Organizing the Unorganizable: Unions, NGOs, and Indonesian Migrant Labour

Abstract There has been little engagement between the organized labour and labour migration literatures. Studies of organized labour movements in Asia have traditionally focused on trade unions that organize workers in factories, in offices, and on the plantations of the countries in which those unions are based, or on international cooperation between such unions. Studies of migrant labour, on the other hand, have tended to emphasize the demographic features of labour migration flows, or the experiences of migrant workers in either their country of origin or their host society. Yet, with the help of local and international non‐governmental organizations (NGOs), migrant workers from countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia are beginning to organize both at home and abroad. This article examines the emergence and operation of both migrant labour NGOs and migrant labour associations from a labour movement perspective. It focuses on the schism between the literature on labour migration, in which descriptions of migrant labour NGOs most often appear, and the literature on organized labour, which has generally ignored both the increasing significance of temporary overseas labour migration and the role of non‐union bodies in the organization of labour. Examples from Indonesia and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China (herinafter Hong Kong) are used to argue that the experiences of migrant labour NGOs and migrant labour associations should be taken more seriously by trade unions and by the scholars who study them.