Workers and Democracy: The Indonesian Labour Movement, 1949–1957, by John Ingleson

Indonesia became an independent nation state in December 1949 when the Dutch finally withdrew after a four-year-long attempt at recolonising the country. Indonesia’s new leaders had great hopes of reviving the economy, which had been ruined by the global depression of the 1930s, the Japanese occupation and the war against the returning Dutch. They believed, with good reason, that new levels of prosperity could be reached once the years of war and foreign occupation were over. The aspirations of the nationalist leaders for rapid economic growth confronted a serious obstacle: the workers in the plantations, factories and offices who were producing the wealth of the nation felt themselves to be free citizens with rights to organise unions, demand higher pay and go on strike.

This book focuses on the first eight years of independence, when the Indonesian state was a multi-party democracy and workers enjoyed some freedom to organise. That period ended in 1957 when President Sukarno declared martial law in response to the outbreak of rebellions by army officers on the islands of Sumatra and Sulawesi. The army became much more involved in managing labour relations at that point and began taking over the management of foreign companies that had been nationalised. The narrow temporal limits of the study enable John Ingleson to describe in detail that period’s particular configuration of political forces.

No one is better informed than Ingleson on the history of the labour movement in Indonesia. He has been studying it for about four decades. This book is a sequel to his two earlier books on the labour movement in the Dutch East Indies from the 1910s to the 1930s. The research for the book is exhaustive. Just about every publication issued by Indonesian unions in the 1950s has been consulted, as have many newspapers and government archives.

Much of the scholarly literature about the 1950s has been preoccupied with the dramatic political events of the time, such as the elections, the armed conflicts, and Sukarno’s international initiatives. Ingleson rectifies the neglect of the labour movement and demonstrates that the battle for control over labour was of crucial importance to the politics of the new nation state. A strike wave broke out in the first year of independence, as hundreds of thousands of workers at harbours, oil refineries, plantations and factories were determined to overcome years of impoverishment and humiliation. Chapter Three is devoted exclusively to describing the strikes of 1950. This is the first time that the strike wave has been thoroughly documented.

The Indonesian managers and state officials panicked and frequently called in military officers to suppress the strikes. The Prime Minister, Mohammad Natsir, reinstated a Dutch law of 1939 on a state of emergency to ban strikes in February 1951. His successor, Sukiman, ordered the arrests in August 1951 of thousands of Communist Party members, including many union activists. But state officials such as Natsir and Sukiman understood that such crude, old-fashioned methods of suppressing workers would not be successful in the long run. Indonesia was supposed to be a democratic country where the workers had a constitutional right to organise. The state developed a dispute resolution system in 1951 that was successful at channelling many of the conflicts through arbitration. The major employers during this period were still Dutch companies and they ‘wanted as little change as possible from colonial ways of managing labor’ (p. 149). The largest union federation, the Communist Party-affiliated Sobsi, did not like arbitration either. But both sides relented and wound up sitting across from one another and working out compromises. Unions became adept at arguing their cases before the arbiters. The dispute resolution system was, as Ingleson shows in Chapter Four, an important innovation of the postcolonial state.

That system was limited. It could not handle all the disputes. The strikes continued, as did the resort to military intervention by employers. Union activists, especially those connected to the Communist Party, were routinely harassed, intimidated, fined and jailed under the terms of colonial-era regulations. The efforts by the anti-communists to supplant Sobsi with a rival employer-friendly federation failed. One of the factors behind the success of the PKI in the elections of 1955 and 1957 was its connection with the Sobsi activists who had become local heroes for fighting on behalf of workers.

The chapters in the second half of the book are organised by theme, not chronology. Each of the last four chapters describes a particular sector of workers over the entire 1949–57 period: public sector workers, plantation workers, dockworkers and sailors, and urban factory workers. One learns much about the nitty-gritty of union organising: unions collecting dues from their members; federations collecting contributions from the individual unions; union publications struggling to find readers and subscribers; union leaders desperately trying to maintain a chain of command from the central office to the local branches; rival unions backed by political parties competing with one another for members. Ingleson refrains from writing the life histories of individual union activists, except for one illuminating passage about five female workers drawn from profiles published in the plantation workers magazine in the 1950s (pp. 202–4).

Without a narrative arc and a personalised style of storytelling, the prose carries the detached tone of a disinterested observer. In the conclusion, that tone is dropped. Ingleson pays tribute to the union activists of the 1950s for improving the living standards of millions of workers and pressuring the government ‘to fulfil the promise that independence would usher in a new era of justice and prosperity’ (p. 344). The reader comes to understand that this large compendium of factual information, carefully organised and footnoted, is Ingleson’s way of honouring all of those union activists, including the communists of Sobsi, for their unheralded efforts to make Indonesia live up to its ideals during that brief eight-year experiment in democracy.