ABSTRACT
Tangerang, approximately 35 kilometres to the west of Jakarta, is one of
Indonesia’s foremost manufacturing centres. However, local residents rarely work
as factory workers in the industrial establishments surrounding their neighbour-
hoods. Instead, migrants – many of them women – comprise the majority of the
labour force in the factories across the region. Unlike rural ‘factory daughters’, who
are able to commute daily to work (Wolf 1992), these urban migrant workers estab-
lish a relatively permanent urban existence far away from Indonesia’s rural hinter-
land. Factory work exposes these urban migrant workers to very different
conditions and experiences from those of the rural settings in which they grew up.
