People say Jakarta is a magnet, a city that promises a thousand dreams. Is that really true? 

In this special edition, Konde.co meets several women who once lived in the countryside and then moved to Jakarta. Their lives are squeezed amidst the city’s hustle and bustle.

Ajeng Astuti, Working as a Domestic Worker to Support Her Parents

A cramped 20-square-meter room in an alley was Ajeng Astuti’s first home when she moved from the village to Jakarta.

The house, with walls made of bamboo, was later covered with tarpaulin and cement sacks. These cement sacks were essential to cover the bamboo so the contents of the house wouldn’t be visible from the outside, and to keep the house from getting too cold at night. They also used oil lamps to light the house, as they couldn’t afford the expensive kerosene lamps. 

In addition to the bamboo walls, the floor was still made of dirt.

“We often looked for used cement sacks and old calendars to cover the bamboo. Our floor was also made of dirt, so sometimes we’d use that paper as a doormat,” said Ajeng Astuti, as she began recounting their first rented home to Konde.co on March 26, 2026.

At that time, Ajeng Astuti had just left her hometown in Pati, Central Java, to join her parents, who had already moved to Jakarta. 

She was only 10 years old at the time; her father worked odd jobs, ranging from helping a friend sell goods at Pasar Rumput in the Manggarai area of Jakarta, to selling cendol, peddling chicken noodle soup, working as a construction laborer, working in a factory, and finally becoming a security guard. Meanwhile, Ajeng’s mother had always worked as a domestic worker (PRT).

Coming from a large family, Ajeng is the eldest of seven siblings, she eventually followed in her mother’s footsteps, becoming a domestic worker when she turned 15. 

Read more: Indonesia’s Garbage Emergency: Scavengers Buried Under Mountains of Garbage in Bantar Gebang

“Back then, I was offered a job at a neighbor’s house to fill in for a friend who had gone back to her hometown. The work wasn’t difficult, it was just like doing chores at home.”

Ajeng intentionally took a part-time job, needs commuting back and forth and limited her duties to washing, ironing, sweeping, and mopping so she could look after her younger siblings. For Ajeng, the work she did was to help her father and mother support the family financially. She also stopped attending school after second grade so her younger siblings could go to school. 

Since then, Ajeng has worked as a domestic worker, and she is now 47 years old.  

“Life in Jakarta is tough, really tough, but going back to the village isn’t an option anymore. We don’t have any rice fields; we’re just farm laborers, often going hungry, the land is barren, and our livelihood is unpredictable.”

When living in the village, they had to farm and do whatever work was available just to eat. For instance, they worked as farm laborers to earn rice, then planted cassava, sweet potatoes, and corn to prepare for times when the harvest was poor. As for vegetables, they got them from the front yard of their house, which they cultivated themselves.

“Regardless, Jakarta has provided us with a livelihood and new income, we’ve gained life experience in a new place. That’s what keeps us staying in Jakarta.”

Additionally, in Jakarta, Ajeng Astuti can manage her time more freely, choose her friends, and get involved in organizations. Unlike in the village, where there were often many rules and the atmosphere was quiet because, at that time, few young people remained in the village, everyone had migrated to the city.

Read more: Indonesia’s Garbage Crisis: The Irony of Women Amid the Stench of Garbage

Ajeng Astuti is currently active in the JALA PRT organization and still lives in the Cilandak area of South Jakarta with her husband, mother, and two younger siblings. However, her current rental house is much larger, it has two rooms and spans 50 square meters. She once bought a house in Bogor, but was only able to make payments for three years; after that, she had to sell the house because she could no longer afford the installments.

Ajeng’s husband works as a cleaning service staff at an office in West Jakarta. Ajeng herself works as a domestic worker for expatriates in the Kebayoran area. When she goes to work, she can take public transportation, specifically the mikrotrans, which is accessible for free. Ajeng also feels her salary is decent because she works for expatriates or foreign nationals living in Indonesia.

“Over time, this is what makes me feel at home in Jakarta. I have many friends, I can share our struggles, I can organize, and I can make new friends who share our fate.”

Lami, Rejected by Jakarta from Day One

Ajeng is not alone; in another part of Jakarta, Lami also came to the city from the northern coast of East Java when she was just thirteen years old. 

Although she has spent much of her life in Jakarta working as a garment worker, she initially worked as a domestic worker in Jakarta. 

“Auntie, I want to go to Jakarta!”

Lami pleaded repeatedly to go with her aunt, who was returning to her hometown in Tuban and would come back to Jakarta after the first Eid following the financial crisis.

Since childhood, Lami had seen people returning to their hometowns for Eid looking so impressive. They usually came back wearing new clothes. Stories passed from mouth to mouth at street stalls and along the beach about the city, salaries, and a life where one didn’t have to hide under a neighbor’s porch when someone came to collect a debt.

“But back then, what really pushed me to go to Jakarta was seeing some people come to Jakarta as migrant domestic workers, you know, and then return home with money. So, since I went to Jakarta back then, I graduated from elementary school and went to Jakarta at that time,” Lami recounted during a late-night conversation with Konde.co before she left for Jakarta (March 26). 

She went along; she didn’t leave or set out on her own. Going along was more like someone who found the current and chose not to fight it, not out of resignation, but because fighting it wouldn’t lead anywhere anyway.

Read more: 2025 Year-End Edition: Women’s Resistance in the Season of Arrests and the Year of #DemocracyApocalypse

His grandmother couldn’t bear to let her go. Her mother, who, in his view, had a complicated and hard-to-read way of doing things, eventually let him go.

And so it was that a thirteen-year-old from Tuban, with an elementary school diploma whose ink was barely dry and a head full of visions of multi-story houses, big cars, and fancy clothes, boarded a bus to Jakarta with her aunt.

Upon arriving in Jakarta, the lingering atmosphere of Eid was still palpable. That night, the Jakarta sky was the color of used cooking oil.

Lami—who is now 41 years old—didn’t remember the name of that area back then. All he knew was that he was now in Jakarta, the “Golden Triangle” a big city with big dreams. It made sense that he had many dreams and hopes, even if what he envisioned was different from other kids his age.

That night, Lami simply sat on a plastic stool by the roadside, next to her aunt who had brought her to the capital, in front of a nasi uduk cart whose steam rose straight into the hot air of Semper, North Jakarta. It was only after she began to feel at home there that she realized where she was on that night after Eid al-Fitr in 1999.

In Lami’s imagination, Jakarta was tall buildings, shiny big cars, and glass windows reflecting off the sky like a city untouched by dust. There, she always imagined money falling like rain in December, and that fate could change as long as one worked hard enough.

Read more: 2025 Year-End Edition: A Season of Persecution Without Transition in the Age of #DemocracyApocalypse

But what she saw more often were dusty streets, houses crammed together in narrow alleys, cardboard boxes on shopfronts serving as the softest beds for people, and electrical wires hanging low like a giant spider building a web.

The Jakarta she’d often heard about back in the village didn’t exist. There were no stories of people returning to their hometowns with new clothes and pockets full of money, just as little Lami had once dreamed.

The atmosphere at Sunda Kelapa Harbor, Jakarta / Photo: Luviana Ariyanti

Lami’s thoughts were actually disrupted when she met a girl her own age at the time. The girl was younger than her. All she could see clearly was her large, rounded belly beneath a tattered dress, and both her hands rummaging through a pile of trash while clutching her stomach.

The girl didn’t look up; she didn’t even realize someone was watching her from behind the nasi uduk cart. She kept rummaging through something that seemed all too familiar.

“There I saw a girl my age, just a few days into her time in Jakarta; I saw she was pregnant and rummaging through a pile of trash. My heart truly broke at that moment. Because back in my village, well, we really couldn’t make ends meet anymore, you could say life was hard or something. I’d never seen anything like that before. It kept me awake all night,” Lami recounted.

Read more: Stop Tech Misogyny: The Long Chain of Gender-Based Cyber Attacks and Disinformation

Back in the village, Lami was already familiar with poverty. She knew what it felt like, growing up in it, sleeping in it. But the poverty she knew was a poverty that still had land to stand on, a sea to look at, neighbors to hide with under the village hall when debt collectors came. So being poor was indeed hard, but it had a face she recognized.

In Jakarta, Lami also saw houses made of cardboard, crammed with people inside.

“Then there was this time my aunt took me to play at one of her rental units, you know, near the shops back then, and there was this cardboard house? So when I first came to Jakarta, I was stressed because seeing that at my age, felt like an emotional clash, like ‘how is this even possible?’ I thought houses were supposed to be nice, but here was something like this,” Lami reflected.

