Workers, Unions and Politics Indonesia in The 1920... - (Introduction)

introduction 1
Introduction
The late 1910s and early 1920s were heady days for the political and labour
movements in Indonesia. Sarekat Islam and the Indonesian Communist
Party (PKI) competed to attract urban and rural support. In Takashi Shirai-
shi’s memorable phrase, it was ‘An Age in Motion’, a time when so much
seemed possible, for the labour movement as well as the political move-
ment.1 Following the end of the First World War, Indonesian workers sought
to achieve greater wage justice from employers at a time of rising prices
and skilled labour shortages. It was a period of labour militancy in the
towns and cities of Java, with a strong growth of unions for workers in both
the private and public sectors.2
Modest gains were achieved by labour unions in these years, but as the
colonial state and employers raised the cost of union involvement workers
drifted away. The failure of major strikes in the sugar factories in 1919 and
1920, in the pawnshops in 1922, in the railways in 1923 and in the Surabaya
engineering workshops in 1925, took a heavy toll on labour union member-
ships and finances. The European community was nervous and the colonial
government was determined to restore ‘tranquillity and order’. The com-
munist uprisings at the end of 1926 and the beginning of 1927, and the swift
retribution against the PKI and unions associated with it, compounded
workers’ fears of remaining members of labour unions. The first period of
the Indonesian labour movement was at an end. Labour militancy was no
longer an option. In future, the space for labour and political activism was
far more constrained.
A little over a decade later, on 30 September 1939, more than 400 people
gathered in Mojokerto, a small town near Surabaya, East Java, to celebrate
Copyright © 2014. BRILL. All rights reserved.
a quarter of a century of labour union activism by Raden Panji Suroso.

Suroso was born in 1893 in Sidoarjo, East Java and was a graduate of the
Teacher Training College (Kweekschool) at Probolinggo, East Java. He did
not become a teacher, instead joining the irrigation service. In 1914, aged
twenty one, he became chairman of the Probolinggo branch of the Union
of Native Employees of the Public Works Department, and began a long
1 Takashi Shiraishi, An Age in Motion. Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912–1926 (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1990).
2 See, Ingleson, In Search of Justice.
Ingleson, J. (2014). Workers, unions and politics : Indonesia in the 1920s and 1930s. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com
Created from perpusnas-ebooks on 2020-03-10 02:53:15.
2 introduction
career as chairman of numerous public sector unions including the Fed-
eration of Public Sector Unions from 1930. Like many labour union leaders
he was also involved in nationalist politics. In 1914 he became chairman of
the Probolinggo branch of Sarekat Islam and later a member of the party’s
central executive, although by 1923 he seems no longer to have been an
executive member. He was chairman of a branch of the sugar factory work-
ers’ union (PFB) during its heyday. His brief membership of Sarekat Islam
and involvement with the PFB began a long association in labour unions
with Surjopranoto, often referred to as the ‘strike king’ of Java because of
his leadership of the PFB and the pawnshop workers’ union during their
clashes with employers. Suroso was instrumental in creating the Persatuan
Vakbond Hindia (Indies Labour Federation) in 1922 and was its chairman
until its collapse after the May 1923 railway strike. He was elected to the
Probolinggo Municipal Council and in 1923 appointed to the colony’s ad-
visory council, the Volksraad, where for the rest of the colonial period he
was a passionate advocate for Indonesian workers.3
In the histories of Indonesia in the 1920s and 1930s Suroso barely rates
a mention. There were many Indonesians who, like Suroso, devoted much
of their public lives to labour unions. Some became central leaders of large
unions for urban workers, men such as Hindromartono from Batavia, Djoko
Said from Bandung, and Ruslan Wongsokusumo from Surabaya. They led
multiple unions, edited union magazines, regularly contributed to the
Indonesian-language press on local and international labour issues and
constantly moved around the towns and cities of Java speaking at branch
meetings and encouraging local leaders. Most were also active in social
welfare organisations and cooperatives. Many were members of national-
ist political parties.
These were the central leaders. Most local level union leaders were wage
earners whose union activities rarely extended beyond the town or city in
which they worked and lived. They were part of the literate minority of
Indonesian workers who read local newspapers and labour union maga-
zines, attended public rallies organised by political parties and no doubt
discussed among themselves what needed to be done for Indonesia to
become independent and what needed to be done after independence was
achieved. For local and central leaders, politics was what they talked about,
3 For profiles of Suroso see: Pemandangan 15 July 1933, Soeara Oemoem, 4 October 1939
and the entry in Orang Indonesia jang Terkemoeka di Djawa (Jakarta: Gunseikanbu, 1944),
p. 468.
introduction 3
labour activism was what they did. For many, politics was the politics of
labour.
Those who have written about Indonesia in the last decades of Dutch
colonial rule have assumed that there was little or no labour union activ-
ity in the colony after 1926, or at least little of any consequence. This book
argues otherwise. These were important years for the labour movement.
Unions had to recover from the crackdown by the colonial state and then
cope with the impact of the 1930s Depression. Union leaders did not disown
the earlier, militant, phase—indeed some, like Surjopranoto and Rekso-
diputro had been in the thick of it—but their narratives now emphasised
the importance of acting within the constraints imposed by a repressive
state. They would continue to represent workers’ interests to employers
and to government as vigorously as they could. They would continue to
exert as much pressure as they could on the colonial state through news-
papers and magazines, public rallies, direct lobbying and support from
sympathisers in the Volksraad and in the Netherlands. But they were con-
vinced that a strategy of accommodation rather than confrontation was
the only way they could rebuild the labour movement.
There is no unitary, continuous or triumphant narrative in the history
of the Indonesian labour movement. Rather there are multiple, sometimes
conflicting, narratives drawing together stories of individual unions, each
with successes and failures. There was much that divided the labour move-
ment, including differences of class, ethnicity, gender and ideology, as well
as personal disputes between leaders. Labour unions were very diverse,
ranging from small organisations of a few hundred people to the large
teachers’ and railway workers’ unions, each with over ten thousand mem-
bers. Despite this diversity, labour activists yearned for the creation of one
united, powerful voice for workers. The search for unity in the labour move-
ment was a common theme in union narratives.
It is important to avoid the danger of writing history backwards. Indo-

