Indonesian socialist Sherr Rinn writes of the need to bring radical politics into the labour movement, which is still hampered by the huge defeats of the Suharto era. The article was first published at <a href="http://www.Solidaritas.net">Solidaritas.net Media Centre</a>.
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In 2012, the Indonesian labour movement experienced an unprecedented upsurge. During 2012, I estimate, around 2 million workers were involved in protests or strikes, There were factory occupations between May and October and two national strikes.
These mobilisations won important demands of the movement: a cancellation of a fuel price rise, the establishment of social insurance and the issuing of ministerial regulations that restricted outsourcing or labour hire. These outcomes further politicised many workers.
While the workers were not able to overcome the capitalist counteroffensive, these outcomes were very important for the Indonesian labour movement, which possessed a minimum of experience and knowledge. This was all new experience. The policy of eradication of historical memory of Suharto’s New Order regime over 32 years (1965-1998) left no memories of the experience of resistance among the masses.
Workers today have no idea that Indonesia once had a union, SOBSI, that had 3.3 million workers or 60 percent of all workers at that time and that it was political and left wing. Almost no knowledge of the experience of organisation has been passed on to the workers’ movement. There is a knowledge vacuum, not to mention an ideological one, among workers.
A vacuum
Even though it has been 17 years since the dictatorship ended, there are at least three causes of this vacuum.
First, there was no or only small involvement of an organised workers’ movement in the ending of the Suharto dictatorship. It was students and the “urban poor” who were the backbone of the mass street mobilisations demanding the fall of Suharto.
Second, there has been no significant change to the education curriculum within the unions from that used by the dictatorship’s yellow unions before 1998. New unions formed after 1998 seem to have used the space opened to them with the ratification of ILO conventions and the legalising of the freedom to organise in 2000. But they retained the old curricula and outlook.
Third, the struggle method of mass action was accepted only in 2010. Prior to that, this method was used only by the left unions organised in the Aliansi Buruh Menggugat. The yellow unions engaged in it only on ceremonial occasions such as May Day. These were festival days, not actions with demands.
After the Federation of Indonesian Metal Workers Union (FSPMI) started to use mass actions in 2010 to provide solidarity with factories on strike and in the struggle for government social insurance, there was steady progress, resulting in the actions that took place in 2012. There were actions in 2011 and 2012 that closed down whole industrial areas in Bekasi (outside of Jakarta) and Batam (an island near Singapore.)
In 2013 there was stagnation following a counteroffensive by employers, who used both police, and thugs recruited from the impoverished slums that often are located on the edges of industrial areas. The union leaderships, at all levels, had no experience of this situation and did not discover tactics to overcome the employer offensive. And there were others who had accepted bribes of one kind or another from the employers.
The 17 years since the end of the dictatorship had not transformed the nature of the unions, despite their acceptance of mass action as a form of struggle. Leaders retained the old patterns from the dictatorship unions: federal, based on patron-client relations and with avenues for internal criticism closed off.
The backwardness of the Indonesian working class is not a result of a shortage of material that could be used for raising consciousness. There is an abundance of material, especially on the internet. The spread of knowledge is held back by an organisational situation that makes members dependent on their officials. New knowledge that teaches internal democracy is seen as a threat to the official leaderships.
Officials of unions have the privilege of being able to represent workers in the courts. Workers can at any time suffer all kinds of violations of their rights, up to and including sackings. Rather than prepare workers to defend themselves through a range of actions, officials cultivate dependence by making sure the education around legal issues is exclusively for themselves.
This legal emphasis also miseducates workers into thinking that their welfare can be advanced only through the normative rights embodied in laws. As regards the spreading of revolutionary consciousness, the threats are even more serious. The spreading of Marxism-Leninism has been banned since 1966 by parliamentary decree. Culturally, communism is taboo.
Accelerating awareness
When political-economic education, introducing left concepts, began among FSPMI workers in 2010, there was rapid progress. Workers quickly accepted mass action as a method of struggle, including in providing solidarity with factory and industrial estate strikes. Within only two years, the FSPMI was able to paralyse totally seven industrial estate areas in the Bekasi area. The union grew quickly and led factory occupations in hundreds of factories between May and October 2012. It quickly started to convince other sectors of society of its capacity as a new force in any struggle for change.
But fear and financial bribes have led the FSPMI elite to make opportunist compromises. 2013 was a dark year for workers, many of whom were sacked or did not have their contracts extended. The climax of this opportunism came when the FSPMI elite supported the presidential candidacy of Prabowo Subianto in 2014. The leadership had reached political bankruptcy.
Then these educational activities were closed down. The movement experienced more setbacks. In mid-2013, education was re-established via the Solidaritas.Net Association. This was established in an area called Cikarang close to the workers’ area and used a medium that workers were using.
Observing how Facebook was used during the protests of 2010-2012, we also used cellular tools, as well as classes. There have also been efforts at unifying workers at the factory as well as municipal and national levels. Workers have taken to using smart phones, – Chinese brands can be purchased for $64-100, They have become proficient at communicating, whether via Facebook, Blackberry or Android operating systems.
The 2010-2012 experience means that there are more workers who are open to new information and ideas. This must be the starting point in filling in the knowledge and ideological vacuum created over the last 50 years. The desperate working conditions alone will not create a workers movement in Indonesia.