Beyond that, Lami also had issues with her body, and she realized this once she arrived in Jakarta. She said having long hair wasn’t good for work; there would definitely be a lot of obstacles.

“On top of that, my aunt at the time, because my hair was long, said, ‘Your hair is way too long; you can’t work like this,’ so they took me to a salon and cut it so I couldn’t tie it up, more stress. So I was really stressed out back then as a newcomer to Jakarta, you know.”

“Yeah, maybe I was still naive, still innocent. I think that’s had an impact on me until now. I still remember that.”

Read more: Stop Tech Misogyny: When AI Becomes a Tool for Manipulating Women’s Bodies

An internal clash. That’s the phrase Lami used thirty years later, when she recounted this over the phone. As if Jakarta were two trains coming from opposite directions and colliding inside the chest of a young girl who hadn’t even finished understanding it yet.

According to estimates from the 2000 Census, approximately 1.6% of Indonesia’s total population (or around 3.3 million people) were classified as homeless. In the early 2000s, the number of homeless individuals, specifically those without a home in the Jakarta Special Capital Region was recorded at 28,364 people.

Two decades later, with changes in data collection methods, a 2020 report by the Jakarta Social Services Agency noted that the number of homeless people in the capital stood at 1,044. This group constitutes the largest segment among those categorized as Persons in Need of Social Welfare Services (PPKS).

In the modern era, data from the Social Services Agency over the past four years shows that approximately 5,000–8,000 people are reached each year in Jakarta. However, this figure reflects the government’s enforcement capacity more than the actual number of homeless people. 

With the “hidden homeless” group remaining unrecorded, the Social Affairs Department’s official statistics which are designed to capture only those in the system, risk downplaying the scale of the problem and driving policies focused on controlling public spaces, rather than addressing the root causes of poverty and housing.

Read more: Stop Tech Misogyny: Misinformation on Social Media Used to Trap Victims of Human Trafficking

Lami was born and raised in the northern coastal region of Java, a place where fields and the sea have coexisted for centuries. In Tuban and other northern coastal areas, people live between two worlds: to the north, the sea and fishing villages; to the south, rice paddies and fields. Her family lived in that gap. Unfortunately, the sea was out of reach, and the fields were beyond their grasp. 

Lami was born into a family that worked as laborers both on land and at sea. They had to work for others as fish processors whose fishing boats were also owned by employers or even companies. Likewise in the south, as farm laborers whose wages were uncertain, depending on the prices set by landowners and middlemen.

Historically, in the 1990s, women owned only about 8.8 percent of the land in Indonesia. Although land ownership by women increased to 24.2 percent by 2020, control over productive resources remains dominated by men. About 30 percent of workers in the agricultural sector are women, but many do not have formal rights to the land they manage.

The latest data from the 2023 Agricultural Census shows that only about 17 percent of adult women in the agricultural sector have secure land tenure rights, far compared to 52.92 percent of adult men. 

This is the reality faced by Lami’s family and other women. Her grandmother was a woman who worked before the sun rose and stopped after the sun set and even those boundaries weren’t always fixed.

Selling boiled corn by the beach or working as a cotton farm laborer. Whatever was available, whatever could bring in some income even if it was small and uncertain.

Baca juga: Prabowo-Gibran’s One-Year Report Card From A Gender Perspective

Every day, little Lami whose life hadn’t even spanned a decade walked beside her grandmother, carrying a bowl of sambal in her hand, toward the still-dark beach in the early morning, to where people gathered before the boats set out.

“Back when I was really little, before I even started school, my grandmother would take me to the beach to sell boiled corn, boiled peanuts, and sometimes urap. I’d carry the sambal,” Lami recounted.

In Lami’s family, it was the women who struggled. Her grandmother. Her mother. And her aunt. These women kept moving to the fields, to the market, to the beach, to other people’s kitchens, all the way to Jakarta while the men in Lami’s story were often absent or unreliable.

“At that time, I suppose what I realized was that in my family, it was the women who were the ones struggling like my grandmother. As for the men, well, they didn’t really put in much effort. My grandmother was the one who, so to speak, provided for our daily meals; she sometimes sold things too. My mother was the same. And my father, well, he passed away after I was born, and then my mother was married off to a neighbor and that’s how it was,” she said wistfully.

By the time she turned eight, Lami started working on her own. In her village, there was a kumbung stone quarry, grayish-white stones cut from the ground and transported for construction materials. Lami joined as a laborer at the quarry despite the high risks.

Read more: Arrests at the End of the Day: Arrested While Hanging Out, Allegations of Sexual Harassment

Then, during the fish-drying season, Lami helped spread the caught fish on bamboo mats under the sun, alongside other women and children who turned them, arranged them, and kept them safe from flies or simply being bothered by cats. Likewise, when there was a road construction project, Lami took part as a worker there.

“I started working at age 8. In my village, there was a kumbung stone mine, and I helped carry the stones there. So I’ve actually been working since I was little, because my grandmother was also a cotton farm laborer; I still remember back then, she’d often take me along to work. That’s why I’m very critical about how our lives depend on these things.”

In a day, Lami earns five thousand rupiah. If there’s work. If there’s no project, no employer needs extra hands, and no fish needs to be dried, then there’s no five thousand. Life depends on the season, on the weather, and solely on the decisions of those who own boats and have capital. 

Before school started each morning, Lami was already out of the house. Selling fried snacks, selling lottery tickets. Whatever she could sell, she sold. After school, she went back to work. She walked the distance from her village to the beach because there were no vehicles and she couldn’t afford to ride on the back of someone’s motorcycle. Sometimes she didn’t get home until after Isha, after the sun had completely set and the sky above Tuban had grown dark and full of stars, with the night breeze from the sea offering no comfort to her hungry stomach.

In coastal villages like the one where Lami lived, there were traveling banks known as loan providers who went from house to house, offering money with suffocating interest rates.

Read more: From MBG Watch to Protests, Civil Society Demands an End to MBG

Under this mobile banking system, for example, on a loan of Rp 1,000,000, the borrower receives only Rp 900,000 after a 10% administrative fee is deducted. They must then pay installments of Rp 30,000 per day for 40 days, totaling Rp 1,200,000. The effective interest rate is approximately 0.75 percent per day, or about 30 percent over 40 days. 

The terms used for them vary, flowering banks, traveling banks, and other terms coined by locals without mincing words to describe their nature: devil banks.

“(Roaming banks) are very common in villages. Even now, my mother told me yesterday that she herself once got caught up in a loan. They’re called ‘flower banks,’ ‘devil banks’, there are many names for them, and they like to drop by. (The debt) could start at 5 million and end up over 10 million.”

Grandma Lami’s fried snack business barely turns a profit. When it’s not enough, she’s forced to borrow because there are no other options available. The interest on the “devil’s bank” when she borrowed grows faster than the profit from any fried snack. So she borrows again to cover the first loan. And so on, like a staircase where every step leads downward.

“My grandma’s profits were very small, you know. Since the profits weren’t enough, she’d think, ‘It’s okay, I’ll just take out another loan later,’ like that. Take out another one later to pay off that other bank. Then another one, then another one, like that, over and over,” she said angrily.

For little Lami, the “devil’s bank” instilled a fear more real than any kind of demon adults told stories about to scare children.

Read more: MBG Must Be Stopped: Poisoning Scandals, Gender Bias, And The Shadow Of The Military

How could it not? As soon as the roar of a motorcycle was heard from the end of the alley, her grandmother would spring to her feet, pulling her hair if necessary, then dragging her to hide under the table.

“Because back then, I remember it so clearly, to avoid that roaming bank, I was even taken to hide under tables, under the neighbors’ porches. Then onions, grated coconut, we’d carry those around, hiding all sorts of things. I’d run around with Grandma.”

Imagine that: a grandmother and her granddaughter, running as fast as they could, hiding under tables, or sometimes in neighbors’ porches, carrying onions and whatever else they could carry, holding their breath, waiting for the sound of the motorcycle to pass.

Amid all that, there was one thing Lami wanted but never dared to say out loud: she wanted to go to school.

Some of her friends were able to continue their education. Lami watched them leave every morning with different backpacks, heading to different buildings, heading toward a future that, in her imagination, felt broader than what was available to her.

“Back then, wanting to continue my education felt like something I couldn’t bring myself to tell my parents because of our circumstances and situation. So, from a young age, I was probably forced to be self-reliant,” said Lami.

Lami grew up in an environment where dreaming about school was something you couldn’t voice without feeling guilty. Because voicing it meant placing a burden on people who were already perceived as having sacrificed too much.

