8 - Conclusion

Summary

This chapter provides a detailed account of the backlash against unions in Jokowi’s first term in office and some reflections on the lessons that can be learned from the Indonesian case. These lessons include the importance of geographic and institutional factors in allowing the labor movement to mobilize on a massive scale despite its low density and high levels of fragmentation, the role of the broader regime context in creating a political climate conducive for advancing a labor agenda through street politics, and the conditions under which decentralization can offer new opportunities for unions to pursue prolabor policies at the local level. However, they also include the ways in which the Indonesian labor movement’s diffuse, networked forms of power constitute a distinctive type of unionism, one that can compensate for weakness on classic measures of union strength.