Welcome to Working Indonesia, a blog created to cover issues of worker activism, labor organizing, and workplace politics in Indonesia.
The goals of this blog are modest enough, to serve as a space for news updates and e-activism related to labor activism in Indonesia, along the way making some connections and raising some questions that go beyond the headlines. The author of this blog is an incoming graduate student in the United States, so this blog is functioning as a learning tool as well, a way to collect news articles and other web resources relevant to labor activism in Indonesia.
The opportunity for interaction is a major upside of blogs and I would encourage anyone interested to post comments and links to relevant news. I will be continuously populating the Web Resources page and would appreciate any suggestions of useful web sources that I have yet to post. I would also direct your attention to the newsfeeds on the right margin of the blog and encourage you to take a moment to participate in the LaborStart solidarity campaigns. Along with these goals, I will try to avoid the topical sprawl or overly authoritative voice that so often comes with the editor-free world of blog publishing, and I apologize in advance for any slippage.
The choice to focus on labor politics in Indonesia is not to presume that workers’ struggles are the exclusive or privileged front in the fight for social justice and any spillover into other areas will hopefully be done with an eye to the interconnectedness of various struggles. This project will also be done keeping in mind, as Vedi Hadiz puts it, that studying labor movements “essentially constitutes a form of praxis in itself…the very act of studying the working class has inevitable political implications – by identifying a ‘proletariat’, one may indirectly contribute to its own self-consciousness,” yet always remembering that the geographical and sociological distances between this blog and real labor resistance in Indonesia, along with my own limited experience, would make this but the smallest of drops in the bucket.
Working Indonesia 