Read more: Celebrity Politics: How Can We Avoid Being Fooled by Image Polishing?

Lami is a young woman who was told that her birth was a debt. Her life is a duty to repay it. Working since she was eight, not continuing her education after taking off her red-and-white school uniform, and leaving for Jakarta at thirteen were ways to pay off something she never asked to borrow.

“My mother also demanded, ‘I’m the one who gave birth to you, you know. You do eat at your grandmother’s, but if I hadn’t given birth to you, you wouldn’t have been born.’ It felt like there was a burden, like my birth wasn’t just a simple thing; her life was tied to it, so I had to help, I really had to help, right.”

Three years after her dreams in Jakarta had settled behind her employer’s walls as a domestic worker, Lami briefly returned to her village.

She tried to return to the beach, to the fish, to the jobs that had once sustained her before she left. But the village she had left behind was not the same village she returned to, or perhaps the village hadn’t changed; it was just that Lami had already come to know that other possibilities existed, and that understanding couldn’t simply be set aside.

So around 2003, Lami returned to Jakarta once more. This time, not as the thirteen-year-old girl who had followed her aunt. This time, with a single goal she’d been dreaming of since working as a domestic worker: she wanted to work as a factory worker in a garment factory.

Read more: Sexism in Student Arrests and Maternal Activism Mothers Defend Their Children’s Struggles

“Enough already, I want to try again at the factory. Because that dream from back in 1999 or 2000 was just imagination, you know, ‘is it even possible?’ Then finally I came here, wondering if I could actually do this job,” she recalled of that time.

Until finally, at the end of the road standing between Lami and the factory gate was a piece of paper. A diploma. Or more precisely, the wrong diploma, from the wrong school, at the wrong level.

“Since I was confused, I just told the security guard honestly, ‘Sir, my diploma is just an elementary school one, but I’m here to work with my hands, Sir,’ I said. But I proved myself there, I worked there for quite a while.”

The security guard let her in. Lami then worked at the garment factory long enough to prove that her argument was correct.

Inside the factory, Lami discovered a world unlike any she had ever lived in before. It wasn’t easier. The garment factory was a place where women’s bodies worked to meet production targets that were sometimes downright unreasonable. The constant noise of sewing machines that never stopped during work hours. The air was filled with invisible fabric fibers that drifted in and entered the lungs without permission. Standing or sitting in the same position for hours on end, repeating the same movements thousands of times a day, until her fingers knew the motions by heart without needing instructions from her brain.

But there is something here that isn’t found in any of the employers’ homes Lami has ever lived in.

“Because when they go home in the afternoon, they go in a big group—it looks so fun. Whereas I work as a domestic worker and never get days off like that.”

Going home in a group means there are others going through the same thing. It means there’s someone to talk to, to vent to, to laugh with when everything feels too heavy to bear alone.

The factory where Lami works produces clothing for brands whose names are displayed in the windows of major malls around the world: Zara, Adidas, Reebok, and even The North Face. In every jacket, pair of shoes, or T-shirt purchased by someone in London, Tokyo, or even São Paulo, at a price that, for Lami, is equivalent to several months’ wages, there are hands like Lami’s that sew, cut, inspect, fold, and package them.

“So back then, the Governor’s decree set the salary at, say, around 2 million, but the company claimed it could only afford to pay about 1.8 million at the time. It turned out that at my factory, production actually ran continuously, the production line never stopped. We even used to produce for Zara; we worked on Zara, Adidas, Reebok, and TNF. I was involved in a lot of garment work back then. So for about two years, our salaries didn’t follow government regulations.”

For two years, Lami and hundreds of women at that factory received wages below the required amount, while on the production floor, orders for Zara and Adidas kept rolling out. The company claimed it couldn’t afford it. Labor organizations proved the company was lying.

Indonesia is one of the world’s most important garment and textile producers, holding a 2.4 percent global market share and ranking sixth as a global supplier. The industry employs 5.2 million workers, and women dominate the workforce in all garment and textile factories. Yet it is women who bear the brunt of the worst working conditions, face greater physical and mental safety risks, and suffer from wage gaps and career disparities. 

Women make up the majority of the workforce in Indonesia’s textile industry and ~80 percent in the footwear industry. They generally work under precarious and inhumane conditions. 

The global supply chains that funnel profits to major brands in wealthy countries are built on the backs of women like Lami.

“Back in 2010, our sectoral minimum wage was actually raised because there was a major protest at the time. But ironically, the areas that ended up with the highest increases were places like Cikarang, where the sectoral minimum wage went up. We’re just in the textile sector (which didn’t see an increase). So the sectors that got the big raises—the ones that saw significant hikes—were metal and electronics, that sort of thing,” she said.

The textile sector, which employs the most women and whose products are the closest to the human body, is the sector furthest from the negotiating table where those figures are decided.

In 2012, the textile factory where Lami worked went bankrupt. Severance pay didn’t arrive on time or in the correct amount. Lami and her friends had to fight to secure the rights of laid-off workers after years of sewing for Zara, Adidas, and Reebok.

“Back then, it was because the factory went bankrupt. After 2012, I couldn’t get that job anymore, so I kept going back and forth to my hometown at the time to handle the rights issues with my friends,” said Lami.

A comparison of the financial performance of the two global fashion industry giants for which Lami once sewed, Adidas and Zara (Inditex) shows a significant surge in accumulated capital over the past two decades. 

From revenue of approximately €6.7 billion in 2005, Inditex—the parent company of Zara—now reports sales of €39.9 billion with a net profit of €6.22 billion in 2025. Adidas also saw a surge in profits from €336 million in 2005 to €1.377 billion in 2025. 

The capital accumulation of these two giants is underpinned by the labor of millions of women workers like Lami, who face low wages, precarious work, minimal protections, and layoffs without severance pay. 

These corporate giants grow on the backs of workers; the owners and capitalists dance atop the accumulated capital, while Lami, a tiny cog in the global production machine, has almost no room to determine her own fate, teetering on a fine line between survival and being swallowed whole.

After that, Lami drifted aimlessly. Too far from her village to call Jakarta home, too long in the city to return to her village easily. She truly became a young woman’s caught between two worlds and not fully belonging to either.

Amid the process of securing her severance pay, Lami couldn’t stop moving. Because stopping meant going hungry.

“Then, after that, since I didn’t have a job anymore, I worked at a pecel lele stall for a while, and eventually I was offered a job at this organization. I also sold soto. I’d join my friend in the mornings to sell soto, since I was the one cooking the soto at the canteen, I’d start in the morning. At 3 a.m., I’d go shopping for coconut milk, then buy chicken to make the soto,” she explained.

At 3 a.m., she buys coconut milk and chicken. Then she cooks soto for the cafeteria. Meanwhile, she’s also trying to secure her severance pay, which might not even come through.

After that, Lami tried working at a factory again in Majalengka, which was located far from everywhere.

“Well, that factory was really far from anywhere. I was dropped off at the highway, and I even had to be helped by someone because there was no road, I had to climb up to the highway. Then I ended up working there for four or five months in Majalengka because it was so remote; I stayed with some friends and their husbands at first. But when a place is that far from everything, even if you have money but no vehicle, you just can’t get by back then,” she continued.

Regardless, Lami had to keep working, no matter how difficult it was, especially since at home, Lami was a single mother with one child; she had divorced her husband. People at kept asking her why she didn’t bring her child with her to Jakarta?

“At that time, I felt that if I worked, since I was divorced from the child’s father, I didn’t want my child to see me struggling to make ends meet in Jakarta. Where would I leave the child? I’d probably feel even more uneasy about that.”

“And maybe because it would have become an issue by then, he would see my situation with his father like that,  seemed like an obstacle; it didn’t seem like a good idea. It seemed better for my child to stay in the village with my mother and my younger siblings, letting him go to school there. First, because of financial circumstances; second, because of the psychological aspect. I thought about that.”

In Jakarta, nothing is free. Childcare isn’t free. Even time isn’t free; every hour Lami spends taking care of her child is an hour she can’t use to work, and working is the only way she can support both herself and her child.

So her child was left in Tuban with her family. The decision was made within a space whose walls are poverty, uncertainty, and the absence of a social safety net that the state is supposed to provide but has never truly been there for women like Lami.

The distance between Jakarta and Tuban is about eight hundred kilometers. In monetary terms, that distance is the cost of a bus or train ticket that must be spent or withheld due to more urgent needs. In terms of time, that distance is a full day’s journey that cannot be undertaken lightly.

