The Women Carrying in Bali's Tourism Economy on their Necks

It’s a sweltering Saturday afternoon in May, and a group of middle aged women — draped in long-sleeved work clothes to protect them from the scorching sun above — are hard at work on a village road just north of Ubud, Bali.

Against the backdrop of an island-wide water shortage caused by decades of excessive water consumption by the tourism sector, they’ve been hired by a small local land owner to move the large pile of rock dumped at the side of the road into his backyard where he is building a new swimming pool.

Many of the women are mothers and rice farmers from a nearby village, and take temporary gigs like this to supplement family incomes, and help deal with rising costs in the wake of the booming tourism economy.

The owner of the property, Dwick, is a local Balinese man in his 30’s.  He’s kind, speaks good English and works at a bank during the week.  He built the house on part of his ancestral family rice farm years ago to earn rental income, as more Balinese began leveraging the tourism boom in the early 2000’s and 2010’s.

This year he is finally upgrading the property with a pool to help his small rental compete with the foreign-owned villas and hotels nearby that offer pools.

He is there today, looking on; he just received the two truckloads of rock he ordered to use for the foundation of the new pool, and hired a female contractor to organize this group of women to move the rock. 

It’s the women in Bali —not the men— who have the better reputation in being able to work and haul heavy loads of rock like this.

He pays the contractor 1,000,000 IDR (75 USD) for each truckload.  Each woman will take home about $4 USD for the half day of labor— a decent rate for women in this rural area, but it’s a physically demanding job, and one that comes with a real risk of injury for aging women.

“They’re used to it,” says Dwick.  “Many younger wouldn’t do it.”

Despite the humid 90-degree heat, the women wear soiled long-sleeved work clothing— with logos such as “Hollister” and “Chicago Bulls”— to shield them from the sun.  They aren’t given many helpful tools to do the work, other than beat up plastic and aluminum wash bins to collect the rock.  With bare hands, and the sheer strength of their thin-framed bodies, they load up old bins with rock, hoist it (with the help of another) to the top of their heads, and haul the rock up a steep driveway into the property to the new pool site.

Some of the women skip the bins altogether and stack two or three boulders directly on top of their cloth turbans on their heads.

When they arrive to the growing rock pile in back, they lean forward with stiff necks, and fling off the entire load in mid-stride as the rocks crash and smack into the pile below.  Some of these loads of rock might weigh more than a hundred pounds.

It will take about 4 hours to get through both truckloads, and the contractor will pay them for the half day’s work.

The tourism economy over the last decades has been transformational in Bali— it has brought jobs, modernization, and elevated tens of thousands of Balinese families into a middle class lifestyle, often to the envy of other Indonesians.  

It’s a multi billion dollar sector in Bali, and if including all of the related services and influences on the supply chain that tourism impacts, it typically accounts for up to 70% of the island’s GDP, according to a report published in the Journal of Tourism and Hospitality Management in Dec 2017 (Role of Tourism in Economy of Bali and Indonesia, Made Antara & Made Sri Sumarniasih). 

Perhaps most profoundly, the tourism economy has enabled life-changing opportunities and freedoms for certain castes in Bali’s Hindu culture that had traditionally been excluded from societal advancement.

However, with all of the modest trickle-down material benefits, most of the real wealth generated from tourism is extracted by non-Balinese owners and investors.  

Recent figures aren’t readily available, but a study in the early 2000’s cited that approximately 80% of the tourism economy in Bali was owned by non-Balinese. 

And while the economic model of tourism has undoubtedly delivered benefits, it has left behind all sorts of detrimental effects to Balinese society:  it has heavily eroded the cooperative farming and local governance networks which have been the backbone of Balinese society since the 10th century; dramatically increased the basic costs of living for the rural and working class; and has left behind severe lasting environmental and water issues.  

The water issue in particular remains dire, as demand has been exceeding supply for years.  Some of the fresh water aquifers near coastal areas have become so overdrawn by the hotels that salt water has started intruding them, creating a potentially irreversible and disastrous water crisis on the island.   Many report water being regularly cut off to local villages during peak hotel usage, leaving them without access to enough clean water to drink, bathe and cook.  

Imagine the water in your town being cut during the day so foreign tourists can instagram themselves in infinity pools, and take multiple long showers a day.  

A 2011 paper on water equity by Stroma Cole estimated that the tourism sector consumes approximately 65% of the island’s groundwater.  When the paper was published in 2011, there were 2.76 million foreign tourist arrivals to Bali.  Eight years later, in 2019, there were more than double that amount:  6.28 million tourist arrivals.

Another scientific paper authored by Cole cited an Indonesia Environmental Protection Agency report that approximately 260 of Bali’s 400 rivers had run dry, and Lake Buyan, the island’s largest water reserve had dropped 3.5 meters.

As environmental issues and social inequities have been brought more into focus in Bali and in western media over the years, many entrepreneurial tourism operators have hustled to jump through signifying hoops to be able brand their profiting, resource-extracting businesses as “eco-friendly” and “sustainable”.  

Websites and social media posts of luxury hotels, wellness centers, and yoga retreat operators continue to use imagery and marketing language about being in harmony with nature and place.  