nesian labour union leaders did not have the benefit of hindsight. They did
not know that Japan would invade the colony in 1942 and that three years
later Indonesia would declare its independence. While there was much
talk in the 1920s and the 1930s about the rise of Japan and the possibility
of Japanese expansion into Southeast Asia, labour union leaders assumed
that they were engaged in a long-term project. They believed that a major
task was to educate Indonesian workers to see labour unions as part of a
broader international movement. They believed that they needed to de-
velop a stronger civil society and that union-owned mutual benefit funds,
4 introduction
libraries, educational activities and social and sporting clubs were essential
to this. Their knowledge of international labour history convinced them
that unions could only reach their full potential in a democratic society
but they also believed that a democratic society on its own would not guar-
antee better wages and conditions for workers. Only labour unions could
achieve this.
The failure of the 1920s strike waves and the suppression of unions con-
nected to the PKI were firmly etched on the minds of those who continued
to try to organise urban workers. The colonial state had established the
boundaries of what was possible. For the rest of the colonial period it re-
tained strict limits on the activities of labour unions. Some labour activists
openly challenged these limits, in the process paying a heavy price. Most
accepted the realities of colonial rule. They tried to protect workers’ wages
and conditions and resolve industrial issues through negotiations and pub-
lic pressure. They focussed on building enduring linkages through the pro-
vision of social security, cooperatives and educational and recreational
programs. They were involved in creating a stronger civil society and be-
lieved that in doing so they were contributing to the broader nationalist
agenda of freeing Indonesia from colonial rule. Creating strong labour
unions was an important step on the (long) road to independence.
The first phase of the Indonesian labour movement was shaped by the
post-First World War economic boom and the inflation that accompanied
it. Labour militancy was a common response throughout the western and
the colonial worlds. The second phase of the Indonesian labour movement
was shaped by the world-wide Depression. Labour unions everywhere were
forced onto the defensive. Unemployment, poverty, and people living on
the streets, were common sights in towns and cities. Workers were desper-
ate to survive, and even in democratic western societies there was a re-
duced appetite for direct confrontation of employers. In colonial Indonesia
the legal constraints made direct confrontation impossible.