And in terms of emotion, that distance turns out to be immeasurable.

Meanwhile, from Tuban, the demands keep coming if she has to stay in Jakarta.

“The thing is, my family in Tuban still depends on me. For example, if I ask for help, I have no choice but to stay and that means I’m also causing trouble because I can’t take care of my child on my own. I still have to ask my family for help. So, I ask my family for help, and at the very least, I have to contribute to my child’s needs, my mother’s needs, and so on.”

“For example, if my younger sibling wants to get married or needs something, they’ll definitely ask me for help, for instance. Well, I’ll borrow money first. Later, I’ll at least use it to pay off a month’s worth of debt, let’s say a certain amount and pay it off in installments. The rest is enough for me to get by for that one month.”

When asked how she manages to make ends meet with a small salary that has to be divided up, Lami replied that since she was a child, she’s known how to get by on very little money.

“Because since I was a child, I’ve learned how to manage money. If I have money, I’d save it in a bamboo jar like that. Even as a child, I didn’t want to end up trapped in debt like with loan sharks. I was very afraid, because that might cause its own traumatic effects.”

Memories of the predatory loan sharks ultimately became an experience that left a lasting mark on her way of thinking and decision-making. The bamboo tube where she saved her money became a symbol of the way of life she holds dear: set aside before spending, taste first before enjoying.

But even the most meticulous architect cannot build a sturdy structure from insufficient materials.

A year of saving. Gone in a week during Eid.

It wasn’t because Lami lacked discipline. But because Eid is the time when that eight-hundred-kilometer journey must be made, and when someone who hasn’t returned home for a year finally comes back, they bring everything they can carry. Because coming back empty-handed would mean telling everyone waiting that a full year of work yielded nothing.

“When it comes to finances, if you really break it down, it’s not much different, saving up for a year. Whether working in a factory or as a domestic worker, we save up for a year but it’s all spent in a week during Eid. Because, you see, people in Jakarta assume that those who migrate to Jakarta, especially those from the countryside have plenty of money. ‘Jakarta’s got plenty of money,’ they say, but in reality, if you get sick, finding work is like turning things upside down.”

Jakarta has plenty of money that myth doesn’t die even though the reality has proven the opposite time and again. It persists because migrants lack the strength to openly declare that the myth is a lie. Because admitting that Jakarta isn’t better than the village means admitting that all those sacrifices weren’t worth it.

Lami currently works at a legal firm in Jakarta; it’s been nearly nine years. There, she’s encountered a world quite different from the factory and employer’s home environments she’d known for decades.

“It turns out that didn’t undermine the fact that I did learn to read, joined communities, and all that. That was one path, one of my healing processes. I joined gatherings, I got involved in organizations. That was one way to chip away at my lack of self-confidence.”

“From the very bottom of my lack of self-confidence, I had to be honest about it, you know. That’s tough, right? I wasn’t confident, but I had to admit that I hadn’t gone to school. Healing that took a long time. Not feeling confident because we didn’t go to school while seeing our friends who did.”

Countless people suggested that Lami go back to school, even though she was already in her thirties at the time. Lami listened to them all, weighed her options, and finally decided to accept that learning can come from anywhere.

“But I’m back to square one. Maybe I’d just accept it if I didn’t go to school. But because I believe there’s a greater hope I’m striving for my child. So, it’s fine if I don’t go to school; what matters is that my child gets an education. Given my circumstances, I have to accept that. Well, I’ll just focus on doing my job well for now. It’s okay that I’m not in school anymore; what matters is my child,” she explained.

Lami didn’t give up on herself. She shifted her hopes and ambitions to where she believed they were more likely to come true: her child. 

Her son grew up in Tuban with his grandmother; he’s now in high school, no longer having to hide under the community hall to escape debt collectors or choose between school and work before sunrise.

Even so, deep down, she still regrets not having had the courage to pursue an education in her time.

“If only time could be rewound, with the awareness I have now, I often ask myself: why didn’t I go to school back then? Even if I had to start over, I might still have left home. But what I regret is why I was afraid to have aspirations back then? Even just wanting to go to school felt like something I didn’t dare to say,” she said.

That regret once turned into disappointment that blamed her family’s circumstances as the root of the problem. But Lami eventually realized that her family was also a victim of a system that had never been fair to women in coastal communities like hers.

“I used to blame them; there was disappointment, as if my family didn’t care enough. But then I realized, that wasn’t the issue. It wasn’t just the family. There were other factors that should have been involved: the community, the village chief, even the regent. Someone should have noticed, someone should have cared. But back then, it felt like people were living in their own little worlds. As if no one truly saw each other’s circumstances.”

Lami doesn’t offer an easy message to other women who will embark on the same journey.

Her experience as a migrant worker has made Lami realize that moving from the village to the city is a journey of shifting risks and perhaps even prolonging them. What is left behind in the village, economic constraints, social pressures, and limited access often takes on a different form in the city: job insecurity, unequal relationships, and a lack of adequate protection.

For female workers like her, especially in the domestic sector, job security is not a right that is automatically guaranteed. The relationship between workers and employers still often relies on informal agreements without strong legal protections. In such conditions, hope alone is not enough.

“Hope is always there; it’s definitely there. But it must be balanced with understanding and knowledge. That whether in the village or the city, nothing is truly guaranteed.”

“Don’t imagine, for example, that moving to the city guarantees success, a secure job, or a stable job, it doesn’t work that way. Even the relationship between domestic workers and employers hasn’t been fully and clearly regulated by law or the government to this day. Although there has been some attention in that direction recently.”

“When we look at our friends, both in Jakarta and in the villages, we understand what conditions are like in the villages. The needs in the villages are different, there are traditional demands, and there are social needs that must also be met. Then, when wanting to change one’s fate by moving to Jakarta, that must be clearly considered,” she concluded.

Lami and Ajeng are just two of the millions of women who travel back and forth every year in the massive exodus known as mudik, only to return to Jakarta because they have no other choice. She left as a young girl following the current. She persists as a woman who knows that current was never meant to take her where she wants to go.

Ratri and Hana: The Fate of Young Migrant Women

Ratri (29), a woman from Kebumen, Central Java, also experienced migrating to Jakarta. 

From a young age, Ratri was no stranger to work. Her mother was a street food vendor, and her father was a day laborer who sometimes came home without any money. Ratri is the eldest of three siblings. She once worked at a small printing shop in Kebumen, relying on her knowledge and skills in graphic design.

“I worked from morning until night, but my salary was only enough for food and to help out a little at home,” she told Konde.co on Thursday, March 26, 2026, recalling that time. 

“I used to wonder, is this how my life is going to be forever?”

At that print shop, Ratri handled everything—from designing invitations, banners, and stickers, to occasionally being asked to help deliver orders. She learned quickly, often even outshining the business owner in creativity. But her creativity was never truly valued. Ratri felt she wasn’t just underpaid; she was also being held back from growing.

That’s where the idea to leave Kebumen came from. Not because anyone invited her, not because she had some romantic dream, but because of the mounting boredom.

“I just wanted to know if I were somewhere else, what could I become?” she said.

To make a long story short, Ratri landed a job as a junior graphic designer at a small creative studio in South Jakarta. 

Her salary was indeed higher than in Kebumen, but the cost of living in Jakarta quickly eroded that difference. It turned out that the “big” income in Jakarta was just to cover living expenses that were becoming increasingly suffocating. It was also “paid for” with overtime disguised as “flexibility” a common buzzword in today’s creative work. In the end, all that remained for Ratri after sending money back home and paying her bills was just enough money and utter physical and mental exhaustion.

“Sometimes I work until 10 p.m., going home just to sleep. That’s if I don’t have work to bring back to my dorm; sometimes I’m still on the clock at 2 a.m.,” she said.

On the other hand, Ratri still felt that something was different. For the first time, she felt that her abilities were starting to be recognized.

“Your design is interesting; try exploring it further,” her supervisor said one day. That simple sentence kept her going.

Unlike Ratri, Hana (32) came to Jakarta in December 2022 in a more impulsive way, almost as if swept along by the current. She is from East Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara; she grew up in a farming family and has been helping her parents in the fields since she was a teenager.

Hana actually didn’t have a clear plan for the future. She had worked at a small cafe in Mataram as a barista, a job she enjoyed because it gave her the chance to meet many people. There, she began hearing stories about Jakarta from friends who had moved there before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“In Jakarta, working at an agency can earn you 6 million, Han. Even more,” a friend told her one night.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, especially if you can design or create content. There are plenty of opportunities there.”

