Building Political Voice from Below: Counterpublic Infrastructure Among Women Garment Workers in Indonesia

Workplace exploitation and the silencing of workers’ voices are sustained not only through labor regimes but also through communicative arrangements that shape whose experiences become audible, legitimate, and politically consequential. Limited attention has been devoted to how women workers in the Global South use poetic and performative communication to articulate justice claims under conditions where formal channels of participation are constrained or unsafe. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Nancy Fraser’s three-dimensional framework of justice, this article examines two poems and one prologue performed by women garment workers during a Marsinah Day commemoration organized by an independent labor union in North Jakarta, Indonesia. Analysis demonstrates how the texts transform experiences of wage extraction, gendered devaluation, and communicative exclusion into collectively intelligible claims for redistribution, recognition, and representation. Findings further suggest that these performances function not merely as expressive texts but as forms of counterpublic infrastructure sustained through ritual sequencing, collective address, affective coordination, and organizational mediation. By foregrounding communicative conditions of political voice, the article contributes to communication scholarship, labor communication studies, and debates on counterpublics by offering empirical insight from the Global South.