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CHAIRPERSON

Dr Lin Qianhan, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

ABSTRACT

Drawing on on-going ethnographic research conducted since 2008, this paper examines some of the pressures and uncertainties that relatively educated, but underemployed young men face in the competition over jobs in heavy industries in the city of Cilegon (Banten), Indonesia, against the background of the upcoming privatisation of the town’s biggest steel factory, the state-owned company Krakatau Steel. Previously heavily protected, following the 1997 Asian financial crisis and subsequent downfall of the Suharto government in 1998, Krakatau Steel faces a growing competition with China and continuing pressure to further integrate into the global market, bringing into focus issues of economic insecurity and changing job prospects at the steel factory. For young men who have invested in education in vocational and technical training institutes with the expectation to find stable salaried employment in the industrial estate, these developments present new opportunities and challenges.

While Krakatau Steel and other companies in Cilegon’s industrial estate are forced to move away from nepotistic recruitment practices that were common in the Suharto era (1966-1998), local youths from working class and lower middle class backgrounds find that their educational background often leaves them badly prepared for the job selection processes. In the context of high youth unemployment rates and perceptions that workers from other parts of Indonesia are more skilled and better equipped to access jobs in Cilegon’s industries, purely meritocratic recruitment is not always perceived as being in the interests of young inhabitants of provincial towns. Instead, local youths try to improve their job prospects by cultivating relations with local politicians and by organizing themselves to pressurize companies to hire young workers from Banten.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Suzanne Naafs is a postdoctoral fellow in the Changing Family in Asia cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Suzanne’s research interests lie at the intersection of youth studies, development studies and cultural anthropology, with a geographical focus on Indonesia. Her dissertation which she plans to revise into a book manuscript is an ethnographic study of lower middle class youth and their education-to-work transitions on the Indonesian island of Java. The study examines how relatively educated young men and women navigate the contemporary opportunities and uncertainties associated with educational change, flexible labour markets and neoliberal globalisation.

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