Those stories kept repeating, like a mantra that slowly shaped a new conviction within her. Jakarta became a kind of vision: a city with high salaries, vast opportunities, and a life that seemed more “alive.” Without much thought, Hana immediately started looking for jobs based in Jakarta and set off with her savings. Her only “provisions” were a job interview offer and hundreds of job applications she’d sent out all over Jakarta. She didn’t deny that she was being reckless by heading there.

“I thought, if my friends can do it, I can too,” she said.

Hana didn’t really know what life in Jakarta was like, especially as a young woman without a strong network. She brought only courage, a little savings, and hopes largely built on other people’s stories.

Hana arrived in Jakarta a few months later, only to find a reality far different from what she had imagined. She didn’t immediately land a job at an agency, as her friends had described. Without a strong portfolio, she struggled to break into the formal creative industry. To make matters worse, she arrived in the midst of the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had led to a significant wave of layoffs and a shrinking job market. One thing he had missed from his friend’s story the other day was that the friend had also been a victim of mass layoffs under the pretext of “efficiency” during the pandemic.

Eventually, she began working as a freelance content creator for several small business accounts from writing captions and taking product photos to managing social media. However, her status as a freelancer also meant her income was unpredictable.

“There are months when I can make a decent amount, but there are also months when it’s really slow,” she said.

She lives in a cheap boarding house on the outskirts of Jakarta, sharing a room with two other people. Sometimes, to save money, she eats only once a day.

“I used to think it was easy to make money in Jakarta. Turns out, it’s not that easy,” she said.

For Ratri and Hana, Jakarta isn’t just about hard work. There are other layers they have to face as women. For example, Ratri was once verbally harassed by a client.

“Hey, if you want to meet, let’s do it outside of work hours, okay? So it’s more relaxed,” the client said via message.

Ratri politely declined, but the messages kept coming and growing more personal, increasingly uncomfortable. She reported it to her supervisor but the response was disappointing.

“Well, just keep your distance. But don’t let the client slip away.”

That statement made her realize that even at work, her safety is often not a priority. What matters is the profit, her safety as an employee is a low priority for her workplace.

Meanwhile, Hana faces a different challenge, but one that is no less difficult. As a freelancer, she’s often underestimated. Being told she charges too much for “just” creating content is something she experiences frequently. Hana has to constantly prove that her work is valuable, that creativity isn’t something to be taken lightly. Moreover, as a woman, she’s often underestimated because of her gender unlike her male colleagues who find it easier to gain others’ trust.

Sometimes, she also feels trapped by beauty standards and visual expectations.

“If you want more clients, you have to ‘sell yourself’ more on social media,” said an acquaintance. Hana isn’t comfortable with that, but she also knows that algorithms often don’t favor those who don’t follow those unwritten rules.

The journey as a young female migrant is often not easy. There were times when Hana almost gave up.

“I just want to go home,” Hana repeated her statement to a friend, about three months after she became a freelance content creator in Jakarta. “I’m tired, and I feel like I’m not good enough to make it here.”

In the end, though, Hana stayed in Jakarta. She decided to stick with content creation and is now able to send part of her earnings to her family in Lombok. 

For Ratri, moving away was a conscious decision to break free from limitations. For Hana, however, it was the result of hopes fueled by others’ stories. Yet both learned that Jakarta never truly gives without demanding a harsh return.

They learned that working in the creative industry isn’t just about creativity, but also about negotiation, resilience, and often painful compromises. They learned that as women, there’s an extra layer of vulnerability to face, from harassment to wage inequality. But amidst all that, they also found something they couldn’t get back home: space to get to know themselves and each other.

So for Hana and Ratri, who arrived in Jakarta just as the city was transforming into a modern metropolis, Jakarta is a ‘dilemma.’ It is a place where dreams hang but are often hard to reclaim.

Why Do Rural Women Come to Jakarta?

Ajeng’s experience as a domestic worker, and Lami’s, who once worked as a domestic worker and laborer along with other women’s stories are similar: they came to Jakarta seeking a better life. 

The factor is poverty in the village that cannot be resolved.

This also reflects a survey conducted by the National Network for Domestic Workers Advocacy (JALA PRT). The survey, conducted in March 2026 among 90 JALA PRT members, revealed that for domestic workers, Jakarta is the destination city to transform their lives of deprivation in the village. 

The factor is poverty in the village. In the village, their parents usually have many children. They can only attend school up to elementary school because the school is far away and they have no transportation to reach it. As a result, from a young age they have become farm laborers or stone gatherers by the river, or stone-breaking laborers earning meager wages. 

They have to take action to help their parents.

“They are truly poor and have nothing when they’re in the village,” said Lita Anggraini, coordinator of JALA PRT, while presenting the results of a survey on the conditions of domestic workers in the Jakarta metropolitan area to Konde.co on March 26, 2026.

Village conditions are dire, leaving women with no other alternatives. This is what is called taking a chance, testing one’s luck in a life that is harsh in every way. The bodies of women living in the village must adapt quickly to life in a fast-paced, mechanized metropolis.

90% of the domestic workers who leave for the Greater Jakarta area are of school age; the majority are elementary school graduates, followed by junior high school graduates, and then high school graduates.

“So 74% are elementary school graduates or child domestic workers, the remaining 25% are junior high school graduates, and high school graduates make up only 1%.”

The goal of going to Jakarta is clear: to support their families and younger siblings due to poverty. Jakarta also offers more job opportunities and easier access to work compared to rural areas. 

When asked why they prefer to work as domestic workers managing household chores, a job in a vulnerable situation due to widespread, often unseen violence and discrimination, Lita explained that it’s because they’ve never had the educational credentials required to work in factories.

“Their education only goes up to elementary and junior high school, so the only alternative is domestic work.” 

All the domestic workers in the survey who came to Jakarta had never been married. They went to Jakarta because wages there are higher than in other cities, and there are more job opportunities. They also saw their neighbors making money while working in Jakarta, so it’s no surprise that they were later brought to Jakarta by their neighbors.

To make ends meet, some now work in the households of local residents or Indonesians, while others work for expatriates or foreigners.

After 5–10 years working as domestic workers, they eventually find a partner in Jakarta, get married, and have children. On average, of domestic workers live in row houses, and 63% already hold Jabodetabek ID cards.

“As many as 82% of domestic workers are the primary breadwinners even after marriage, because their husbands typically work in informal jobs such as construction workers, gardeners, and drivers, street vendors, and some are unemployed or not working,” said Lita Anggraini.

These domestic workers then decided not to return to their villages because they wanted to make a living in Jakarta, trying to find subsidized housing in the Jakarta metropolitan area or rent a row house.

“Although life in Jakarta is very tough, it’s still more bearable than in the village because there’s an income, they can buy a motorcycle, rent a house, and some can even buy a home, even if it’s on installments. Jakarta also offers domestic workers a wide range of new experiences,” said Lita Anggraini.

However, as many as 37% of domestic workers still choose to keep their regional ID cards, because in their old age, they want to return to enjoy life in the village. So what they are doing now is saving by buying livestock and land in the village so that they can manage it in their old age.

Currently, most domestic workers work full-time but do not live in their employers’ homes. In households with expatriate employers, they can earn up to the regional minimum wage (UMR). In local households working full-time, they earn an average of Rp. 1.7 million to Rp. 2.5 million. For part-time workers in expat households, they earn Rp. 1.5 million to Rp. 2.5 million, and for part-time work in local households, they earn Rp. 600,000 to Rp. 800,000.

Currently, the number of domestic workers organized by JALA PRT is spread across 7 labor unions in 6 provinces: North Sumatra, South Sulawesi, Yogyakarta, Greater Jakarta (Jabodetabek), Central Java, and Banten. The total number since 2003 is 13 million, and the current active workforce is approximately 4.5 million people. Of this total, the largest number of domestic workers are employed in the Jabodetabek area.

At JALA PRT, in addition to organizing, they are provided with various educational classes, such as cooking classes, English language classes, sewing classes, article-writing classes, social media campaign creation, filmmaking, and other skill-building classes. Some are also enrolled in the Kejar Paket A, B, and C programs, and there are domestic workers who are later sent to college on scholarships. 

Yuni Sri is one of the domestic workers currently receiving a scholarship to attend college. She studies and completes assignments online in between her work shifts. 

Lita Anggraini stated that the organization provides these classes and offers domestic workers the opportunity to pursue education and transform their lives, or to gain knowledge they previously lacked, as most were only elementary school graduates when they began working in the city.

Currently, these domestic workers are also campaigning for the immediate passage of the Draft Law on the Protection of Domestic Workers (RUU PPRT) into law, with the sole aim of changing the fate of domestic workers.

