Labour Strikes in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia, 1998–2013

Fahmi Panimbang and Abu Mufakhir

This chapter discusses labour strikes in post-authoritarian Indonesia between 1998 and 2013, including the occurrence of general strikes in 2012 and 2013. Recovering from dictatorship since Reformasi in 1998, the labour movement has increased its capacity for protest mobilization. It shows that workers and labour unions are capable of articulating their political aspirations with a combination of various strategies of legal and non-legal activities (direct actions, street politics). It argues that the coalitions of labour unions from different federations at the grassroots level and their increased capacity to mobilize workers have played a major role in successful strikes. Nonetheless, the state and the capital have also consolidated their power to enact countermeasures against labour.

LEGACIES OF THE AUTHORITARIAN ERA

Although Indonesian workers and labour unions are recovering from the dictatorship of the Suharto regime (1967–1998), its legacies remain to form the context in which they exist today. Labour unions face a number of impediments in their mobilization, including organizational fragmentation and the decimation of the Left. The corporatist system that was formulated by the regime in 1974 to create harmonious industrial relations has profoundly shaped labour relations until today.

During the Suharto era, a formerly vibrant labour movement was violently curtailed and the Left decimated with the massacre of hundreds of thousands of communists in 1965–1966. The regime banned leftist unions, which had played a significant role in independence movements and the dismantling of colonialism. In 1973, the regime brought together the moderate and conservative unions under the umbrella of the Federasi Buruh Seluruh Indonesia/All Indonesia Labour Federation as a single trade union federation. It changed its name in 1985 to Serikat Pekerja Seluruh Indonesia/All Indonesia Workers Union (SPSI). This solely recognized trade union federation was heavily manipulated by the regime and served to control workers rather than to promote their rights.

Repressive labour policies were reflected in regulations that allowed military intervention in labour disputes, which resulted in severe suppression. Grievances were strictly regulated in the industrial dispute system, virtually allowing authorities and the military to suppress any resistance. Nonetheless, the regime never succeeded in completely eliminating independent labour organizing.

Non-governmental organization (NGO) activists, student-sponsored workers' groups and self-styled 'alternative unions' extended their support for labour organizing in the 1980s and since, despite running the risk of being labelled communists and falling foul of the regime. In the early 1990s, spontaneous industrial actions increased in industrial areas around Jakarta. An unprecedented massive workers' strike at the tyre factory PT Gajah Tunggal in Tangerang, West Java, occurred in 1991 and subsequently spread to other industrial estates in Surabaya, East Java and Medan in North Sumatra. This was followed by the detention, kidnapping and murder of workers and activists who played a major role in the strikes (Kammen 1997).

The Suharto regime controlled and sought to depoliticize workers by fostering a corporatist industrial relations system that prevented non-workers or outsiders – including NGOs, academics, social activists and intellectuals – from promoting workers' rights and organizing them (Ford 2009). This has left an authoritarian legacy for labour relations today: workers are still largely not unionized, and SPSI, the former state-controlled union that is essentially unchanged, remains dominant and has the largest number of members. Workers were ill-placed to benefit from the drastic changes in Indonesia's political and social landscape after the downfall of Suharto (Hadiz 2004). Organized labour entered the immediate post-authoritarian period with little political power. International pressure, rather than domestic labour activism, was the key factor in forcing Suharto's successor, B. J. Habibie, to fundamentally change the industrial relations system: the adoption of basic rights, including freedom of association. Ironically, at the same time, the new administration embraced market-oriented and flexible labour policies. This double transition of Indonesia towards a free market economy and (neo)liberal democracy occurred under the pressure of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank during the Asian financial crisis in 1997 which forced the country to adopt austerity measures and structural adjustment programmes.

Some of the features of industrial relations in Indonesia's post-dictatorship phase are that they are liberal, flexible and decentralized (see also Tjandraningsih 2011). A flexible labour market policy was implemented to create a 'friendlier' pro-business environment. Since the enactment of Law No. 13/2003 that legalized contract work and put labour outsourcing practices into effect, employers turned their workers into more casual, contract; hence a more precarious workforce.

Since 2003, it has been the norm for companies to have...