Abstract:

Despite being the key player in the Indonesian economy, garment industry is indicated to have poor working conditions with excessive daily targets and long working hours. The poor working conditions cause workers to spend most of their live in factory, having little time for their other responsibilities at home, thus leads to work-family conflict. Even though a lot of studies have examined issues regarding work-family conflict, only a few studies bring this topic to garment industry, especially in Indonesia. This research tries to understand the working condition of Indonesia’s garment workers and how it affect their personal life. We examined how social support from family and coworkers has reduced the conflict that the workers’ experience. We undertook ten focus group discussions with garment workers from five different cities in Indonesia. Data were collected between June and July 2018 and were proceeded using qualitative method with guidance from Strauss and Corbin (1998).  Five main themes were discovered. Furthermore, we conducted an analysis to see the difference between gender, and marital status. Our results show that, working condition in garment industry in Indonesia is generally bad as it leads to work-family conflict. All workers experience work-family conflict despite their gender and marital status. The difference rise from the main source of the conflict for each gender and marital status. Social support, from family members and co-workers, has important roles in reducing the work-family conflict experienced by the workers, in which social support from family members will reduce conflict from family domain and the support from co-workers will reduce conflict from workplace domain. This study recommends to reduce daily targets and replace them with more sensible daily targets, which provide workers with less working hours that could help lower their pressures, decrease fatigue, and drop work-family conflict. Moreover, other policies that encourage workers to balance their personal and work life are predicted to give more positive impacts.