Non-judicial mechanisms in global footwear and apparel supply chains: lessons from workers in Indonesia

This case study describes how Indonesian garment and footwear workers, and allied organisations have used a combination of strategies to pursue their rights, which includes engaging with local and international non-judicial mechanisms. The case study analyses their efforts to influence the local and global forces that determine their working conditions. Major footwear brands who sell their goods globally produce the factories under study. Issues: Although Indonesia’s labour laws are relatively progressive, its enforcement strategy and industrial dispute resolution remains weak. Workers who collectively organise and take industrial action in pursuit of improved wages and conditions can face significant intimidation and threats to their job security. The underlying commercial model of the global manufacturing sector does not promote improved working conditions. Suppliers are under pressure to minimise the cost and speed of production while still meeting quality requirements, and these pressures are frequently passed on to workers. Non-judicial redress mechanisms: The Indonesian trade unions we interviewed generally use a combination of strategies to pursue rights grievances, including strikes and protests; engaging the media; collaborating with global campaign networks to influence the reputation of brands in consumer and investor markets; reporting rights violations to local police and other law enforcement agencies; and lodging complaints with multiple local and international non-judicial redress mechanisms. The expectations the trade unions have of a non-judicial redress mechanism is based on their previous experiences with it. Unions often use mechanisms to achieve purposes that would not necessarily have been envisaged by those who designed the mechanism’s grievance handling procedure. In order to understand how non-judicial redress mechanisms can contribute to the resolution of rights-based grievances, it is therefore necessary to look beyond their role as discrete processes and consider how they interact with other judicial and non-judicial mechanisms and other claim-making strategies. Our research suggests that, considered from this perspective, non-judicial redress mechanisms can play a more useful role than is apparent when they are considered in isolation. Arguably, this should be taken into account when non-judicial redress mechanisms are designed or reformed, so that each mechanism can play the most useful role it can within the array of possible means of seeking redress. However, while we found evidence that combining strategies in this way can result in improved respect for workers’ rights, in those cases where some form of human rights redress was achieved, it was generally partial and in some cases the improvements in respect for human rights proved to be temporary. As such, while strategically pursuing simultaneous complaints and other claim-making strategies through multiple grievance mechanisms operating at different scales can enhance Indonesian garment workers’ chance of achieving meaningful redress, this enhancement should not be overstated.