Politicizing the Minimum Wage: Wage Councils, Worker Mobilization, and Local Elections in Indonesia

Teri L. Caraway, Michele Ford and Oanh K. Nguyen
Additional contact information
Teri L. Caraway: University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Michele Ford: University of Sydney
Oanh K. Nguyen: University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Politics & Society, 2019, vol. 47, issue 2, 251-276

Abstract: Indonesia’s weak labor movement transformed local wage councils from institutions of wage restraint into institutions that delivered generous wage increases. This article argues that the arrival of direct elections created an opportunity for unions to leverage elections to alter the balance of power on the wage councils. Activating that leverage required increased contentiousness and coordination among unions. As unions mobilized around wages, conflict with capital intensified and produced disruptive protests that led incumbents to side with workers. Unions also developed innovative tactics to sustain momentum in nonelection years. As unions turned the wage councils in their favor, employers fought back by shifting the scale of the conflict to the national level; the result was the recentralization of wage setting and more modest increases. In a global context of ever weakening organized labor, the Indonesian case shows how weak unions can gain power by mobilizing politically at the local level.

Keywords: minimum wages; labor movements; decentralization; tripartite institutions; Indonesian politics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0032329219838917 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:polsoc:v:47:y:2019:i:2:p:251-276

DOI: 10.1177/0032329219838917

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Politics & Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().