LITMIR.BIZ

      There are five women weavers working at home in Sidemen for this manufactory—married women over 25 years of age who already have large families and cannot absent themselves from home for the whole day. The manufactory has still not acquired the cold, impersonal atmosphere of a proper factory, and a great deal is still informal. One weaving woman sometimes brings her little son with her to work when she has no one to leave him with. Any worker failing to fulfill his or her quota will know about it on payday, as wages are paid per meter of woven material and according to quality.

      The entrepreneur's risk and input were and are considerable, for changes on the market affect him directly. Prices have a marked tendency to plummet, and sales are dependent on the vagaries of fashion. The manufactory's production figures for 1988, for example, are only half what they were in 1983. The owner has been able to ride out the crisis by introducing new designs, particularly motifs from old Balinese and east Indonesian cloths. More recently, brightly-colored red checked fabrics without endek have been particularly successful on the market.

      Thus, the entrepreneur has prospered. With no land of his own to begin with, he has been able to buy rice and vegetable fields over the course of the years, and to employ others to farm them for him. He owns two rice mills in the village, two house compounds, and a house in a suburb of Denpasar where he goes in his car on business or to visit his older children, who are receiving higher education there. However, as we have noted, the manufactories shave their prices very finely and competition between them is fierce. A single mistake in color, pattern or material, and all that he possesses could be at stake.

      HOME-WORK: FAMILY AND COMMISSION WEAVING

      The second example deals with a family where the mother is engaged in home-work. The house compound of this particular family is a small complex standing on leased land which belongs to the village temple (see Fig. 2.15). The married couple pay off the lease by working for the temple. They live together with their six children in a house where they also work, and which they built themselves with help from neighbors. They are members of the lower class (like 95 percent of the Balinese population, although the modern money economy with its new opportunities of accumulating wealth is bringing about changes in the previously rigid hierarchic order). One of the three rooms in the house is set aside for endek work, and the ATBM loom occupies almost the entire room. In the middle room the 15-year-old daughter and the mother weave songkèt. The cagcag looms occupy a relatively small space.

      The father has leased small plots of land, on which he plants maize and vegetables. If there is no work to do in the fields, he does occasional work in the market, helping to load and unload goods and running errands. He regularly takes his two cows to graze along a grassy roadside or on a tiny pasture. He also looks after the goat and tends to the small-scale gardens within the compound. The oldest child, a son, is already employed part-time as a tyer in an endek workshop although he is still attending school.

      Before her family became so large, the mother worked for seven-and-a-half years in a small workshop. For the past two-and-a-half years she has had an ATBM loom at home on loan from her previous employer, for whom she continues to work.

      The home-worker rises each day shortly before dawn, attending to her large family before the children—ages 6 to 18—go off to school. One of her jobs is also to fetch water (although the eldest daughter sometimes does this for her). From 8 to 10 a.m. she works at the ATBM, and then sees to her housework, goes shopping and prepares the midday meal. At 1 p.m. she returns to the loom for another two hours, after which she must once again tend to domestic chores. After the evening meal she sits down at the cagcag loom from 7 to 10 p.m. to weave songkèt. The aim of this work, she tells us, is to obtain some (relative) freedom for herself. She wants to earn enough money to buy yarn and gold threads for work which she elects, so that she will not be under the pressure of total dependance upon an employer—at least not in this field. Her hope is to work as an independent producer at least for a few months of the year, but this does not always work out. When school fees and electricity bills have to be paid, there is no' money left for new investments and, without these, independance is unattainable. And her exertions begin all over again.

      —B. Hauser-Schdublin and M.L. Nabholz-Kartaschoff