| During the early 1990s the Indonesian industrial working class erupted in a wave of strikes of unprecedented proportions. Given the scholarly consensus about the strength and repressive character of the Indonesian state, the scope and intensity of this industrial unrest poses a serious challenge to current explanations of Indonesian politics. This dissertation seeks to explain the origins, development and political significance of the wave of industrial strikes that erupted in Indonesia during the early 1990s.;For industrial workers, strikes were as much a means of bringing pressure against the state as they were a form of negotiation with employment. The demands made and tactics employed by striking workers were overwhelmingly legalistic: workers sought the fulfillment of long-standing yet equally long-neglected labor legislation. Paradoxically, the market-exposed employers against whom workers struck held and continue to advance a similar set of interests centered on the rule of law, the rationalization of bureaucratic red-tape, and the elimination of corruption.;This study locates the origins of the strike wave in divisions between market-sheltered and market-exposed industries. Tracing these divisions to the economic transition from import-substitution to export-oriented industrialization during the 1980s, it argues that a disjunction arose between the economic logic on which new, market-exposed industries developed and the political apparatus of control associated with impart-substitution industrialization. Under the dual pressures of exposure to internationally competitive markets and state control, these new producers attempted to pass these operating costs on to labor. Industrial workers responded to these measures by striking with increasing frequency. |