Despite the draconian laws at the disposal of the state, the European
community in colonial Indonesia was concerned that the Depression
would lead to urban unrest. It was particularly worried that unemployed
urban Indonesians would provide a fertile recruitment ground for nation-
alist agitators. The government’s concern about the potential consequenc-
es of the social and economic impact of the Depression influenced its
decision to tighten already stringent controls over all nationalist activities.
In 1933 and 1934 it banned the two major nationalist political parties, Par-
tai Indonesia (Partindo) and Pendidikan Nasional Indonesia (PNI Baru)
introduction 5
and exiled their leaders from Java. In making an example of these two par-
ties, neither of which in any real sense threatened the colonial state, it was
warning the nationalist political elite of the limits of dissent. The repression
was effective. There was no serious political challenge to the colonial state
until the Japanese occupation.
In the eyes of the colonial government the Indonesian labour movement
was inseparable from the wider nationalist movement. Monthly political
intelligence reports prepared by the Attorney-General’s office always had
a section on the labour movement. While union leaders insisted that they
were focussed on an industrial agenda and on meeting workers’ immediate
social and economic needs, they were well aware that in a colony all labour
union activity was in a deep sense anti-colonial. Indeed, unions proudly
associated themselves with the wider nationalist agenda. It could not be
otherwise when capital and management, as well as the power of the state,
were in the hands of Europeans. The colonial government’s suspicion of
labour unions was deepened by the nationalist symbols that adorned the
halls and cinemas used for their public meetings. Portraits of ‘national
heroes’ hung on the walls, podiums were dressed with red and white flags
and the ‘national anthem’, the Indonesia Raya, was sung with gusto before
or after meetings.
Despite the close connections between the two, the labour movement
should not be seen simply as an appendage of the grander narrative of the
political movement and its drive for independence. It was a movement in
its own right, with goals that went beyond the achievement of indepen-
dence. Labour unions gave a voice to otherwise voiceless urban workers.
A voice for greater social justice, for stronger legal protections and for im-
proved opportunities. They created a discourse of social rights and wage
justice for workers. It was a discourse based on the knowledge that the
romantic Java of the past was rapidly giving way to an urban Java of impov-
erished wage earners. Their industrial and social justice agendas influenced
the platforms of the nationalist political parties and became the basis for
worker demands after independence. The story of the Indonesian labour
movement in the last decade and a half of colonial rule is an important
part of the story of Indonesia.
During these years, labour union leaders grappled with fundamental
questions as they sought to create unions that would survive a repressive
colonial state and be the basis for a long-term movement. What should be
the relationship between labour unions and political parties? Should la-
bour unions be independent or sub-units of political parties? Should
6 introduction
unions be led by ‘insiders’, who were workers themselves, or by ‘outsiders’,
who were less exposed to intimidation by employers? How much energy
should be devoted to the provision of social security for members? What
should be the relationship with labour unions for Europeans and Eurasians
in the colony? Would workers’ interests be better served by the creation of
a Labour Party? It was a time of lively, sometimes heated, debate. Some of
these issues were resolved, others remained the subject of contentious
debates after independence.
Before the communist uprisings in late 1926 and early 1927, workers in
the private sector had been just as strongly unionised as workers in the
public sector. Harbour workers, sailors, sugar factory workers, and workers
in the Surabaya engineering workshops as well as drivers and workers in
the private railway companies were all drawn to labour unions in large
numbers. The failure of the strike waves, the destruction of the PKI which
had been committed to organising urban workers, and the tougher ap-
proach of employers, made it much more difficult to persuade workers in
the private sector to join unions. The collapse of the Java sugar industry in
the Depression years along with sharp reductions in plantation exports
had an enormous impact on urban employment, especially in Surabaya
workshops and engineering companies, in the harbours and in the private
railways, all areas where unions had been strong. Efforts were made in the
late 1920s and early 1930s to create new unions for workers in the private
sector, especially in Surabaya, but as the Depression deepened these had
only limited success. Renewed efforts in the late 1930s, when the economy
was beginning to recover, were showing signs of success only to be cut short
by the Japanese occupation.
The labour movement after 1926 was dominated by unions for workers
in the public sector. Some of these workers were relatively well paid and,
at least until the Depression, had secure employment, prospects for promo-
tion, child allowances, and small pensions on retirement. However, the vast
majority of workers employed by the government and government-owned
industries were not so fortunate. They had low wages, and a high propor-
tion were monthly or daily wage earners with no certainty of employment,
no allowances and no provision for holidays or pensions. Three of the larg-
est employers in the colony were the State Railways, the Post, Telegraph,
Telephone and Radio Service and the Department of Education. In 1929,
the State Railways employed 43,341 Indonesian and Chinese workers, of
whom only 6,335 were employed on a permanent basis. Some 26,923 were
introduction 7
temporary workers and a further 10,033 were casual day-wage labourers.4
In 1936 the Post Office employed over 15,000 low level Indonesian workers,
of which one-third were casual workers.5 Over 40,000 Indonesians were
employed as teachers in public schools in 1930, but the majority were low
paid village teachers or assistant teachers. Given the large numbers of low
paid workers it is not surprising that the railways, the post office and the
teaching service were three of the most unionised workplaces.
In this second phase of the Indonesian labour movement, unions fo-
cussed on urban workers in the formal sector of the urban economy. This
was difficult enough given the constraints imposed by the colonial state.
Only rarely were attempts made to organise among the larger number of
people working in the informal sector of the urban economy. In a sense
there was no one to organise informal sector workers against. It would have
been different if there had been elections to contest, with the need to
gather a mass vote and the ability to pressure a representative government
to improve the lives of the labouring poor. There would then have been a
strong incentive to compete for these votes by organising among them.6
As it was, the electorate for the Municipal Councils was so restricted that
it was the elite talking to the elite.7
There was, however, no hard divide between formal and informal sector
workers. Most lower paid workers in the towns and cities worked in both
sectors. They had no choice. The wages of day-wage labourers and casual
workers from their formal sector jobs were too small and too insecure.8
4 See, Director of Government Industries to Director of Justice, 2 May 1929, in a file

