Indonesia’s Labor Movement and Democratization
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Open Access
Type
Book chapterAbstract
This chapter demonstrates how the actions of the labor rights movement made a decisive contribution to the delegitimization of the regime. Struggling to regain a foothold after the decimation of independent labor unions in the massacres of 1965 and repression in the decades that ...
See moreThis chapter demonstrates how the actions of the labor rights movement made a decisive contribution to the delegitimization of the regime. Struggling to regain a foothold after the decimation of independent labor unions in the massacres of 1965 and repression in the decades that followed, worker activists and their middle-class allies nevertheless clawed their way back, raising awareness at home and abroad of the Indonesian government's unrelenting subjugation of labor rights in its search for economic growth and political stability. Having been forced to accommodate some of the labor movement's demands in the early 1990s, the government struck back, all but destroying the alternative labor unions that had emerged in the intervening years. As a consequence, there was little evidence of worker mobilization in the immediate lead-up to the fall of Suharto. While continuing to grapple with the ongoing obstacles of low density of unionization among workers, organizational fragmentation, and political isolation, the labor movement has since asserted itself economically and politically.
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See moreThis chapter demonstrates how the actions of the labor rights movement made a decisive contribution to the delegitimization of the regime. Struggling to regain a foothold after the decimation of independent labor unions in the massacres of 1965 and repression in the decades that followed, worker activists and their middle-class allies nevertheless clawed their way back, raising awareness at home and abroad of the Indonesian government's unrelenting subjugation of labor rights in its search for economic growth and political stability. Having been forced to accommodate some of the labor movement's demands in the early 1990s, the government struck back, all but destroying the alternative labor unions that had emerged in the intervening years. As a consequence, there was little evidence of worker mobilization in the immediate lead-up to the fall of Suharto. While continuing to grapple with the ongoing obstacles of low density of unionization among workers, organizational fragmentation, and political isolation, the labor movement has since asserted itself economically and politically.
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Date
2019Source title
Activists in Transition: Progressive Politics in Democratic IndonesiaPublisher
Cornell University PressFunding information
ARC DP120100654Licence
Copyright All Rights ReservedRights statement
From Activists in Transition: Progressive Politics in Democratic Indonesia, ed. Thushara Dibley & Michele Ford, a Southeast Asia Program Publications book published by Cornell University Press. Copyright © 2019 by Cornell University. Included by permission of the publisher. No use of this material is allowed without prior, written permission from the publisher.Faculty/School
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, School of Languages and CulturesShare