00074918.2015.1023416

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TANJUNGPINANG, KEPULAUAN RIAU] Date: 17 January 2016, At: 23:09

Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies

ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20

Workers, Unions and Politics: Indonesia in the

1920s and 1930s

Chris Manning

To cite this article: Chris Manning (2015) Workers, Unions and Politics: Indonesia in the 1920s and 1930s, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 51:1, 155-157, DOI: 10.1080/00074918.2015.1023416

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2015.1023416

Published online: 30 Mar 2015.

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Book Reviews 155

the uncertainty of estimates and then by using the uncertain data to shape sound policy decisions. The authors of this volume give priority to facilities, setting out the following recommendations to address the infrastructure: the need for strategies and plans to reduce regional and class disparities; the application of standards and accreditation to improve quality of care; the improvement of the content and quality of training; the assurance of adequate and effective inance mechanisms to eliminate corruption; the collection, compilation, and distribu-tion of valid and reliable data; and, inally, the educadistribu-tion and empowerment of women, who are the primary consumers of maternal and child health-care ser -vices. This last recommendation stands out from the others as being more general and timeless, but it addresses one of the key issues in health services, where a cowed or passive consumer allows governmental inadequacies to persist unchal -lenged. The authors believe that better education will make women better deci -sion-makers and more insistent consumers.

The appendix (pp. 101–8), written by demographer Peter Gardiner, summa -rises recent fertility estimates and links these to the reduction of high-risk births. As women marry later, complete childbearing earlier, have fewer births, and have longer periods between births, the various dangers of childbearing associated with maternal deaths are avoided. These recent important social changes are at the heart of the strong advocacy for funding family-planning services as a means to reduce maternal and child deaths.

The Indonesian and US academies have here made a very useful contribution to the Indonesian health system, and they have also demonstrated the value of such international collaborations.

Terence H. Hull

The Australian National University

Workers, Unions and Politics: Indonesia in the 1920s and 1930s. By John Ingelson. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Pp. xvii + 352. Hardback: $163.00.

This is a ine sequel to John Ingelson’s 1986 book In Search of Justice: Workers and

Unions in Colonial Java, 1908–1926. I am in awe of Ingelson’s ability to pick up some of the themes of his irst book and write about them with such commitment, clar -ity, and apparent enthusiasm almost 30 years later. The irst book dealt with the labour movement from the turn of century to the ultimately unsuccessful wave of strikes and the Indonesian Communist Party rebellion of 1926–27. Workers, Unions and Politics is about a much different period, when unions were for the most part

divorced from direct links with political parties and the nationalist movement. Ingelson focuses here on union organisation and relations with the colonial government during three very different periods: the economic boom of the late 1920s, when unions were still closely watched in the aftermath of the radical -ism of the mid-1920s; the Great Depression, when workers suffered greatly and unions struggled to survive; and the recovery period after the depression, when

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156 Book Reviews

tensions increased between the colonial elite and Indonesia’s growing and edu -cated middle class.

The book is set irmly in urban Java, with a focus on public-sector unions (which accounted for the large majority of union members). The union move -ment was frag-mented throughout the 1930s till the end of colonial rule. We are told that workers were spread across some 35 unions, which, at the peak of their growth, embraced more than 100,000 workers. No national-level union was ever formed, although one public-sector union, Persatuan Vakbond Pegawai Negeri (PVPN), was formed in 1930 and became a major vehicle for the articulation of union demands over the welfare of public-sector workers.

The author describes the more conservative union agendas of the public-sector unions compared with those of the private-sector unions, most of which were based in Indonesia’s main industrial city, Surabaya. The public-sector unions dealt with disputes and represented their members in matters including low lev -els of public-sector pay and beneits for Indonesian workers. These remunera -tions were frequently compared with those of the workers’ Dutch and Eurasian counter parts (workers with higher ‘Level C’ and ‘Level B’ beneits, according to the labour code). From time to time the unions achieved small wins for their mem -bers on issues such as pension rights for widows, working hours, and rest days. But the cash-strapped government was becoming implacably opposed to increas -ing wages signiicantly or offer-ing Indonesian workers on ‘Level A’ beneits any of the superior working conditions enjoyed by Dutch and Eurasian employees.

Union membership and actions were less stable among the private companies in Surabaya, where unions tended to be sponsored by outside organisations such as the Indonesia Study Club. We are told that many of these unions led a ‘precarious existence’. Many union leaders were ‘outsiders’, since employees in major private irms were too vulnerable to retrenchment at the whim of managers.

As its title suggests, the book principally examines the politics of unions through their organisations and leaders. Besides PVPN, most union activity was ‘local’, restricted to speciic industries in several major urban locations. Because the links with major political parties were tenuous, and because the more radical parties, such as the Indonesian National Party (Partai Nasional Indonesia), were banned for much of the period under investigation, the story is mainly about many union organisations and leaders rather than national struggles. Ingelson goes into some detail on the organisation, activities, and strategies of the main public-sector unions (the railways union, the postal and telephone and telegraph unions, the pawnshop unions, and the teachers unions), during the boom times in the late 1920s, the Depression years, and the latter half of the 1930s. This detailed treatment means that one does not emerge with a ‘big picture’ or climax to the book, unlike in the case of In Search of Justice.

Owing mainly to the paucity of data in the colonial and union records, the book does not present much detail on wages and working conditions across indus -tries or among unionised versus non-unionised workers. Some readers might be shocked to learn that a 60-hour working week, without overtime (10 hours for six days), was common, although we learn later in the book that an eight-hour work -ing day was repeatedly among the demands made by the railways union. The author draws some comparisons with more liberal industrial-relations laws in India and the Philippines, arguing that the 1920s and 1930s were ‘decades of lost

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Book Reviews 157

opportunities in Indonesia’ and bemoaning the fact that the ‘government baulked at every proposal for major reform to industrial laws or the Criminal Code’ (p. 39).

The main themes might seem more mundane than those of Ingelson’s earlier book on the labour movement, at least for those more interested in confrontational politics of the colonial state. Yet in his concluding chapter the author warns us not to underestimate the importance of the late 1920s and 1930s in Indonesian labour history. The more repressive and less exciting environment for labour action masked a signiicant growth of civil-society movements, and this was to under -pin labour and political organisation and activism in newly independent Indone -sia in the 1940s and 1950s. Many of Indone-sia’s later political leaders, including Mohammad Hatta, Sutan Syahrir, and Sukiman Wirjosandjojo, cut their teeth in organising and mobilising labour in the decades before the Japanese occupation. One of the main contributions of the book is its illing in this important gap in the history of the labour movement and the forms in which civil society developed at the local level in Indonesia during the late colonial period. It is not an easy story to tell, but Ingelson recounts it with some lair.

Chris Manning

The Australian National University