The geographical term “Southeast Asia” dates from the 1930s, and came to denote a topic for academic studies in the early days of the Cold War.Footnote 1 As such, it includes Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indochina, Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines. Southeast Asia has become thoroughly incorporated in the global economy over the past 150 years; first, as a producer of commodities, and later, as a supplier of cheap garments and electronic components. Under Dutch colonialism and British hegemony—the latter established by the conquest of Burma and the imposition of free trade on Siam and the Philippines in the 1850s—Southeast Asia was turned into a key provider of commodities for the industrializing countries. During high colonialism, from 1870 to 1930, the region became increasingly intertwined, via Singapore as the central port and through the role of mainland Southeast Asia as the rice basket for the plantations of maritime Southeast Asia. After the Second World War, the region was the world's most violent frontier of containment for communist expansion. In recent decades, Southeast Asia has become integrated in global commodity chains as a producer of cheap industrial goods, often as a subcontractor for more advanced economies, such as those of Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, and later on, Southeast China.
The history of labor, and particularly of organized wage labor, in Southeast Asia tends to be colored by the region's image as a zone of export-oriented and union-unfriendly “Tiger economies,” epitomizing the worldwide perceived trend of declining union density since the 1970s. Indeed, Southeast Asia has a poor record with regard to workers’ rights of association. Seventy years after the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted the “Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise” convention in 1948, six Southeast Asian countries are among the thirty-three that have still not ratified it.Footnote 2 The ILO Convention “Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining Convention, 1949 (No. 98),” aimed at protecting labor unions against infringements on their membership and right to collective bargaining, has been ratified by 165 countries to date but still remains unsigned by five in Southeast Asia.Footnote 3
The relationship between the poor record of signing up to the ILO and the role of Southeast Asian workplaces in global commodity chains is a tangential one, however. First, the conventions antedate the emergence of the Southeast Asian export-oriented industries in the 1970s and 1980s. Second, not all Southeast Asian countries have experienced declining union density over the past decades. Third, the history of tense relations between governments and labor unions goes back to the earliest days of organized labor in the region at the turn of the twentieth century. Both colonial and postcolonial governments either tried to control or, if that failed, to suppress organized labor. These policies, however, resulted in fragmentation and disorganization rather than stifling collective action. Waves of wildcat strikes are as much part of the region's labor history as is government suppression of collective action. It is a trajectory with mixed outcomes, varying from high labor density and effective collective action to the complete marginalization of unions. Gender plays a major role in this history, primarily because textiles and garment manufacturing—offering employment predominantly for women—remained the largest non-agricultural sectors in Southeast Asia until the region was swamped with cheap Japanese cloth in the 1920s.Footnote 4 In the 1970s, the export-oriented industries turned to female labor, not only to economize on wages but also in the false belief that women were more docile than men. Today, women are underrepresented in the leading positions of organized labor, but are vocally present at the factory floors of the garment, footwear, and electronics industries.
The sharp social polarization between capital and labor in this part of the world is not only the result of colonial legacies, its subservient position in the global commodity chains, and the attendant culture of resistance but also of its extensive exposure to global ideological currents. In this regard, we can discern three key types of transnational movements over the past century. First, the early labor unions were intimately linked to the first currents of anti-colonial nationalism in Asia, and became increasingly perceptive of communist activists. From the mid-1920s, their position was bolstered both by the fact that Communism was a significant and eventually victorious power in China, and by the presence of large ethnic Chinese populations in Southeast Asia. Communist labor unions spread throughout the region, despite heavy oppression by the colonial states. Second, this phase was followed by the arrival of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) in the region in the early Cold War years. The confederation played a key role in fostering labor unionism as a bulwark against communist infiltration engineered by Russia and China. The third, and current, wave features transnational advocacy groups and NGOs—ranging from the Clean Clothes Campaign and the Young Christian Workers, to the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung foundation—helping to revive labor unions in the aftermath of the authoritarian and communist regimes that were dominant in the 1970s and 1980s.