“Dactyloscopies 1927–1932”, in Binnenlands Bestuur Collection, No. 3555, ANRI.
5 See, Orgaan PTTR, January 1938, p. 25.
6 The contrast here is most clearly with India in the 1930s where unions and political
parties did reach down to much broader levels of the population because there were elec-
tions to contest. There is an extensive literature on the history of Indian labour unions. See,
Nandini Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial
Capitalism in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
7 In 1 925 the franchise was extended to males who were at least 21 years of age, literate
in any language, and had an annual taxable income of at least 300 guilders. Women were
permitted to stand for election to Municipal Councils from 1938 but were not given the
right to vote until 1941. The electorate for the Batavia Municipal Council in 1938 was 8,563
Europeans, 3,468 Indonesians and 718 Foreign Orientals, at a time when the total population
of the city was in excess of 600,000. See, Verslag van de Commissie tot Bestudeering van
Staatsrechtelijke Hervormingen (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1941), Part 1, pp. 143–144 and Susan
Abeyasekere, Jakarta. A History (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 118.
8 A union survey in 1939 of casual day-wage labourers employed in factories in the north
Java coastal city of Cirebon reported that many people earned as little as two to five guilders
8 introduction
They added to these meagre wages by working wherever they could in the
informal sector. As well, while a man might have a low paid job in the
formal sector, his wife, and perhaps his children, were likely to be working
in the informal sector. When labour unions recruited day wage and casual
workers they were drawing into the union world people who worked in
both the formal and informal sectors.
Indonesian labour unions in the late 1920s and the 1930s were essen-
tially Java unions. The one exception was a union for taxi drivers and chauf-
feurs established in Kalimantan which had a membership largely in
Kalimantan and Sumatra. There were also a few locally based unions in
Sumatra but they had very small memberships. Some of the major Java-
based unions established branches outside Java, most notably the railway
workers’ union, the teachers’ unions and the pawnshop workers’ union.
But a history of the colonial labour movement is a history of labour unions
in Java. Java contained two-thirds of the colony’s population, was its ad-
ministrative centre and was the site for advanced education for Indone-
sians and Eurasians. The large cities were all in Java, as were the naval
bases and much of the defence infrastructure along with most of the mod-
ern industry.
The history of Indonesian labour unions cannot be written in isolation
from the history of European labour unions in the colony. The 1930 Census
estimated that there were 245,000 people in the colony legally classified as
Europeans.9 Of the approximately 60,000 who were employees, two-thirds
were employed in the public sector. European workers were strongly union-
ised. Some European unions were for senior officials and managers who
intended to stay only briefly in the colony. They stayed aloof from other
unions, whether European or Indonesian. Most were for middle level In-
dies-born European and Eurasian public sector workers for whom the
colony was home. Many of these European unionists were supportive of
Indonesian unions, though this support was qualified by fears of what the
future might hold as Indonesians were promoted to jobs previously the
preserve of Europeans. Despite some fundamentally divergent interests,
a month. They could not live on this and were forced to obtain additional work elsewhere
in the informal economy. See the report in Soeara Oemoem, 20 January 1939.
9 Anthony Low has pointed out that the proportion of Europeans in the Netherlands
Indies was about eight times the proportion of Europeans in India and that the ratio of
Dutch officials to the Indies populations was fifteen times that of British officials in India.
A.D. Low, Britain and Indian nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
