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ABSTRACT
Before the presidency of President Joko Widodo (2014 – present), Indonesia’s small but feisty labor movement was remarkably successful in defeating government policies that it opposed and winning pro-labor policies. Labor’s success, however, was quickly reversed after Joko Widodo became president. I argue that social movement and contentious politics scholarship provides insufficient analytic leverage to explain labor’s sudden reversal of fate. The budding literature on democratic backsliding, which analyzes the incremental steps through which democracies become less democratic, provides critical insights to understanding labor’s changing fortunes. This broader regime context of executive aggrandizement, not deficiencies in the labor movement or a mere closing of the political opportunity structure, explains both the rapidity and the depth of labor’s reversal of fortune since 2014.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The research for this essay was approved by the University of Minnesota’s Institutional Review Board (Study 00006933). Interview respondents provided verbal consent prior to the interviews, using a consent form approved by the IRB and translated into Indonesian. Written consent was waived because subjects would have lost faith in their anonymity.
2. See Caraway and Ford (2020, p. 8) for more details about organizational fragmentation. Union density was about 2.7% and 2.8% of the total workforce in 2000 and 2010 respectively (Ditjen, PHI, & JSK, Citation2010; Quinn, Citation1999). Many if not most unions fail to conclude collective bargaining agreements, and their quality is often poor (Caraway, Citation2010; Duncan, Citation2015; Palmer, Citation2008; Quinn, Citation2003).
3. The table excludes protests against increases in fuel and electricity prices, which often included significant participation from other groups.
4. Discussion of developments before October 2014 draws on Chapters 3 and 4 of Caraway and Ford (Citation2020).
5. Because they believed that PP78 violated the Manpower Act, unions filed judicial reviews with the Supreme Court. But after a year and half, the Supreme Court had dismissed all of them because the Supreme Court could not adjudicate cases challenging PP78 until the Constitutional Court completed its review of the Manpower Act. Unions surmised that proponents of PP78 submitted constitutional challenges to the Manpower Act in order to deter a judicial review of PP78 (Interview, June 2017).
6. Gubernatorial Regulation No. 228/2015 on Controlling the Implementation of Freedom of Expression in Public. The governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, was Jokowi’s vice governor before he became president. The governor issued a revised regulation after pushback from civil society groups, but limitations on noise levels and the permitted hours of protest were retained.
7. Law No. 9/1998 on Freedom of Expression in Public.
8. They were charged with incitement under the criminal code (penghasutan) and spreading hate under the ITE Law (BBC Indonesia, Citation2020b; Rizky, Citation2020).
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Notes on contributors
Teri L. Caraway
Teri L. Caraway is Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research focuses on comparative labor politics, comparative and international political economy, and the Indonesian labor movement. She is co-author of Labor and Politics in Indonesia (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and co-editor of Working Through the Past: Labor and Authoritarian Legacies in Comparative Perspective (Cornell, 2015).