While tourists may see little placards in their bathrooms with gentle requests to limit their bath towels or shower times, most have the overall impression that their visit is simply helping the Balinese economy, without any sort of adverse impact to people they don’t see face to face.  And that’s fair – one can assume that zero hotel guests have ever been made aware that water has been cut off to local villages because of peak hotel demand.

No reports could be found during research about any real metrics that have been achieved by hotel groups in the years of water conservation messaging.   If anything, sustainability and conservation messaging seems to be more about giving travelers a sense that their visit does not impact, to keep the money machine churning, than designing and measuring for any real change that helps alleviate the pain of rural populations. 

And despite a decade of awareness and action by academics, NGOs and government organizations, Bali in 2019 reportedly is dealing with a worse water crisis than ever.  

As environmental issues and social inequities have been brought more into focus in Bali and in western media over the years, many entrepreneurial tourism operators have hustled to jump through signifying hoops to be able brand their profiting, resource-extracting businesses as “eco-friendly” and “sustainable”.  

Websites and social media posts of luxury hotels, wellness centers, and yoga retreat operators continue to use imagery and marketing language about being in harmony with nature and place.  

While tourists may see little placards in their bathrooms with gentle requests to limit their bath towels or shower times, most have the overall impression that their visit is simply helping the Balinese economy, without any sort of adverse impact to people they don’t see face to face.  And that’s fair – one can assume that zero hotel guests have ever been made aware that water has been cut off to local villages because of peak hotel demand.

No reports could be found during research about any real metrics that have been achieved by hotel groups in the years of water conservation messaging.   If anything, sustainability and conservation messaging seems to be more about giving travelers a sense that their visit does not impact, to keep the money machine churning, than designing and measuring for any real change that helps alleviate the pain of rural populations. 

And despite a decade of awareness and action by academics, NGOs and government organizations, Bali in 2019 reportedly is dealing with a worse water crisis than ever.  

Dwick, the owner, has just received the two truckloads of rock he ordered to use as a foundation for the pool.  

He hired the team leader to get the rock brought to the back.  He pays 1,000,000 IDR for each truckload, and the leader has hired a team of about 10 women to get the job done.  They will each make about $4 USD for a half day of work— a good rate for these women, but it’s a demanding job.

The women are from a nearby rice farming village in the Gianyar province, just a mile away.  The women take work like this to supplement declining family incomes, and help with rising costs of living.  Many of them have hard looks on their face; others are playful and gregarious, and laugh at me for being there. I’m laughing at myself.

I tell Dwick I’m amazed they carrying such heavy loads on their heads.

“They’re used to it”  Dwick says. “The younger generation maybe wouldn’t do it, but [these older women] are used to it.”

While older generations of women in Bali have been carrying loads with their heads their entire lives, and many may have grown used to the physical strain that these activities may require, our bodies inevitably become more vulnerable to injury as they age.  

In an informal work situation, where women are not medically-insured and might be pressured in the heat of a moment to take on more strain to their bodies than they were used to (whether to ensure that day’s money, or for fear of not remaining part of a group and being invited to the next job), the risk/reward is too unbalanced to be considered part of an ethical or sustainable economic exchange.  

While a construction job may be a short-term economic score for many women, and cited by the investor class as an example of the benefits of “trickle down” economics, for anyone who suffers an injury during a job, the gig suddenly becomes a costly disaster that results in irreversible physical injury, chronic pain, and the inability to do future work.

According to an email exchange I had with American organizer Phi Kaplan, who had spent years living in Bali and doing social work with rice farmer communities to stimulate sustainable economic opportunities through her organization Sawah Bali, many women in rural villages silently suffer from spinal injuries and chronic pain, after years of using their backs, heads and necks to haul heavy loads. 

In a developing region, where incentives for agricultural production have continually been eroded by the government, and work opportunities must be seized upon by residents facing (and competing in) an unnaturally transformed economy, but no system of health insurance or worker protections in place, there seems to be no one looking out for these older, at-risk laborers.  

While workplace health & safety standards as in some industrialized nations aren’t a viable or affordable approach for developing countries with entirely different institutional and socio-economic models, it should fall upon tourism operators working with local and provincial governments to account for and provide these basic standards, and address the underlying economic pressures that bring it about.

As the Balinese and Indonesian governments, driven by big investors, continue to push for expanding tourism development into new areas on the island, all while Bali’s farmers and villagers continue to deal with severe water shortages and continuing disruptions and disincentives to the agrarian fabric of their local economies, it’s worth examining the connections tourism dollars have to the middle aged women taking gigs carrying rocks on their necks for the construction of more tourist playgrounds.

Although Bali is only .29%, of the land area of Indonesia, it generates almost 40% of it’s tourism revenue, and the government sees tourism on the island as an essential source of tax revenue for the country, and there are powerful interests want the development to expand.

While the future of tourism in Bali will be determined by the leaders of Balinese society and the Indonesian government, market choices by tourists play an important role in the sustainability of Bali’s continued growth, and well-being of its people. 

As we emerge from the pandemic slowdown from 2020-2022, how might we use the reset to rethink our economic relationships, friendships, and responsibilities to each other, and work to establish more influential connections that benefit each other directly, bypassing big business hotelier groups and investors who’s only purpose on the island is to extract profit?