Labor And Politics In Indonesia

The first analysis of how Indonesia's labor movement overcame organizational weakness to become the most vibrant in Southeast Asia.

“In this most significant contemporary study of Indonesian trade unions and the broader working class, Max Lane provides a concise and informed examination of the practical and ideological challenges of incipient labour organizations engaged in political and popular struggles in an underdeveloped nation. This detailed and highly informative book evokes similar historical and comparative struggles of exploited workers worldwide and is indispensable for students of labour movements in the Global South.” —Immanuel Ness, Professor of Political Science, City University of New York, author of Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class

In Workers, Unions and Politics. Indonesia in the 1920s and 1930s, John Ingleson revises received understandings of the decade and a half between the failed communist uprisings of 1926/1927 and the Japanese occupation in 1942. They were important years for the labour movement. It had to recover from the crackdown by the colonial state and then cope with the impact of the 1930s depression. Labour unions were voices for greater social justice, for stronger legal protection and for improved opportunities for workers. They created a discourse of social rights and wage justice. They were major contributors to the growth of a stronger civil society. The experiences and remembered histories of these years helped shape the agendas of post-independence labour unions.

Beyond Decent Work explores the history of the Indonesian labor movement, using three contemporary case studies to shed light on the development of Indonesia's labor struggles and trade union strategies. Drawing on extensive and recent qualitative fieldwork, Felix Hauf argues that the economic idea of "decent work" plays a central role in current trade union strategies at the expense of more radical--or traditional working-class--strategies of industrial action, even though the latter have been more effective in fulfilling workers' demands for higher wages and better working conditions. Hauf's analysis offers unique insight into the labor dynamics of Indonesia and Southeast Asia more broadly, revealing how genuinely democratic and independent unions--confronted with rival unions controlled by businesses, Indonesian subcontractors, multinational corporations, and the Indonesian state--struggle to create an economy outside the confines of neoliberal capitalism.

In the 1990s, Indonesia’s independent labor movement re-emerged after decades of repression. The revival was led by students and NGO activists, who organized industrial workers and spoke on their behalf. Workers and Intellectuals explores how these middle-class activists struggled to define their place in a labor movement shaped by a history of fierce debate about the role of nonworker intellectuals. Drawing on extensive interviews, Michele Ford documents the contribution made by NGOs and student groups to the resurgence of labor activism, explaining how activists and workers perceived their roles and how the situation evolved in the decade after Suharto’s authoritarian regime crumbled in 1998. This fine-grained study of labor organization in a developing country will appeal to scholars of labor history, politics, and sociology, as well as Indonesia specialists.

A dynamic new labor movement emerged in Indonesia in the 1990s, helping to bring down the brutal Suharto dictatorship in 1998. Through rare personal interviews with the activists who are leading the rebirth of struggle for democratic rights in the world's fourth-largest country, La Botz draws valuable lessons for workers in the United States seeking to build international labor solidarity.

Demonstrating how the strict labour controls in Indonesia are a legacy of the struggles between the army and the Left before the new order, this work explains how a corporatist social and political framework continues to constrain the development of labour movements.

In few Asian countries is organized labor so important an economic and political factor as in contemporary Indonesia, and in few countries of the world has it been so politicized. Yet, thus far very little serious research and writing has been concerned with the Indonesian trade unions. Consequently the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project is pleased to publish this pioneering study by Iskandar Tedjasukmana. It would be difficult to find anyone better qualified to undertake it, for he served as Minister of Labor in three different Indonesian cabinets: the Sukiman Cabinet (April 27, 1951 - April 2, 1952); the Wilopo Cabinet (April 3, 1952 - July 31, 1953); and the Burhanudin Harahap Cabinet (August 12, 1955 - March 27, 1956). In addition, he was from 1951 to 1956 Chairman of the Political Bureau of the Labor Party. From 1946 to 1956, except while Cabinet Minister, he was a member of the Indonesian Parliament, serving from March, 1947, to August, 1949, as Vice-Chairman of its Working Committee. - George McT. Kahin, October 31, 1958