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.

Workers and Democracy is a study of worker activism and labor unions in the eight years between the recognition of Indonesian sovereignty by the Netherlands at the end of December 1949 and the nationalization of Dutch assets in December 1957. It contributes to a re-evaluation of the era of liberal parliamentary democracy in Indonesia. The focus is on the agency of workers and the structures, strategies and industrial campaigns of unions in the context of intense ideological conflict, competing union federations, the opposition of employers to collective action, and the efforts by the Indonesian state to manage industrial conflict. The imposition of martial law in March 1957 was the deathblow to parliamentary democracy and to the freedom of workers and unions to engage in collective action. It was not until Suharto’s ‘New Order’ regime collapsed in 1998 that Indonesian workers regained the freedom of association and the right to engage in collective action.

Beyond Oligarchy is a collection of essays by leading scholars of contemporary Indonesian politics and society, each addressing effects of material inequality on political power and contestation in democratic Indonesia. The contributors assess how critical concepts in the study of politics—oligarchy, inequality, power, democracy, and others—can be used to characterize the Indonesian case, and in turn, how the Indonesian experience informs conceptual and analytical debates in political science and related disciplines. In bringing together experts from around the world to engage with these themes, Beyond Oligarchy reclaims a tradition of focused intellectual debate across scholarly communities in Indonesian studies. The collapse of Indonesia's New Order has proven a critical juncture in Indonesian political studies, launching new analyses about the drivers of regime change and the character of Indonesian democracy. It has also prompted a new groundswell of theoretical reflection among Indonesianists on concepts such as representation, competition, power, and inequality. As such, the onset of Indonesia’s second democratic period represents more than just new point of departure for comparative analyses of Indonesia as a democratizing state; it has also served as a catalyst for theoretical and conceptual development.

The book features an analysis of teacher reform in Indonesia, which entailed a doubling of teacher salaries upon certification. It describes the political economy context in which the reform was developed and implemented, and analyzes the impact of the reform on teacher knowledge, skills, and student outcomes.

Activists in Transition examines the relationship between social movements and democratization in Indonesia. Collectively, progressive social movements have played a critical role over in ensuring that different groups of citizens can engage directly in—and benefit from—the political process in a way that was not possible under authoritarianism. However, their individual roles have been different, with some playing a decisive role in the destabilization of the regime and others serving as bell-weathers of the advancement, or otherwise, of Indonesia's democracy in the decades since. Equally important, democratization has affected social movements differently depending on the form taken by each movement during the New Order period. The book assesses the contribution that nine progressive social movements have made to the democratization of Indonesia since the late 1980s, and how, in turn, each of those movements has been influenced by democratization.