1 - Introduction

Summary

This chapter situates our analysis of the Indonesian labor movement within theoretical debates in comparative labor politics and Indonesian politics and presents the broad contours of our answers to the three overarching questions that guide the analysis in the book: Why did Indonesia’s labor movement combine contentious street politics with autonomous electoral engagement, why has the Indonesian labor movement been surprisingly effective in winning pro-labor policies, and why have unions have been less successful in the electoral arena than in the policy arena? In answering these questions, the chapter delineates three phases of the development of Indonesia’s labor movement, and emphasizes the role of authoritarian legacies, changing opportunity structures, organizational learning, the geographic concentration of the labor movement, and comparatively weak cooperation across organizational divides in the electoral arena. The chapter also outlines our research sites and methods, provides background information about the economic and political contexts, describes the union landscape, and concludes with a summary of the book’s chapters.