Workers and Intellectuals: NGOs, Trade Unions and the Indonesian Labour Movement

ASAA Southeast Asian Publications Series

by Michele Ford

In the 1990s, Indonesia's independent labor movement re-emerged after decades of repression. The revival was led by students and NGO activists, who organized industrial workers and spoke on their behalf. Workers and Intellectuals explores how these middle-class activists struggled to define their place in a labor movement shaped by a history of fierce debate about the role of nonworker intellectuals. Drawing on extensive interviews, Michele Ford documents the contribution made by NGOs and student groups to the resurgence of labor activism, explaining how activists and workers perceived their roles and how the situation evolved in the decade after Suharto's authoritarian regime crumbled in 1998. This fine-grained study of labor organization in a developing country will appeal to scholars of labor history, politics, and sociology, as well as Indonesia specialists.

270 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2009

Reviews

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although not as theoretically informed as I would have liked, the book contains an impressive amount of qualitative data on the changing relations between state and labor and NGOs and unions in New Order and Reformasi Indonesia. Here, Ford argues that more analytical attention should be paid to the role of NGOs and middle-class intellectuals in the broader labor movement in order to account for the distinct experiences of postcolonial repressive countries in which organized labor has been heavily repressed in the interest of economic development.