p. 11.
introduction 9
on many issues they found common cause. The colonial government was
concerned about what it saw as radical European labour unions and their
socialist leaders, and even more concerned about union cooperation across
the racial divide, seen most publicly in joint protest meetings in the towns
and cities of Java throughout the 1930s.
The absence of significant labour unions for Chinese is noticeable. In
1930 Chinese, both local-born and those born overseas, were 14.4 per cent
of the population of Batavia, 12.6 per cent of Semarang and 11.4 per cent of
Surabaya.10 Each city had strong Chinese community organisations that
operated schools and provided welfare, recreational facilities, social net-
works and other support to Chinese workers. Chinese labour unions only
emerged during the Depression years and at the end of the colonial era
their memberships were very small. The nationalist sentiment of the larg-
er public sector Indonesian unions did not allow Chinese to be members.
It was not until the late 1930s that some of the new Indonesian unions for
private sector workers opened their membership to Chinese workers. The
lack of Chinese labour unions may have reflected the fact that most urban
Chinese earned their living as small traders or by working for small Chinese
family-owned companies. But Chinese were also employed in ordinary jobs
in the harbours, in warehouses, in offices and in the public sector. The
social security offered by community associations probably provided many
of the benefits that only labour unions offered to Indonesians.11 Indonesian
labour union leaders frequently discussed the place of Chinese workers in
the colonial economy, usually critically, but it was a rare leader who open-
ly contemplated allowing Chinese to become members.
The first phase of the Indonesian labour movement was marked by ex-
tensive strikes and the drama of conflict between unions, employers and
the colonial state. The battery of repressive laws enacted in the 1920s made
it impossible for labour unions to organise strikes or in any way to encour-
age workers to go on strike. This did not stop strikes occurring, but they
were localised and the colonial government found no evidence of union
involvement. This did not deter large parts of the European press from
10 See, H.W. Dick, Surabaya. City of Work. A socio-economic history, 1900–2000 (Athens,
Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2002), Table 3.4, p. 125.
11 For a discussion of Chinese community organisations in Semarang in the colonial
period see Donald Earl Willmott, The Chinese of Semarang: A Changing Minority Community
in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960). For a short contemporary discussion
of Chinese labour unions see, Nio Joe Lan, “Chineesche Vakvereenigingen in Nederlandsch-
Indie”, Koloniale Studien, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1940), pp. 77–93.
10 introduction
seeing even the slightest protest from workers as evidence of union mili-
tancy threatening the very foundations of the colony.
While strikes were rare, worker protest was not. Here labour unions
played an important role in channelling worker discontent and organising
public protest meetings as a way of putting pressure on the colonial govern-
ment. The government could ban strikes, close down political meetings
and arrest and jail newspaper editors but it could not eliminate workers
protest without taking actions so drastic as to cause political problems in
the Netherlands itself. This was the public space that Indonesian and Eu-
ropean labour unions alike used to their advantage.

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introduction 1

a quarter of a century of labour union activism by Raden Panji Suroso.

1 Takashi Shiraishi, An Age in Motion. Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912–1926 (Ithaca:

It is important to avoid the danger of writing history backwards. Indo-

the legal constraints made direct confrontation impossible.

4 See, Director of Government Industries to Director of Justice, 2 May 1929, in a file

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