This essay introduces the politics of the Indonesian trade union movement today, including the crucial factors from before 1998 that have helped create the terrain of today's movement. The essay concentrates on the most visible overt political activities of the most politically active unions. In the preface, I point out that these most active unions represent a minority of union members and an even smaller minority of the workforce, who are mainly not organized into trade unions. However, it would be wrong to imply that workers outside the main unions discussed in this essay are not engaged in industrial activity. Any perusal of the mushrooming number of websites and Facebook groups reporting on industrial activity reveals that there is ongoing workplace disputation. Disputes are happening every week. However, the reporting via these websites and groups provides only a more or less arbitrary coverage of what is happening, depending on the contacts and capacities of the people behind each group or website.

The newness of the labour scene, emphasized in this essay, means that both the mushrooming of workplace unions and sources reporting their activities are fragmented and dispersed. There is no centralized or systematic collection of data or reports. This also reflects the reality that organized labour itself is still neither centralized nor organized into a unified system. Labour itself is fragmented and dispersed. The fact that a massive proportion of the workforce is employed in enterprises with fewer than twenty employees also means that day-to-day disputes between employees and employers in those enterprises may not take the form of normal union disputes. These smaller enterprises number in the hundreds of thousands.

In these circumstances it is extremely difficult to make any general conclusions about trends in underlying levels of industrial disputation or tensions.

What can be identified are the most explicit manifestations of strongly organized union activity. Even here, the most visible are those activities that insert themselves on to the national political stage. In this essay, the focus has been on the activities initiated by the KSPI/FSPMI and the spectrum of smaller dissident unions. Most observers consider the KSPSI the biggest union, inheriting the majority of the membership of the New Order era single union, but its activities have not significantly inserted the union on to the national political stage.