Sherr Rinn

Raising class consciousness in Indonesia

During July and August, the Indonesian government firmed up its resistance to any further large increases in the minimum wage. Regulations are to ensure that wage increases don’t exceed companies’ “capacity to pay”.
The regulatory offensive is meant to consolidate a several months long counteroffensive against the newly emerging trade union movement that employers and government launched after a million-strong national workers’ mobilisation on 3 October 2012. The counteroffensive has used legal channels, gangs of thugs, mass sackings and divide and rule tactics, and has been assisted by attitudes of accommodation by a new bureaucracy among the union leaderships.
The counteroffensive has been successful in damping worker activity; strikes and other protests have been in decline since around November. In recent talks with the minister of industry and the head of the Indonesian Entrepreneurs Association (APINDO), the heads of two major union federations more or less offered support for the government’s insistence that unions exercise wage restraint.
However, this was rejected by another leader, Said Iqbal, from the Indonesian Metal Workers Federation (FSPMI), who is also head of the major union alliance Indonesian Workers Assembly (MPBI), which organised the 3 October mobilisation. The other union leaders were also members of MPBI, indicating that new differences might be emerging among the union leaders.
Breakout
When the dictator General Suharto was pushed from power in 1998, the new president, B.J. Habibie, quickly ratified International Labour Organization conventions on trade union rights, and the state ended its policy of tight control over the single “union” organisation that was allowed.
During the next 10 years, that organisation fractured and fragmented as rival leadership cliques struggled over control, while at the same time there were also independent initiatives from the factory floor to win leadership or even start new unions. Thousands of new enterprise unions were registered.
After more than a decade of this internal tumult and enterprise union expansion, Indonesia now has several major union federations independent of the state.
During 2010-12 worker protest actions expanded rapidly, demanding wage rises and also an end to casual labour hire practices (outsourcing). Around 80 percent of factory workers, including in the central production line processes, were being employed on labour hire contracts, with low wages and no rights. This was a violation of Indonesian law.
Wages had dropped below the official government estimate of what was needed for minimum physical survival. These protests took on a more combative form, with militant workers moving through factory areas and calling out workers from other factories.
There were pickets, as well as road blockades and city protests. Hundreds of thousands of workers were involved around the country. The militancy climaxed in the 3 October national protests, mobilising around 1 million workers – although only a minority were actually on strike. The campaign won rises in the minimum wage of between 40 percent and 120 percent, depending on the region.
Bosses’ counterattack
There was an immediate counterattack. Anti-worker leaflets threatening strikers in the name of various new organisations appeared among communities in the poor factory worker areas. Soon after, gangs of thugs appeared, sometimes up to 400 men, recruited from the poorest areas.
They attacked and harassed picket lines and burned down worker offices. Many companies started to deploy these thugs, as well as soldiers, on site. The thugs would follow outspoken workers home and threaten them and their families.
Meanwhile, when companies had been forced to end labour hire, they would upgrade workers to contracts, but often give different groups better or worse conditions, dividing the union membership. Some workers have been charged with criminal libel against employers and may end up in court or jail.
In other cases, workers were made redundant and offered pay-offs, resulting in drops in memberships of some unions. Many employers have successfully applied to government bodies for a postponement of wage rises. Despite inspiring incidents of workers fighting off large brigades of thugs back in November, there has been a demoralising impact on sections of the union membership.
This has been made worse by union bureaucrat conservatism. Almost immediately after the counterattack started, there were retreats. On 8 November, union leaders, including from the FSPMI, signed a “Declaration of Harmony” with APINDO and government officials.
In the aftermath of this agreement, union leaderships discouraged worker protests, including the popular solidarity actions between factories. Workers were instructed to withdraw from several union-community alliances in several cities.
Two worker centres that had been dynamic recruiters and educators for new members, often channelling 1,000-2,000 workers a day into unions, came under suspicion. Their voluntary worker trainers were replaced by new people who often had not been active.
Teachers of economics and politics courses, even English, have been removed. Worker resistance to the thug presence has been channelled into ineffective symbolic national actions at the expense of preparations to deal with the thugs inside factories.
As some workers become demoralised, others become increasingly angry. Polarisation among members is likely into the next period. Meanwhile, Said Iqbal’s insistence that workers should campaign for another 50 percent wage increase while other leaders acquiesce in the government’s line of no more increases appears to point to internal struggle developing among the leaderships.
A reorganisation of the mainstream unions may be in the making. If it does happen, it will provide an opportunity for the small unions attached to socialist propaganda groups to reassess their policy of organising separately from the 3 million workers organised in the big unions.

Raising class consciousness in Indonesia

Indonesian unions divided on next steps

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