Women and Labour Organizing in Asia: Diversity, Autonomy and Activism

This book investigates the role of women and labour activism in Asia, demonstrating that women have been active in union and non union based campaigns throughout the region. Although focusing primarily on women, the contributions to this book address issues that affect all workers. Chapters on China, India, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Bangladesh examine the part that female labour activism has played inside, and outside, formal union movements. Whilst documenting the peculiar factors characterising individual national contexts, the book emphasises the similarities in women’s experiences of union and labour activism and the barriers women labour activists have faced. It considers the relationships between women union members and activists and male officials and union members, links with other social movements – particularly the broader women’s movement – and the details of specific labour campaigns and struggles. In doing so, it provides a full account of the role of women in union activism in Asia, covering all the major economies of the region, and successfully challenging the prevailing conception of Asian women workers as passive and uninterested in industrial issues.

Kaye Broadbent is currently based is in the Department of Industrial Relations at Griffith University, Australia. Her research interests include the impact of gender on work and industrial relations and gender and unions in a comparative context. Her publications include Women’s Employment in Japan: The Experience of Part-time Workers (2003), also published by Routledge.

Michele Ford chairs the Department of Indonesian Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on the Indonesian labour movement, labour migration in Southeast Asia and women and work. She is co-editor, with Lyn Parker, of the edited collection Women and Work in Indonesia.