Lingering problems: Industrial action, peace

Vedi R. Hadiz

In January 2004, the minimum wage in Jakarta will stand at Rp 671,550 per month, representing an increase of 6.3 percent compared to the year before. Moreover, this certainly seems a "good" wage compared to the level of around Rp 150,000 just seven or so years ago. Though the minimum wage levels in regions across the sprawling archipelago differ, similar increases have taken place elsewhere.

As a result, many people might well be tempted to ask, why are workers, especially in Indonesia's manufacturing zones, still complaining? Why do we incessantly hear of worker unrest? Industrialists, domestic and foreign, have often complained that labor strikes are one of the key reasons that Indonesia has become so unattractive as an investment locale. "We'll go to Vietnam or China" is what is commonly heard, or some other place where workers are less "ungrateful".

If the problem is lack of freedom of organization, hasn't there been a significant liberalization of the laws and regulations regarding trade unionism? After all, the New Order- tainted All-Indonesia Worker's Union (SPSI) is no longer the sole state-recognized labor organization in the country. There are literally dozens of union organizations now registered at the Department of Manpower.

So what's the problem? Do workers not realize that, with tens of millions of people unemployed, out of a workforce of over 100 million (Central Bureau of Statistics data, 2003), there is only so much that they can expect? Too much complaining can mean the loss of jobs for their fellow Indonesians. "What a bloody selfish lot these workers are", the English might say.

Well, it is unfortunate that the point of view of the rank-and-file worker does not often make it into the national newspapers or television programs. This is hardly surprising: businesspeople are much more influential, and the middle class so much more eloquent. They look better on TV as well. Who is going to interview a laborer from Tangerang (Banten), Sidoarjo (East Java), or Medan's (North Sumatra) industrial zone, to get their take on the toils of life in Indonesia today? Besides, when they actually do get on TV, they seem so emotional, so uneducated and dare I say, so dishevelled. Certainly such people cannot know anything about life, let alone as much as a well-dressed corporate lawyer or politician in Jakarta. They should just be grateful that they can earn a living -- look at all those unemployed who yearn for a job!

This writer is, perhaps inevitably, a member of the middle class intelligentsia -- a section of society that had quite a comfortable life-style during most of the New Order. But for well over a decade now, he has been visiting industrial workers at their homes, sometimes their workplaces, just chatting about their conditions of life and work in general. These conversations -- which often develop into real discussions about social issues -- have taken place all around the Jabotabek area, parts of Central and East Java, as well as North Sumatra -- quite a good cross-section of Indonesia's industrial centers. Undoubtedly, some NGO activists that live for periods of time with workers in sprawling urban slums have deeper insights into what social scientists like me call "the proletariat". But I reckon I can say a few things to try to explain the seeming paradox of higher wages, freedom of organization -- and yet -- no real industrial peace.

The following is one writer's, admittedly subjective, interpretation. First of all, while the wages look good on paper, they do not look half as good when one considers the spiraling cost of basic necessities in Indonesia's major cities over the last five or six years. But even middle class housewives can empathize with that. The fact is that the quality of life of Indonesia's "proletariat" has scarcely improved, and that for a worker with a family, a "living wage" is but a pipe-dream.

Second, there is a deep sense of injustice which lies deep in the heart of many workers who are able to witness the ostentatiously lavish and consumeristic lifestyles of rich Jakartans and citizens of many other major cities. They may not know of conceptual tools that economists use to measure social inequalities -- but they feel, live and breathe inequality in their everyday life. And we are not just talking the tangible, material sorts of inequalities. The experience of the workplace is one of powerlessness or at least gross inequality of power between management and worker. The result is the many indignities often suffered at the workplace.

Third, as everyone that has lived in this country knows, what looks good on paper in Indonesia often is not so good in real life. For example, although there is supposed to be freedom of organization, many workers talk about the immense difficulties of setting up a functioning labor organization at their workplace. They regularly complain that local bureaucrats make it hard for this to happen, or that management develops all kinds of reward and punishment mechanisms to hinder genuine workplace organizing.

Fourth, workers still do not feel that their formal rights offer them real protection. Though I have encountered workers that relate stories of how military personnel come in to quash any signs of labor unrest on behalf of management, many more have recently complained about hired goons and thugs. Sometimes more brutal than the military-proper, some of these hail from the "youth organizations" -- or paramilitary groups -- linked to political parties.

More issues can be added to the arbitrary list above. Many workers from Indonesia's state-owned companies, for example, fear that privatization plans will cost them their jobs. Most of these issues cannot be tackled easily -- and thus one cannot expect lasting industrial peace to transpire overnight. Indeed they are but symptoms of deeper, more fundamental problems in Indonesian society -- in which the voices of the poor have been marginalized for decades, and where the power of money and brute force still speaks much too loudly.

The writer is also the author of Workers and the State in New Order Indonesia (London, Routledge 1997)