Abstract
Offering historical analysis of unions since Suharto’s fall in 1998, this is arguably the most important book written about Indonesia’s labour movement in the last decade. Over many years, the authors interviewed hundreds of participants across key industrial areas and, in partnership with local researchers, conducted two rounds of surveys among 1200 working-class residents. The book begins by noting the emergence of ‘the most vibrant and militant’ labour movement in Southeast Asia (p. 2) – a surprising development to many given severe repression under Suharto’s New Order and contemporary weaknesses such as low membership density.
The book sets out to explain the movement’s distinctive features over eight chapters, including achievements during the last two decades and, especially, challenges of recent experiments with electoral politics. Chapter 1 provides a useful summary of local politics, industry, and key unions while Chapter 2 summarises how and why the movement advanced in the last 20 years. Unions’ blend of ‘contentious street politics’ and ‘autonomous electoral engagement’ – a transactional pragmatism which eschews formal or ongoing relations with established political parties – is explained as a distinctive result of factors like New Order authoritarianism, which banned independent unions, as well as the introduction of direct elections in the 2000s, which generated new opportunities for unions to leverage concessions at the national and local level. The restricted political terrain for unions can hardly be exaggerated, especially the wholesale destruction of the left decades ago, as well as the contemporary domination of ‘money politics’ and the near-insurmountable barriers to the establishment of a genuinely national ‘labour party’.
Chapter 3 looks at the first 10 years after Suharto. It focuses on minimum wage-setting and national labour law reform, in which unions successfully prevented the state from stripping labour protections by creating ‘mayhem in the streets’ (p. 49). Chapter 4 moves onto unions’ more proactive approach in the 2010s, focusing on the highly successful national campaign for a social security law, the shift to more effective minimum wage campaigning, and action against outsourcing in which unions used highly militant tactics in industrial zones, including dozens of ‘factory raids’ that involved occupations and even taking managers hostage.
Chapter 5 marks the start of the book’s deep analysis of unions’ electoral work, beginning with elections for executive bodies (district heads, gubernatorial, and presidential elections). Case studies from four industrial areas suggest that key unions have mostly pursued a ‘political contract’ approach in which candidates from established parties promise to implement pro-worker policies in return for active union support in elections, with mixed results.
Chapter 6 looks at legislative elections from 2009 to 2019, when parties and unions made mutual overtures to include union representatives on candidate lists. Importantly, the most enthusiastic party for union involvement has become Gerindra, the personal vehicle of former general, twice presidential candidate, and onetime Suharto ally, Prabowo Subianto (Prabowo was Suharto’s son-in-law and, at the time of writing, Indonesia’s Defence Minister). This unlikely relationship is fascinating but also, as the authors argue, highly controversial. Drawing on longitudinal survey evidence, Chapter 7 proposes a way of advancing unions’ political agenda – the cultivation of a ‘working-class constituency’, by which the authors mean a critical mass of workers who are sufficiently conscious politically to identify with union-backed candidates at elections.
Much of the book’s discussion of union politics focuses on its institutional limitations – for example, the failure of unions to get more candidates elected in the 2019 legislative elections compared to 2014. An underlying assumption is that getting labour into the ‘halls of power’ (p. 149) is a positive step. Maybe so, but what this might look like within Indonesia’s tangled political system and whether this would advance the ‘economic and political interests of workers’ (p. 184) is cause for further reflection. The book tends to consider the risks of political engagement in organisational terms, such as the isolated legislators, coalition splits, and demoralised dropouts that occur when movements throw their lot into electoral work for limited results. But rapprochement with the likes of Gerindra, with its social base in small farmers and petty commodity producers and its deeply anti-democratic ethos, also raises the risks of labour’s incorporation into Prabowo’s version of populism and its underlying project of authoritarian nationalism. Given the authors’ recognition of this danger, it would have been fascinating to read more about this potential. Perhaps this would have verged on speculation but there are few scholars as qualified to explore the pitfalls of labour’s engagement with reactionary political forces in Indonesia.
A further criticism is the brevity with which the book considers theoretical questions. While clearly not intended primarily as a theoretical work, the book poses arguments that reach beyond the Indonesian experience. For example, Indonesian unions are framed as neither ‘conventional’ nor ‘social movement unions’ like those of South Africa, Brazil, or the Philippines in the 1980s; instead, they represent a ‘network of unions that have coalesced into a social movement’ (p. 184). This raises the tantalising possibility that, like the amplification of a weak voice with a microphone and sound system, the configuration of actors within a social network can substitute for their weak associational power. While this argument is foreshadowed in Chapter 4’s discussion of the campaign for a national social security law – described as a watershed moment for union relevance – the authors’ theoretical conclusions are largely squeezed into the book’s final few pages. The book alludes to contemporaneous debates in labour scholarship about the mobilisation of power resources but, disappointingly, avoids discussing them in any detail.
A few frustrations aside, there is no doubt this book is a substantial achievement. The level of empirical and historical detail is truly impressive, such as the description of political contracts between parties and unions that could only be compiled by area experts with close contact to insiders (Chapter 5) or the blow-by-blow accounts of important historical events and campaigns. Relevant to scholarly experts but also accessible to beginners, this book is valuable for those concerned with Indonesia’s political transformation and is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of labour in Asia and beyond.