Berita Satu Interview with Jim Keady

Part 1:

Part 2:

ABC Report on Indonesian Union Election Strategy

Gratiane de Moustier: Hong Kong’s Indonesian Indentured Servants

“A recruiter in Madium, Indonesia, checking a candidate’s fingers for cleanliness.” (Gratiane de Moustier/NYTimes)

“By creating conditions that keep Indonesian women tied to their debts, while limiting their movements and underpaying them, the Indonesian and Hong Kong governments and the recruiters force maids into a form of indentured servitude. The people of Hong Kong should demand that their government rectify the legal discrimination and provide more protections for their domestic workers. And Indonesians should do their part to reshape the recruitment system so foreign worker safety and dignity come before profits.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/14/opinion/hong-kongs-indentured-servants.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0)

Prabowo At FSPI National Meeting

Prabowo Subianto at KSPI Meeting (credit: Prabowo Subianto Facebook feed)

Perspective presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto spoke at the national meeting of Konfederasi Serikat Pekerja Indonesia (KSPI). Okezone has a slideshow from the event.

Have you seen other reports of meetings between 2014 candidates and labor unions? Or opinion pieces on the labor movement and this year’s election? Please send them along and I will post them.

National Strike, Set For This Week

From The Jakarta Globe:

Around three million workers in 20 Indonesian provinces will join national strikes on Thursday and Friday in support of improved welfare conditions.

Said Iqbal, the president of the Confederation of Indonesian Workers Union, said in a press release that hundreds of thousands of companies in forty industrial regions would cease production during the stoppage.

“There’s no political motive in this national strike,” he said. “Worker unions are purely fighting for the welfare of the workers.”

Said said that the unions were demanding an average national wage increase by 50 percent. In Jakarta, they were expecting the minimum wage to be set at Rp 3.7 million ($334).

Apart from wages, workers are demanding universal health coverage for all Indonesians by Jan. 1, 2014 and for the elimination of outsourcing.

From Nobodycorp.:

Reads: “Ayo Resist! Resist Low Wages, Resist Outsourcing, Social Security for Everyone”

Max Lane on Gerindra’s ‘Populism’

From Max Lane’s recent article for the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies publication Perspective, in which he sets the stage for Indonesia’s 2014 elections:

Another former general who has declared his candidacy is Prabowo Subianto of GERINDRA. Subianto is more controversial and more strongly associated with the New Order’s reputation for repression. He played an active role in 1997 and 1998 in trying to preserve the Suharto government in the face of popular opposition, even to the extent of organizing the kidnapping of student activists. He was eventually dismissed from the Army for these actions. Subianto’s difficulty is that Gerindra is also unlikely, based on present indications, to win more than 20% of the popular vote. In 2009, Gerindra only received 4.4% of the popular vote, while recent polls suggest that its support rating is at 11%. Subianto’s profile is based more on a perceived comparison, in some segments of the electorate, with Yudhoyono, where the latter is seen to be without combat experience and to be indecisive, while the former is seen as a decisive combat officer. However, this niche will not come into play since Subianto will not be facing Yudhoyono in the 2014 election.

In the 2004 election, Subianto stood as Vice-President in a Megawati-Subianto team. Could this happen again? Gerindra’s parliamentary record has seen it align more frequently with the ruling coalition than with the PDIP. Even in June this year when Gerindra voted against fuel price increases, along with the PDIP (and Hanura and PKS), it did so in a last minute switch. Gerindra and Prabowo used rhetoric that is similar to those of the PDIP on the “peoples’ economics” and so on, but it has also spoken out against wage rises and labour demonstrations while the PDIP has associated itself with such demands.

Said Iqbal on Mass Organizations Bill

“We will appeal it in the Constitutional Court,” Said Iqbal, president of the Confederation of Indonesian Workers Unions (KSPI), told the Jakarta Globe on Tuesday. “With this bill, local governments can disband local union organizations if they go on strike: industry bodies are all for [the Mass Organizations Bill].”

From The Jakarta Globe

Arrighi on the Capitalist Archipelago of East and Southeast Asia

From Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of our Times (1994):

On the other hand, the superiority of force and the capitalist accumulation of capital seemed to diverge geopolitically as never before. The decline of Soviet power was matched by the emergence of what Bruce Cumings (1993:25-6) has aptly called the ‘capitalist archipelago’ of East and Southeast Asia. This archipelago consists of several ‘islands’ of capitalism, which rise above the ‘sea’ of horizontal exchanges among local and world markets through the centralization within their domains of large-scale profits and high value-added activities. Below this sea lie the huge, low-cost, and highly industrious laboring masses of the entire East and Southeast Asian regions, into which the capitalist ‘islands’ thrust their roots but without providing them with the means needed to rise to or above ‘sea level.’ (p. 23)