The Impact of Globalization on Indonesia and Indonesian Apparel Workers (2009)

Undergraduate: James Gulledge

Faculty Advisor: Thomas Oatley
Department: Philosophy

---

The plight of Indonesian workers in the apparel and textile industries is by now familiar. Anti-union discrimination is rampant. Workers who try to unionize are demoted, fired, or physically assaulted. Often the military and police themselves use force to repress Indonesians’ attempts to exercise their fundamental human rights. The International Trade Union Confederation notes that labor strikes in Indonesia “remain characterised by police intervention and violence."
Given the normatively reprehensible circumstances that Indonesian apparel and textile workers toil in from day to day, what impact has globalization had on these conditions? This presentation will seek to answer this question. In order to answer it, however, a distinction must be made between trade liberalization and globalization. Trade liberalization can be considered as an increased reliance on market forces, while globalization is a more generic term for an increase in any international transactions. This presentation will show that trade liberalization (as promoted by establishments like the World Trade Organization) can be quite harmful in some cases, but that other aspects of globalization have had enormously positive results for Indonesian workers in the textile and apparel industries.