“This law is crucial for changing the lives of domestic workers; the state has a duty to improve their circumstances,” said Lita Anggraini.

Herdiyati, a board member of the Urban Poor Network (JRMK), told Konde.co that within the JRMK organization, almost everyone left their villages due to poverty and a desire to improve their lives. However, upon moving to Jakarta, the conditions there are no less harsh. 

Herdiyati observes a stark class divide in Jakarta, where a marginalized class with limited access coexists alongside a wealthy class with abundant access. This marginalized class, lacking many opportunities, must struggle hard, trying their luck as laborers, informal workers, domestic workers, and so on. Meanwhile, the privileged class lives an easy and luxurious life.

“So if we want to change our lives, we must do it together, struggle together, organize together so that this marginalized class, which is often overlooked, can obtain their rights.”

JRMK then organized Jakarta’s marginalized communities to fight together from securing their own rights to advocating for others to have equal access. JRMK believes that change toward a just system cannot come from the elite but must be fought for by the people from below, and how crucial it is to organize the people as the foundation of the movement to restore sovereignty to the hands of the community.

A Collective Rejection of Newcomers

In 2025, the Jakarta Capital City Population and Civil Registration Office (Disdukcapil) estimates that approximately 10,000 to 15,000 newcomers will arrive in the capital after Eid al-Fitr, down from 16,207 people in 2024 and 25,918 people in 2023. 

This downward trend continues into 2026, with the Jakarta Provincial Government predicting that the number of newcomers will only range from 10,000 to 12,000 people. 

However, this decline in numbers does not mean the phenomenon of urbanization is subsiding. The average monthly income for young people in rural areas is only Rp 1.5 million, and more than 30 percent of young workers in villages earn less than Rp 1 million while in major cities, working in the formal sector can yield over Rp 5 million. It is this disparity that continues to drive migration flows, even as their intensity shifts. Jakarta is now even considered to have exceeded its ideal carrying capacity.

In 2017, the Jakarta Provincial Government released a spatial planning calculation stating that with a land area of approximately 661 km², the city’s ideal population should actually be around 7.5 million people.

The city’s maximum capacity is estimated to be able to support a population of up to 12.5 million by 2030. In reality, Jakarta’s nighttime population has already reached 10.6 million, and swells dramatically to over 14 million during the day due to the mobility of workers from the Jabodetabek metropolitan area.

From this mobility to Jakarta’s satellite cities, a new pattern of urbanization has emerged: not merely migration to the city, but also a shift to peripheral areas with persistently high vulnerability. In this context, housing, employment, and land management issues are interlinked and reinforce one another.

Fadhilah Isnaina, a researcher at LIPS Sedane, highlights that this issue is not merely about migration, but a multi-layered structural crisis.

“Housing and land in Jakarta are expensive, right? And now people are moving more to surrounding areas, where working conditions are just as precarious. This is a layered problem, it involves the failure to fulfill the right to space and housing, as well as labor policies. The government cannot control land prices; the market and land mafias are allowed to drive prices to extremes. Additionally, labor flexibility prevents workers from securing housing. Compounding this is a militaristic regime that increasingly facilitates the military’s control over land (acting as land mafias) and the seizure of people’s land.”

Looking at the reality in Jakarta/Greater Jakarta and other major cities such as Surabaya, Bandung, Cilegon, and even Bali, in recent years there has been a flurry of policies or appeals from local governments directed at migrants returning after Eid al-Fitr. 

Almost all local leaders emphasized the same thing: individual preparedness. Surabaya Mayor Eri Cahyadi even stated this explicitly as early as 2025.

“I’ll send them back if there’s no clarity, if they’re not working. If they don’t have a clear job, we’ll certainly consider not letting them enter Surabaya,” said Eri.

In 2026, Surabaya officially issued Circular Letter (SE) No. 400.12.2/7333/436.7.11/2026 on Anticipating and Controlling Population Mobility, which requires that newcomers must be verified as having employment.

“I ask the RT/RW leaders: if anyone enters Surabaya, please check to ensure they have a job. Their ID cards must be registered,” said Eri.

This is similar to what the Bogor Regency Government did in 2019, which carried out a law enforcement operation by prohibiting newcomers from entering “without a clear purpose.” 

Meanwhile, Jakarta has adopted a more open stance, though still conditional. Jakarta Governor Pramono Anung stated that newcomers must not become a burden on the city.

“Jakarta will not close its door, but those who come must realize that working in Jakarta is not easy, while also emphasizing that newcomers must not become a burden on the city.”

At the legislative level, this stance is reinforced by an emphasis on protecting local residents and selectivity, as stated by DPRD member Kevin Wu.

“The government’s top priority must be to protect Jakarta residents, along with encouraging newcomers to come prepared. They must bring a spirit of hard work.”

Other cities also exhibit similar patterns with varying emphases. Bandung Mayor Muhammad Farhan emphasized limited openness: “We cannot refuse, but remember, coming here shouldn’t mean becoming unemployed.” Meanwhile, Bekasi Mayor Tri Adhianto highlighted the importance of individual preparedness: “Moving away, cannot be done without provisions. You must have skills and be prepared.” In South Tangerang, the main requirement is job certainty: “If you already have a job, you can’t be stopped, but if you don’t, it’s best to stay in your hometown,” said South Tangerang Mayor Benyamin Davnie regarding the call for the post-Eid exodus. 

In Cimahi and Cilegon, however, the focus is more on local labor market conditions. Cimahi urges prospective migrants to first ensure job availability. Meanwhile, Cilegon emphasizes prioritizing its own residents: “There are still many local residents who are unemployed. The government must focus on that first,” said Cilegon Mayor Robinsar in the aftermath of Eid al-Fitr 2025.

When examined more closely, nearly all such statements and even policies stem from the assumption that the failure to survive in the city is due to the lack of preparedness among individuals who lack jobs, skills, connections, or meet administrative requirements. 

Elza Yulianti, a board member of the Indonesian United Labor Union Federation (FSBPI), argues that the migrant restriction policies advocated by various local leaders contain an illogical paradox: they ask women not to come to the city, while the government fails to provide the conditions that would allow them to survive in the villages. 

For Elza, this is a false solution that reverses the logic of causality, as if the victims of structural inequality were being treated as the cause of the city’s problems.

Elza also critiques this situation through the lens of the social backgrounds of officials, most of whom come from bureaucratic or business backgrounds which prevents them from having a working-class perspective. They have never experienced what migrant women workers go through, and thus are unable to formulate solutions that truly address the root of the problem.

“That statement, in my view, contradicts the vulnerabilities that are currently impoverishing rural communities. So, instead of seeking solutions on how they can work in the city under a fairer labor system”

“The government must also be more aware, and its labor agencies must be more attentive to ensuring workers’ rights are upheld when they face issues like outsourcing, short-term contracts, and so on,” Elza told Konde.co on March 27, 2026.

In line with Elza, Hariati Sinaga, a lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Indonesia, sees this as related to the disparity between urban and rural areas. Migrants are simply viewed as a ‘problem,’ even though they may have come out of necessity.

“Perhaps because in their regions, the sources of livelihood have become increasingly degraded,” said Hariati. “This might be caused by development projects that are actually aimed at extracting resources from the villages. Taken for use in the city, for example.”

Consequently, she added, it should logically follow that these cities are capable of accommodating the migrants. Including those who are forced to seek a livelihood in the city because their living spaces have become increasingly degraded or cramped.

“And it turns out these statements also reveal a common pattern,” Hariati remarked. “That is, the assumption that these migrants who are, so to speak, neglected will increase crime, for example, in the cities.”

“Yet on the other hand, it is precisely their vulnerability: they can be exploited or, more often than not, become tools of exploitation. A situation where they are exploited (for example) as cheap labor. They become cheap labor in such urban areas.”

However, the turmoil caused by various government programs that have stalled or failed according to Hariati could be an interesting turning point.

“How do changes occur as a result of, for example, cuts to the Village Development Fund (TKD) in villages. As a result of the MBG program and also the Merah Putih Cooperative,” said Hariati.

She believes this will further reduce the scope of public services and local government development in villages. Ultimately, this will actually increase migration from villages to cities, both within Java itself and from outside Java to the island, including to areas around the Greater Jakarta region.

Furthermore, Elza added that the ban on entering cities does not address the root of the problem because structural inequality exists in both areas, villages and cities. Asking women not to go to the city without improving conditions in the village merely shifts vulnerability, not eliminating it.

