive orders from Tanah Abang and Jatinegara," he said, "The kiosk owners send their materials already cut according to the pattern, and we assemble them and then send the finished products back."

Another Pademangan business owner, A Bay, said that networking played a crucial part in the business. "You know the kiosk owners personally, so you would have two or three loyal customers," he said, "And you should know your workers personally too, because finding skilled workers is not easy."

Most of the workers in Pademangan are contracted for three to six months.

"I like contract-based working better," Botak, who operates a sewing machine, said, in between chatting with his boss. "I can move from one place to another as I choose."