For the last thirty or so years, Indonesia’s small and divided union movement has relied primarily on its mobilisational capacity in key industrial centres to wrest concessions from employers and government. It would have been no surprise if the COVID-19 pandemic, having robbed them of this weapon, had erased all evidence of the labour movement from the public domain.
Instead, unions have risen to the occasion, using other strategies in their classic repertoire to push for better containment measures and at least stay attempts to use the pandemic to pass an anti-worker law.
A frog in a coconut shell
In Indonesia, to say someone is “like a frog in a coconut shell” is to suggest that they think that they know everything but in fact know nothing, that they are captive to the echoes of their own voice as it ricochets around them. And so has it been with the Indonesian government, faced with the public health implications of COVID-19.
