Ethnography research with Indonesian female factory workers: challenges and strategies in the field

Abstract

My interest in conducting research on the Indonesian female workers in Malaysia’s manufacturing sector was piqued when I was informed by an acquaintance, a Malaysian labour outsourcing agent who recruited female labour migrants, that there was a significant number of female Indonesian migrants in Malaysia’s manufacturing sector. For myself, this topic challenged me in my role as an "insider" doing research in my own backyard while seeking to understand at the same time as an "outsider" the experience of female migrants from Indonesia working in the manufacturing sector. Due to the lack of access to women through their place of work, I had to be creative in order to connect with Indonesian women. This often meant hanging around places where Indonesian migrants gathered, such as street eateries, bus stops and sidewalks outside factories in order to make contact with women who had finished their shift or were waiting for a shuttle bus to transport them home. I developed various strategies including the approach I call “walk-in recruitment” to try to get interviews. After a series of rejections from Indonesian and local informants in the first couple of weeks of fieldwork, and after considering that none of the State Government agencies could provide adequate information or statistics about the factories that employed Indonesian women or even women of any nationality, I decided to use basic information obtained from the Internet. This yielded specific information about the number of companies operating in each of the industrial zones in Melaka. Armed with that information, I went to every mentioned district and asked the factory’s security guard about the possibility of Indonesians being employed at their factories.