The reluctance to sign on with international labor conventions was not just out of authoritarian instinct but stemmed from a well-founded fear that control of organized labor was a matter of survival in the face of restive labor classes in precarious conditions. The postcolonial governments behaved no differently from the colonial regimes in this regard, as instruments to control labor unions and isolate communist activism dating from colonial times remained in place during the Cold War. In the 1980s, with the communist threat already receding, the authoritarian regimes deemed this control highly useful when they inserted their working classes into global buyer-driven commodity chains. They further added the instrument of creating special economic zones, where their own tax and labor regulations do not apply and where migrant labor can be heavily exploited because of its alien status. Although they expected that investors were looking for docile labor, the Southeast Asian leaders miscalculated the attitude of US, EU, and Japanese governments, which began to make access to their markets conditional on the observance of at least some of the ILO conventions. Moreover, in the 1970s and 1980s they could not yet fathom the growing power of transnational advocacy. As described by Keck and Sikkink, transnational advocacy groups put pressure on the governments of the rich, consuming countries to instill some respect for the working classes in the governments of the producing countries.Footnote 5
The earliest labor unions
In the decades prior to the Second World War, Southeast Asia was a dominant exporter of commodities such as copra, pepper, rice, rubber, and tin, as well as a major producer of palm oil and sugar. The Netherlands Indies, with about half of the region's population, received over half of the foreign direct investment flowing into the region. Mainland Southeast Asia became, however, increasingly globally incorporated in the 1920s: its proportion of the region's foreign direct investment grew from just 16 percent in 1914 to 24 percent in 1937.Footnote 6
Wage work consisted overwhelmingly of cheap undifferentiated labor for plantations and, to a lesser extent, for infrastructure, mines, and some processing industries. Rapid demographic growth made this labor abundantly available in Java and the northern parts of the Philippines, whereas British Malaya and Burma had to bring in workers from China and India on a massive scale. Labor relations were defined by subcontracting and piece-rate payment, either by locally recruited labor gangs under their own foremen known as the tandil (Chinese), the kangani/maistry (Tamil), or the mandur (Javanese).Footnote 7 These labor relations did provide some collective security, although they also gained notoriety for involving the debt bondage of laborers. Colonial powers introduced individualized indentured labor contracts to control human trafficking (which was a particular concern for the authorities in Singapore) to enforce labor discipline, and to ensure the repatriation of workers. These indentured contracts comprehensively banned collective action by workers, but did not stop labor resistance in the form of massive-scale desertion from plantations and mines.Footnote 8
While plantations were not conducive to workers submitting collective labor demands, and engendered their own forms of resistance (including desertion), a labor movement more akin to that in industrial Europe emerged in the railways and docks, as well as in garment and textile factories. Labor gangs under patron-client relationships, secret societies, Chinese hongs (guilds), Catholic gremios in the Philippines (based on patron saints), and mutual assistance were the dominant forms of labor solidarity in the urban sectors. Strikes and walkouts did take place and were recorded in Manila, for example, as early as in the 1870s, but labor unions emulating the European model only emerged thirty years later.Footnote 9 They recruited their members from the expanding bureaucracies, infrastructure, and nascent manufacturing industries; a process that was facilitated by a relaxation of the bans on association.Footnote 10 Among the earliest labor unions in Southeast Asia were those established by Malay seamen in 1894 and by the Bangkok tramway workers three years later.Footnote 11
Organized labor first emerged as a significant force in Manila, the fastest growing center of industrial wage labor at the turn of the twentieth century. The city had mushroomed to two hundred thousand inhabitants in the previous half century, and its per capita income level was well ahead of the rest of Southeast Asia.Footnote 12 Radical political collective labor action was galvanized by resistance to Spanish rule and against the powerful mendicant orders that dominated Philippine public and economic life. The first leader of this action was the nationalist entrepreneur and newspaper publisher Isabelo de los Reyes. While serving his time as a political prisoner in a Barcelona jail, Los Reyes had become acquainted with anarcho-syndicalist thinking. On his return to Manila, he started clandestinely to organize wage earners (barbers, tobacco workers, woodworkers, carpenters, and clerks) and had assembled a reported twenty thousand followers by around 1900. After his arrest, the banner was taken over by the equally nationalistic surgeon Dominador Gómez, suspected by the American administration of having links with the Filipino guerilla movement that lingered on in the countryside. Gómez's fate was sealed after one of his followers threw a bomb at a group of strike breakers at the Manila Electric Railway and Light Company (Meralco).Footnote 13 Both Los Reyes and Gómez should be remembered for their nationalist revolutionary fervor rather than their affinity to socialism.Footnote 14
