Bersama Menuju Keadilan (BUKA) or Towards Fairness Together is a Yayasan Care Peduli (CARE) project which was implemented in West Java from July 2018 to October 2020.1 The project was implemented in Sukabumi and Bandung districts and was implemented by CARE and the Trade Union Rights Center (TURC). The project partnered with 7 trade unions in 21 factories across the two districts.
The goal of the project was to improve working conditions in garment factories in West Java through evidence-based negotiation and collective bargaining between unions and factory management using publicly available data. The project aimed to improve the capabilities of women garment workers and their unions to collect, analyse and use publicly available data in negotiation and collective bargaining with factories, resulting in particular in more gender-responsive Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBA). The project was designed on the assumption that publicly-available data could be used as the basis for evidence-based negotiation and bargaining between unions and factories, and that this form of evidence-based bargaining based on public data would lead to more successful bargaining and improved working conditions. The project also aimed to ensure that the evidence-base, data and lessons learned from the project became accessible to the wider labour movement and civil society in Indonesia.
An emphasis on gender justice was mainstreamed within the project objective, outcomes and activities. Women constitute the majority of the garment sector workforce in Indonesia and they are disproportionately impacted by worker’s rights abuses and face differential impacts on the basis of their gender. Women are also inadequately represented within union leadership and in collective bargaining, resulting in their voices and experiences not being reflected in the outcomes of bargaining. The project prioritised building the capabilities of women union members in particular on data and bargaining skills, encouraging the presence of women within negotiation and bargaining teams, developing a peer network of women leaders, strengthening union understanding and identification of the disproportionate and differentiated impacts of poor working conditions on women, and supporting the agreement of CBAs which are more responsive to those realities.