Workers&State New Ord Indones

by Vedi R. Hadiz

This book is the first major study of labor relations in New Order Indonesia for nearly thirty years. The author provides theoretical analysis on the role and prospects of organized labor in late industrializing countries. With the use of comparative models, Hadiz argues that labor movements face greater obstacles to their effectiveness the later it is that a country undergoes industrialization. Strict labor controls in Indonesia are shown to be the legacy of struggles between the army and the Left before the New Order, and the corporatist social and political framework is shown to continue to constrain the development of labor movements.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published November 5, 1997

About the author

Vedi Hadiz is Professor of Asian Studies and Director of the Asia Institute and an Assistant Deputy Vice-Chancellor International, University of Melbourne, where he is also a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor. He was previously Professor of Asian Societies and Politics at Murdoch University’s Asia Research Centre and Director of its Indonesia Research Programme.

An Indonesian national, he was an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in 2010-2014. Professor Hadiz received his PhD at Murdoch University in 1996 where he was Research Fellow until he went to the National University of Singapore in 2000. At NUS, he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology until returning to Murdoch in 2010. His research interests revolve around political sociology and political economy issues, especially those related to the contradictions of development in Indonesia and Southeast Asia more broadly, and more recently, in the Middle East.

He is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia

Professor Hadiz’s latest book is entitled Islamic Populism in Indonesia and the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2016). His other books include Localising Power in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: A Southeast Asia Perspective (Stanford University Press 2010), Workers and the State in New Order Indonesia (Routledge 1997) and (with Richard Robison) Reorganising Power in Indonesia: The Politics of Oligarchy in an Age of Markets (RoutledgeCurzon 2004,), as well as the co-edited Between Dissent and Power: The Transformation of Islamic Politics in the Middle East and Asia (Palgrave Macmillan 2014) and the edited Empire and Neoliberalism in Asia (Routledge 2004). His articles have appeared in such journals as Development and Change, New Political Economy, International Political Science Review, Democratization, Journal of Development Studies, Pacific Review, Pacific Affairs, Third World Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Critical Asian Studies, Indonesia, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Historical Materialism.

Professor Hadiz has been a visiting scholar in the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in France, the International Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands, the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Kyoto, the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology - Delhi and the Department of Sociology at the University of Indonesia, where he is also an Adjunct Professor.

Reviews

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an important book on organized labor under New Order Indonesia, and probably a seminal study of workers' movements prior to the fall of Suharto. However, one might argue that Hadiz's claims are largely outdated in light of the dramatic transformations experienced by Indonesia and neighboring Asian countries after the 1997-1998 financial crisis. The exclusionary model of labor accommodation that Hadiz argues to be "characteristic" of a specific moment of late industrialization seems less pertinent in light of the growing clout of populist alliances between newly emerging political parties and organized labor after the crisis. Moreover, while rising wages and industrial unrest may encourage mobile capital to relocate to places with cheaper labor, Hadiz may err in attributing an overly deterministic logic to the imperatives of "mobile capital v. immobile states and workers"-- as if the balance of state-capital-labor relations, and manufacturing firms' reliance on other factors of production, matter little in shaping the tenor of capitalist development. Nevertheless, the book remains an important contribution to works on workers' movements in postcolonial Indonesia which have remained largely understudied.

[i · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the most cited book by whom studying labor and political economy of New Order Indonesia…