Visiting US labor unionists might have convinced the colonial administrators of the Philippines that outright suppression of organized labor would not only be un-American, but could also fuel anti-American feelings among Filipinos. In 1903, the administrators wisely decided to allow workers to organize, and five years later, the Bureau of Labor was established, with conciliatory powers over labor disputes. In 1917, with the granting of voting rights to Filipinos who had passed a literacy test (and literacy in Manila was the highest in Southeast Asia at that time), the laboring classes obtained even more political clout.Footnote 15 Even though their organizations submitted important demands, such as an eight-hour working day, and established a broad range of cooperative societies, they did not develop a class-based ideology as such.Footnote 16
Whereas in the Philippines, the urbanized and culturally Hispanicized Manila workers had opened up the field for labor unions, in the Netherlands Indies, this role was played by the significant Eurasian or Indo-European population. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Indo-European postal services employees, subaltern officers, and railway workers all established their own unions, strongly supported by the Dutch language press in this colony.Footnote 17 One key organization was the railway union, the Vereeniging van Spoor- en Tramweg Personeel (VSTP), which had radicalized during the First World War under the influence of brilliant young Indonesian activists and the Dutch Communist Henk Sneevliet, who would later become famous for his Comintern work in China. Established in 1908 by Indo-European railway employees, the VSTP crossed a crucial colonial boundary by admitting both European and Indonesian members. It gradually turned into an Indonesian labor union counting thirteen thousand members, out of a total railway labor force of fifty thousand in 1923. It had a troubled relationship with the largest Indonesian union, the Personeel Fabriek Bond (PFB), which organized the Indonesian employees in the sugar industry and counted about forty-three thousand members in 1921.Footnote 18 The PFB was a somewhat elite union, having only salaried workers as members, even though 90 percent of the workers in the sugar industry were piece-rate day laborers. While impressive in size, and protected by a colonial government that still believed in taking a neutral stance in the struggle between capital and labor, its internal divisions made it vulnerable to suppression once the political winds changed. This occurred after the railway strike of 1923, which was provoked by an increasingly reactionary Dutch colonial government. It not only meant the end of the VSTP but also proved to be the pretext for the colonial authorities to ban all strikes of any significance.
In British Malaya, labor unions remained prohibited for much longer than in the Philippines or the Netherlands Indies, but this did not prevent their clandestine emergence. In 1928, the authorities finally reversed their course, having realized that in light of the growing presence of communist activists in the city, it was preferable to bring unionism into the open.Footnote 19 These unions were, in many respects, an English-style organizational superstructure on a Chinese basis, energized by the revolution in their Chinese motherland that had established a republic in 1912.Footnote 20
In mainland Southeast Asia, organized labor lagged far behind that of the Philippines, Java, and the Malay Peninsula. Labor unions remained prohibited in French Indochina until the end of the Second World War, although clandestine labor organizations emerged in the late 1920s, most notably the Red Trade Union Federation in 1929.Footnote 21 Moreover, a culture of labor resistance had already made itself felt through frequent strikes in the light and the heavy industries from the early years of the twentieth century. Women actually played a vocal role in these industries. Although Indian labor law applied in Burma, which recognized the legality of organized labor, unions only emerged in the late 1930s, founded by Indian urban immigrant workers.Footnote 22 In Thailand, labor unions were outlawed; both under the absolutist monarchy that ruled until 1932 and during the subsequent military regimes that were in power for most of the time up to 1973.Footnote 23 Organized labor only obtained the opportunity to operate through the Labor Act of 1956, a law that was adopted by the Thai government mainly to shore up its standing at the ILO, only to be rescinded by a new military regime two years later.Footnote 24 In sum, with regard to mainland Southeast Asia, only Vietnam exhibited labor activism of some significance; a pattern that was to continue in the postwar era.