“In my view, this statement is completely contradictory when telling people they’re not allowed to enter the city, even though in the villages they can’t survive. So it’s a bit of a paradox, isn’t it? It’s a paradox,” she continued.

The second narrative emerging from officials is the push for migrants to “bring an entrepreneurial spirit” and establish Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs). A statement by a member of the Jakarta Regional Legislative Council (DPRD) hoping that migrants won’t become “street vendors or criminals” if they choose to start a business is the best example of a depoliticization mechanism: structural issues are framed as individual failures.

Elza firmly rejects this narrative. The glorification of MSMEs ignores the reality that newcomers arriving in the city lack the capital, networks, or infrastructure to start a business. She also criticizes government training programs for being bureaucratic, limited in scope, and failing to reach the intended targets.

“How are they supposed to run an SME business if they’re already struggling to afford rent for just two months in a new city, right? They’ve been laid off, yet starting a job in Jakarta also requires capital.

“This effectively negates their role as council members in addressing this inequality issue. Because, ultimately, these DPRD members do not come from backgrounds rooted in the working class, the urban poor, domestic workers, and so on,” Elza criticized.

The glorification of MSMEs is a government strategy to shift structural responsibility onto individuals. When a female worker fails to “start a business,” Elza argues that this failure will be viewed as her personal failure, not the failure of a system that has never provided her with capital, education, market access, or adequate social safety nets.

“Those structural issues are turned back into individual problems. So, these are actually structural issues that should be resolved or addressed by the state, the government, council members, mayors, public officials, and so on. But in the end, they’re turned back into individual problems,” she emphasized.

As a result, urbanization is not truly addressed. Those who arrive with greater resources will be absorbed, while those who arrive with limited means will be marginalized, sent back, or pushed further into the informal sector. 

Under these conditions, major cities merely maintain order on the surface, while allowing the roots of inequality to continue growing beneath it.

Income in rural areas is far from adequate when compared to that in cities. This situation is compounded for women, as it occurs within a labor market that remains gender-biased. 

Data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) in February 2025 shows that the average wage for male workers reached Rp 3.37 million, while female workers earned only Rp 2.61 million. This wage gap exists across all educational levels—from elementary school to university—with the largest disparity observed at the Diploma I/II/III levels.

Meanwhile, the female Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) in February 2025 stood at just 56.70 percent, far below the male rate of 84.34 percent, although the female figure rose more rapidly than in the previous year. The majority of working women remain concentrated in precarious sectors: domestic workers, seasonal laborers, and micro-entrepreneurs.

Women Forced into Slavery in Their Own Land

Thus, the most fundamental question regarding urbanization is not “why do they come to the city?” but rather “why can’t they survive in the village?” 

LIPS Sedane, through researcher Fadhilah Isnaini, explains that the root of this problem can be traced back to agricultural policies of the 1970s.

“As for urbanization, this has been happening since the 1970s, driven by the unfair policies of that era, namely, the Green Revolution. These policies led to growing class inequality in rural areas, particularly in the rice farming sector at the time. Wealthy landowners benefited even more from the new rice varieties. Middle-class farmers and landless farmers were unable to keep up with the new varieties, which required intensive (and expensive) care, so most of them sold their land and became landless or poor farmers.”

Furthermore, he added that the impact of this policy did not stop at the agricultural sector alone, but also drove massive population mobility:

“Some eventually chose to join government programs to migrate off the island. Unfortunately, this history continues to repeat itself to this day,” she told Konde.co on March 30, 2025.

In the current context, urbanization is not only occurring from rural areas to cities but also between regions with unequal levels of economic development. Economically constrained areas tend to “push out” their residents, while industrial zones become the primary magnet.

Fadhilah emphasized that the root of this problem remains the same: structural inequality.

“This also highlights the context that the rural economy isn’t much different from that in the city, namely, high class inequality leading to poverty in rural areas. Additionally, it’s not just urbanization from villages to cities, but from regions with low and impoverishing economies to other industrial areas.”

Hariati Sinaga agrees that the context of urbanization today, particularly for women, highlights the unequal access to natural resources in rural areas. 

Furthermore, development in coastal and rural areas actually perpetuates this inequality. Consequently, access to, control over, and ownership of natural resources, including in the agricultural context revolve around land.

“(Land) is controlled by a handful of people, you know. It’s also controlled by agribusiness,” Hariati criticized. 

Both of these statements align with data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) in the 2023 Agricultural Census. Structurally, land ownership in Indonesia is highly unequal, marked by a Gini coefficient of 0.58 in 2022, indicating that 1% of the population controls up to 58% of the nation’s land. 

This extreme inequality stands in stark contrast to the reality at the grassroots level, where the number of smallholder farmers, those with less than 0.5 hectares of land actually surged to 16.89 million people in 2023. This figure represents 60.84% of the total farming population and marks an 18.54% increase over the past decade. 

The shrinking living space for communities and the dominance of a handful of parties over this land ultimately trigger an escalation of disputes on the ground; as evidenced by the 2024 report from the Agrarian Reform Consortium (KPA), which documented 295 agrarian conflicts (a 21% increase from the previous year), involving 1.1 million hectares of land and affecting the livelihoods of 67,436 families. 

In 2025, the KPA recorded 341 agrarian conflicts (a 15% increase from the previous year), which have left 914,574 hectares of land in limbo and affected the livelihoods of 123,612 families.

These figures provide the context behind every decision a woman makes to leave her village. When farmland can no longer sustain a livelihood, whether because the plots are too small, fertilizers are too expensive, or technology is monopolized the choice to move to the city becomes the only option.

Elza explains that the agrarian reform promised by the government has never addressed the root of this inequality. 

By the end of 2024, land redistribution had reached only 26 percent of the national target of 9 million hectares. And most of it consists of asset legalization, not actual land redistribution to those who need it most.

“We have the UUPA, the Basic Agrarian Law, but it has not been implemented to this day by the government. There is still no serious political will from the government to address this structural inequality. Why land ownership? Because whether we like it or not, whether we want it or not, the people migrating from villages to cities are those who lack access to land ownership,” Elza explained.

Agrarian inequality is not gender-neutral. Land ownership by women in Indonesia stood at just 24.2 percent in 2020, while 30 percent of women work in the agricultural sector, often without ownership of the land they cultivate or as tenant farmers. The patrilineal customary inheritance system and cultural stigma against women landowners make women the group most rapidly pushed out of villages when an agrarian economic crisis strikes.

Instead of agrarian reform, according to Hariati, what has emerged are control mechanisms and ownership structures that favor capitalists rather than the people. As a result, the public is left with only the lowest-paying jobs: farm laborers or fishing laborers. Even along the coast, small-scale fishermen still have to “compete” with larger industrial fishing vessels.

“Imagine, for example, a fisherman who relies on manual nets having to compete with the fishing industry, which employs many crew members,” she said. “Then they use massive nets; in the past, some even used fish bombs to catch large quantities of fish immediately,” said Hariati. 

This situation results in industrial vessels catching far more fish than the small-scale fishermen in the area. Ultimately, they choose to become laborers and work for fishing companies rather than risk their fortunes at sea as independent fishermen with uncertain livelihoods.

On the other hand, the rising cost of education has pushed farming families to sacrifice their land or send their daughters to work in the city as breadwinners to fund their sons’ education. This reflects the logic of patriarchy, which views women as a mobilizable resource to maintain the family structure.

“There are also many farmers like that who send their children to college in the city. And they have to strain their finances to sell part of their land or mortgage part of their land to cover the increasingly expensive education costs for their children in the city. So all of this is intertwined. Economic, social, and political factors also greatly influence this structural inequality,” explained Elza.

Upon arriving in the city, migrant women do not find the freedom promised, they encounter more sophisticated forms of exploitation that are legally protected. The outsourcing system and short-term contracts, which are legally permitted under Indonesia’s labor regulations, serve as the primary mechanisms for profit accumulation by minimizing labor costs as much as possible.

The figures on mass layoffs in the garment and textile sectors dominated by women in 2024 validate Elza’s analysis. Women are the first to be hired when production increases, and the first to be laid off when the market slows down. 

According to Elza, this is an implication of a system designed to accumulate profits by shifting business risks onto workers.

“Within capitalism, capitalism mobilizes women as a reserve labor force meaning they can be hired and needed, hired and fired as capitalism demands through that system, the system of contract work and outsourcing. Furthermore, this patriarchal structure also imposes limitations it restricts women’s roles in social mobility. After being exploited in the factory, they still face exploitation in the domestic sphere because they must perform more domestic work.”

