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

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.

Written by the best-selling author of Asia Pacific Economies, this book, containing a thorough analysis of pre- and post-crisis environments and industry is an important addition to the literature on industrial development in developing countries.

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.

This book examines the meaning of work for women in contemporary Indonesia. It takes a broad definition of work in order to interrogate assumptions about work and economic activity, focusing on what women themselves see as their work, which includes not only paid employment, home life and child care, but also activities surrounding ritual, healing and religious life. It analyses the key issues, including the contrasts between ‘new’ and ‘old’ forms of work, the relationship between experiences of migration and work, and the ways in which religion – especially Islam - shapes perceptions and practice of work. It discusses women’s work in a range of different settings, both rural and urban, and in different locations, covering Sumatra, Bali, Lombok, Java, Sulawesi and Kalimantan. A wide range of types of employment are considered: agricultural labour, industrial work and new forms of work in the tertiary sector such as media and tourism, demonstrating how capitalism, globalization and local culture together produce gendered patterns of work with particular statuses and identities. It address the question of the meaning and valuing of women’s ‘traditional’ work, be it agricultural labour, domestic work or other kinds of reproductive labour, challenging assumptions of women as ‘only’ mothers and housewives, and demonstrating how women can negotiate new definitions of ‘housewife’ by mobilizing kinship and village relations to transcend conventional categories such as wage labour and the domestic sphere. Overall, this book is an important study of the meaning of work for women in Indonesia.