Communist labor activism in Southeast Asia
Whereas the first phase of organized labor was embedded in the wave of early nationalism, inspired and fueled by the revolutions in the Philippines and China, as well as by activists originating from radical labor movements in Europe, from the 1920s, Communism became the transnational driving force behind labor organization in Southeast Asia. This happened via the Comintern and its labor union branch, Profintern, and was backed up by the strong position of the communist movement in China. Meanwhile, Dutch and Indonesian activists had not only established the first communist party in Southeast Asia—the Perserikatan Kommunist di India, better known as the PKI—but had also emerged as the region's communist leaders, with Tan Malaka as the Comintern's formal regional representative after 1922. A defining moment was the Pacific Transport Workers conference, organized by the Profintern in Canton in 1924, where Tan Malaka met representatives of the Philippine labor unions, who invited him to their country.Footnote 25
In a mood of overconfidence, and ignoring Tan Malaka's stern warning not to engage in an untimely adventure, a Communist revolution was attempted in the Netherlands Indies in November 1926. The devastating result was a comprehensive ban on the PKI and the arrest of thirteen thousand people. In addition, the government and the plantation enterprise built up extensive archives of fingerprints and issued passes to ensure that they could easily identify possible communist “infiltrators” in their organizations.Footnote 26 After the railway strike of 1923, this meant a second brutal setback for the radical labor movement in the largest—and economically, by far the most significant—colony of Southeast Asia. While in the Philippines and Vietnam, communist labor activism was a force to be reckoned with in the 1930s, in Indonesia, the entire labor movement was practically toothless and concentrated in the government and service sector, despite the fact that the industrial sector had experienced rapid growth.Footnote 27 These unions were content with mutualist welfare provisions for their workers, and to the regret of Indonesia's nationalist leaders, were either unwilling or incapable of fighting colonial exploitation.Footnote 28
After the communist debacle in the Netherlands Indies, the center of radical labor activism in Southeast Asia shifted to the Philippines, where urban and rural radicalism would join forces.Footnote 29 Tan Malaka played a key role in this, traveling to the Philippines three times between 1925 and 1927 to lay the foundations for the country's communist movement, which was established as the Partido Kommunista in 1930.Footnote 30 Its policy to instill the notion of class struggle into the Philippine labor unions was much helped by growing labor discontent in Manila in the late 1920s. The important cigar manufacturing industry had suffered heavily due to competition from US cigarettes, whereas the textile industry was struggling against Japanese imports.Footnote 31 In addition to its growing urban base, the Partido Kommunista succeeded in building a position in Central Luzon, where the population of landless peasants was increasing at an alarming pace. Although the Partido Komunista was banned and its leadership jailed in the early 1930s, urban labor continued to be militant, culminating in a spate of strikes in 1934. The largest of these, involving the eight thousand workers in the Manila cigarette industry, lasted for six weeks.Footnote 32
At that time, Manuel E. Quezon became the first president of the Philippines. Although a scion of the landowning elite, he had invested in good relations with the workers of Manila throughout his political career. Quezon launched a social justice program in 1935, inspired by Roosevelt's New Deal. It included the granting of the twenty-year old demand for an eight-hour working day, a minimum wage, and the protection of union membership against harassment by employers. Yet Quezon also tightened control over the labor unions by requiring their registration—a system that stayed in place until 1953.Footnote 33 This was only a partial success, however, mainly because the communist labor movement continued a clandestine existence.Footnote 34 In fact, two thirds of the 286,877 union members in the Philippines belonged to non-registered, predominantly communist associations. Among the registered unions, the largest single one consisted of the workers at the sugar factories, a privileged group within the sugar economy. While urban radicalism was subdued but not defeated, the countryside in Central Luzon continued to be in turmoil.