One of the most systematic mechanisms of exploitation is the gender-based wage gap. BPS data shows a consistent trend. Over the past decade, men have consistently been paid more than women for equivalent work.

This gap is inevitable. Elza identifies the ideological mechanism behind it: patriarchy provides a cultural justification that women are “merely supplementary workers,” not the primary breadwinners, making low wages seem reasonable. 

In reality, however, the majority of female migrant workers are the primary breadwinners for their families back in the villages.

“Capitalism also exploits this patriarchal ideology to legitimize paying female workers lower wages than male workers, right? So, they inevitably bear more responsibilities—more expectations, more demands from their families back in the village, which means they’ll definitely send money home and so on.” 

Shelly Adelina, a researcher at the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Indonesia (UI), views the situation of marginalized women migrating to major cities especially after Eid al-Fitr—as a convergence of various forms of gender injustice. This encompasses issues of class, space, ethnicity, as well as spaces for negotiation and the potential for change.

She offers an intersectionality approach popularized by Kimberlé Crenshaw. Through this approach, Crenshaw observes that women in this context, migrants—do not merely carry the identity of “women.” Often, they are also poor or from the lower economic class, come from rural areas, have limited education, and belong to ethnic or indigenous groups resulting in layered vulnerabilities. Consequently, policies and interventions must always account for the layers of identity and inequalities experienced by women. 

“Patriarchy in the village restricts freedom of movement, and the economic system creates exploitative informal work,” Shelly explained to Konde.co on Saturday, March 28, 2026. “Migration is the result of an unjust structure, not merely an individual decision. We must question: who controls women’s mobility?”

She continued, “In rural areas, women’s bodies are generally controlled by family, norms, and reputation. In cities, the same bodies become cheap labor or objects of exploitation. There is a continuity in power relations; only the form changes. Demanding the right to safe mobility for women is imperative to eliminate gender-based violence in the workplace, public spaces, or wherever women migrate.”

One of the demonstrators in Jakarta holding a poster calling for the abolition of patriarchy, which is always intertwined with capitalism. (Photo: Luthfi Maulana Adhari/Konde.co)

Shelly also added a socialist feminist perspective on the large number of migrant women working in the domestic and care sectors (informal). Their work is often unrecognized, unprotected, and not fairly valued. Yet, the work these women do is part of the care economy that sustains society, yet it is overlooked. Iris Young emphasized that understanding women’s conditions should not focus solely on their class and workplace roles, but also on their reproductive roles and sexuality, which profoundly shape the complexity of women’s experiences. Meanwhile, Alison Jaggar invites us to consider the situation where female workers no longer feel “human” while working because work is no longer a form of self-expression, but something imposed, controlled by others, and causing her to become alienated from herself and her own humanity. This is what places women in a state of alienation.

Meanwhile, Hariati Sinaga analyzes women’s migration experiences from a feminist political economy perspective. According to her, one key aspect to observe is the interconnection between urban and rural development. This helps us understand the impact of development on women. 

This includes when destructive development agendas and extractive industries are promoted under the guise of ‘national strategic projects,’ even though their implementation lacks any feminist perspective whatsoever.

“In fact, they eliminate or destroy livelihood spaces, particularly for communities especially women,” Hariati told Konde.co on Monday, March 30, 2026. “That is one of the reasons they eventually have to seek their livelihoods elsewhere. Including, in part, in the city.”

Hariati added that in this situation, the city presents its own challenges due to development that tends to be urban-centric. She refers to this as “urban bias.” 

“Thus, certain dreams emerge; intertwined with the deterioration of rural communities’ livelihoods. This includes the increasingly limited living spaces for women in rural areas. Consequently, this becomes one of the drivers of forced migration,” she said. “One such reason is to seek livelihoods or economic opportunities in urban areas.”

Outside of factory hours, female workers get no rest. They still have to handle domestic chores. A 2023 ILO survey on Indonesian women’s perceptions of work found that 79.3 percent of female workers bear a double burden, while 61.6 percent of male respondents acknowledged that their wives or sisters face the same situation.

When layoffs come one after another, especially in labor-intensive sectors, these women have no safety net. They are pushed into the informal sector: becoming street vendors, laundry workers, or domestic workers. And in the informal sector, they face uncertainty once again no contracts, no BPJS, let alone severance pay.

“So they have no choice but to survive within that highly flexible system. Or when they are laid off, they are dragged into the urban informal sector. What are some examples? They end up being pushed into street vending, for instance, or laundry work, or domestic work, you know. Where they also become increasingly vulnerable, you see, because they live in slums or in the city, you know, in areas that are prone to eviction,” he explained.

Unlimited Solidarity and a System That Must Be Smashed

If there is one place where migrant female workers can find a safe space, it is the labor union. However, Elza also offers self-criticism regarding patriarchy, which is not only entrenched in factories and households but also reproduces itself within the resistance organizations themselves.

The dominance of masculinity within the union means that issues most urgent to female workers—such as sexual harassment , daycare, lactation rooms, and maternity rights—often do not make it onto the priority agenda of the struggle. The 2024 Workplace Conditions Survey of 134 garment companies confirms this: 70 companies do not provide menstrual leave, 32 companies do not pay full wages during maternity leave, and 1 in 23 respondents reported cases of sexual harassment at their workplace in the past year.

“The dominance of masculinity within labor union organizations remains a major challenge for unions. First of all, there are many union leaders who are dominated by masculine men who often do not view women’s issues as a priority such as daycare, cases of sexual harassment, or the need for lactation rooms, maternity rights, and so on and these issues remain difficult to accommodate within unions still dominated by men,” Elza criticized.

Barriers to women’s organizing do not stop at the union’s patriarchal structure. Elza outlined the layered barriers that every female worker must navigate to actively participate in organizing:

• Domestic barriers: Union meetings are usually held outside of working hours (in the evenings or on weekends), precisely when women must attend to domestic chores. They even have to “negotiate” with their husbands or families to be allowed to leave the house.
• Ideological barriers: Many join unions out of pragmatic concerns (seeking legal protection against layoffs), not out of class consciousness or a commitment to the struggle.
• Structural barriers: Short-term contracts and outsourcing make women afraid of losing their jobs if they become too active in organizing.

“When female workers want to organize, they must have—and are required to have—the ability to negotiate regarding domestic work, with their husbands, and with their families, right? Even when they just want to leave the house, they have to negotiate with their husbands, right? They have to negotiate with their husbands to be allowed to participate in union activities. Then, once they’ve organized and become active in the group, they face another obstacle: ‘Oh, it turns out the organization is dominated by men,” she added.

At FSBPI, where all members are women from various regions across Indonesia, Elza witnessed how primordialism fanaticism regarding identity attachment can become a trap that fractures solidarity. 

For example, workers from Java tend to group with fellow Javanese, as do those from Sumatra or Nusa Tenggara. This regional sentiment is exploited whether consciously or not by the system to prevent the formation of a broader class consciousness.

The strategy to overcome this is to build a narrative of solidarity based on class analysis: that all women workers, from the garment sector to the palm oil plantations in Kalimantan, from the nickel mines in Morowali to the fertilizer industry, are part of the same class and experience exploitation by a capitalist system that merely changes its masks.

“The solidarity we’re building is rooted in a working-class perspective. Why is it so important to emphasize this class perspective or class analysis? Because they, too, come from the proletariat. In the villages, they were trapped and exploited by the capitalist system. That’s why they came to the city to survive. But it turns out that in the city, they’re trapped by that same system as well,” Elza explained.

The slogan “All Workers Are Laborers” at the May Day rally in Jakarta. (Photo: Luthfi Maulana Adhari/Konde.co)

Furthermore, Shelly added Elza’s perspective from the labor union. She provided several points for critically reviewing the implications of policies and interventions regarding the protection of female workers who migrate from the countryside to the city.

First, formal recognition of women as managers of the household economy. Women must be given access to assets and decision-making. Second, support for the local economy through access to capital, training for strategic and practical gender-related needs, and market access. This way, women are not solely dependent on remittances.

Third, reducing the workload by improving public services such as water, health, energy, and childcare, as well as enhancing rural infrastructure. Fourth, changing social norms by shifting perceptions of the head of the household and reducing gender-based social control. 

On the other hand, Shelly urges us to view migrant women not merely as victims, but as women who possess agency. This means they are capable of making decisions despite their limitations. Migrant women are also capable of empowering themselves and building networks as a survival strategy. They transform their families’ lives through remittances, even funding their children’s or family members’ education. 

“So, migrant women are not just victims; they are also actors who negotiate with the system,” she emphasized.

(Translated by Theresia Sanubari)