With new discourses and standards on the cleanliness and regularity of streets gaining influence in the Ottoman administration and public, memorandums and planning policies become widespread in the Mediterranean port cities as of the 1830s/1840s. Especially neighborhoods reconstructed after fires and newly developed faubourgs see their application, although often only partially.

This chapter examines the first decade of worker mobilization in post-Suharto Indonesia. At the national level, the labor movement experienced stunning success in shaping labor law reform during this period. In the absence of strong ties to political parties, unions created mayhem in the streets to capture the attention of politicians and raise the cost of supporting laws that unions opposed. Since both the executive and the legislature had to approve labor legislation, unions could stop the enactment of antilabor laws by peeling away legislative support. This task was facilitated by government instability and weak presidential control over coalition partners and the fact that the Minister of Manpower was from a labor background in some years. At the local level, by contrast, unions had fewer points of entry and less leverage. Although newly created tripartite wage councils gave workers a voice in wage-setting, executives had the final authority to determine minimum wages increases, and they were relatively immune to pressure from workers until direct elections were phased in between mid-2005 and late 2008.

This chapter examines the forces that produced Indonesia’s highly mobilized but politically independent labor movement. It describes the authoritarian legacies that shaped the first phase of its evolution when the labor movement had no choice but to use street politics as its primary weapon in the struggle for more worker-friendly labor policy. In a second phase, new opportunities opened by the decentralization process led unions to experiment with electoral engagement. The focus of these efforts was at the local level where union activists backed executive candidates from many different parties, pragmatically trading their political support for pro-labor measures. In a third phase, unions drew on their past organizational learning and experimentation to extend their electoral engagement to the legislative arena. Reluctant to tie themselves directly to a single party, union strategists chose to place union cadres on legislative tickets of many different political parties. Autonomous electoral participation now complemented street politics as central features of labor’s political strategy.

This chapter focuses on the Indonesian labor movement’s increasingly assertive and offensive posture in the second decade after Suharto’s fall. At the national level, unions learned to lobby more effectively, generate favorable media attention, and leverage judicial institutions to complement street mobilization. They played a central role in the passage of a groundbreaking social security law. They made even greater strides at the local level, where they embarked on an unprecedented round of mobilizations around wages. Having consolidated their networks and their position on the wage councils, they transformed them into institutions that delivered sustained real wage gains. In doing so, they exploited the opportunities presented by direct local and provincial executive elections, leveraging electoral cycles, and harnessing regional patterns of wage-setting to win massive gains. Massive protests in several core industrial areas and stronger coordination among national confederations also allowed unions to nationalize local conflicts. Even after this support vanished, unions in some parts of Indonesia sustained substantial real minimum wage increases through their local organizing efforts.