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The unheard voices of female workers at their workplaces
Knocking off: Workers head home from work at a factory in Cakung, North Jakarta
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span class="inline inline-center">Knocking off: Workers head home from work at a factory in Cakung, North Jakarta.(Courtesy of Factory Workers Federation (FBLP) of Cakung)
Every year to celebrate May Day, Indonesian workers take to the streets and march together with their fellow comrades from all over the world.
The main topics of May Day rallies include minimum wage, working hours, health care and welfare. Female workers in the country still face a disturbing problem –sexual abuse and harassment in the working place.
A collective of female workers in Cakung, North Jakarta, are trying to raise their voices over this problem, which is often overlooked.
The collective created a documentary called Angka Jadi Suara (Numbers Become Voices), which highlights the lives of female workers at the Kawasan Berikat Nusantara (KBN) industrial complex in Cakung.
The KBN complex is home to a variety of garment factories and the majority of its 50,000 workers are women. Yet female workers remain under the threat of sexual abuse and harassment from their male colleagues as shown in the documentary.
Directed by Dian Septi Trisnanti, who is a worker at the KBN complex and the secretary general of the Factory Workers’ Federation (FBLP) in Cakung, the 22-minute documentary is a no-holds-barred presentation of the nightmares that took place inside the industrial complex.
The documentary features interviews with a number of female workers who decide to speak, albeit anonymously, about the sexual abuse they have endured.
Based on the interviews, the survivors of the sexual abuse depict the conditions, in which cat-calling, groping and rape occurred behind the walls of the factories.
Some of them are so terrified of the constant sexual harassment that they pray constantly for their machineries to work because when a machine breaks down, that means they need to call mechanics – who are all male – to fix it. They live in fear of the potential for verbal and/or physical harassment.
“I hate them. Their voices and derogatory words keep ringing inside my head, no matter how hard I try to forget,” one of the interviewees said.
Some of the female workers have been contemplating of suicide as a result of the harassment and others have wound up pregnant after being raped by male supervisors, according to the documentary.
Jumisih, the chairperson of the FBLP, which has been advocating for the victims since 2012, said most of the sexual abuse victims were too afraid to fight against their abusers because they were often afraid of having their contracts terminated.
“Some of the abusers are their supervisors, and they often threaten the female workers with contract termination if they speak up about being sexually abused,” Jumisih said.
In addition, survivors who come out are often shamed by their superiors, who are mostly male.
In one scene, for example, when Jumisih meets with one of the members of higher management, they received a surprising statement from him in which he said that the women had dressed inappropriately and that those who claimed cat-calling was a form of sexual harassment were just exaggerating.
“I was so angry, but stayed composed. I had to because I knew my colleagues were ready to speak out against him, too,” she said.
Jumisih said she could stay composed because she thought the supervisor was naïve and had not received proper education on what sexual harassment was.
In the documentary, the action that she and her colleagues take focused on how to educate all workers and people in management on sexual harassment and to demand the factories install large anti-sexual harassment banners to raise awareness.
So far, Jumisih and her colleagues have been successful in the installment of large banners with anti-sexual harassment messages.
However, the struggle to eradicate sexual harassment is ongoing and the documentary, according to Dian, provides a glimmer of hope to make more people aware of another important workers’ issue.
“We want to show female workers who face sexual abuse that they have our support and we want the government to also pay attention to this issue as well,” Dian said.
Angka Jadi Suara will be screened for the public at the KBN complex in Cakung, North Jakarta, on May 17.