In Vietnam, communist activists trained in China found fertile ground in the rapidly expanding mining, plantations, and railroads sectors over the course of the 1920s.Footnote 35 Their work culminated in a popular uprising in 1930–1931, which the French found hard to quell. Renewed labor activism emerged in 1937, after initial hopes had dwindled that the French Popular Front government would bring the rights of labor in its colonies on par with its metropolitan counterparts. Moreover, wages were falling behind the rising cost of living. Discontent rose to such heights that the strikes were even supported by the predominantly Catholic railway workers, one whose loyalty to the French colonial administrators had been unstinting during the earlier 1930–1931 actions.Footnote 36
In Singapore, where the Profintern had created the Nanyang General Labor Union in 1925 to coordinate its operations in Southeast Asia, communist labor activists were able to amass a following of a few thousand workers, but their organization was soon destroyed by the city's authorities.Footnote 37 Elsewhere in the Malay Peninsula, twenty thousand Chinese workers on rubber estates went on strike in 1937. This developed into a mostly spontaneous strike wave joined by tens of thousands more workers, in which the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) apparently played an initiating but not a dominant role. It was above all the resolve of workers, almost exclusively Chinese, who demanded their share of the rapidly recovering rubber and tin prices. Incidentally, Chinese women were also in the frontline and quite a few female activists were arrested.Footnote 38
Radical labor activism strengthened after the Second World War
The communist and other radical labor movements in the 1920s and 1930s had suffered from repression, not least because of their links to Moscow and China. However, the same, strong transnational network—in addition to growing popular antipathy to colonial rule—had enabled their survival. Moreover, during the Japanese Occupation, they had strengthened their position as resistance movements in various Southeast Asian countries. In 1945, the Hukbalahap (the military guerilla organization of the Philippine Communists) had grown into a formidable force, the communist labor movement was powerful in the Indonesian Republic that had been proclaimed on August 17, 1945, and the CPM was the de facto ruler of Malaya between the Japanese capitulation of August 15 and the arrival of the British on September 3. Last but not least, Ho Chi Minh ruled over North Vietnam.
In British Malaya, the communist labor unions only gained strength after 1945, when the Indian and Chinese labor activists moved closer together. The CPM's support for Indian independence, together with Jawaharlal Nehru's visit to Malaya in 1946, played a key role in this. Meanwhile, massive strikes were taking place in practically every sector of services, infrastructure, and industry in the Malay Peninsula.Footnote 39 The British authorities reacted to this by systematically curtailing the influence of the CMP-affiliated General Labor Unions (GLUs), by limiting activists’ access to plantations and mines, and by outlawing strikes. As a result, workers who went on strike against a 20 percent reduction of the wages of rubber tappers and who were fired by their employer, found themselves no longer protected by law.Footnote 40 The crackdown on the GLUs, including the execution of some prominent leaders, was fiercely protested against by British and Australian labor unions. Some people, including the government of India, saw the CPM and its affiliated labor unions as a nationalist movement like the ones in Vietnam and Indonesia.Footnote 41 The Cold War set in, however, and the British declared a state of emergency in Malaya in 1948. They waged a drawn-out counter-insurgency against the CPM that eventually involved the relocation of 650,000 residents of the countryside to controlled neighborhoods in order to empty the pond in which the communist guerilla moved.
At this point, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU)—established by Western labor unions in 1949—stepped in to open up the space for a non-communist labor movement. It sent a delegation on a grand tour throughout Southeast Asia to prepare for the creation of regional organizations, which resulted, among other things, in the founding of the Malaysian Trades Union Congress (MTUC) and the opening of an ICFTU office in Singapore.Footnote 42 The British and American governments greatly welcomed these activities, even though it was the same ICFTU that had pressured the government of British Malaya into recognizing labor unions in 1952. The colonial administration did, however, not leave a shred of doubt that it would act resolutely against any political activism by trade unions.Footnote 43
Nonetheless, this severe repression of radical unionism continued to be a dangerous policy for the British rulers of Malaysia. With the communist guerilla action ongoing, and ethnic Chinese being coercively relocated in massive numbers, the British government could only count on the Indian population to participate in legally accepted trade unionism, which meant that Cold War and communalism began to mingle dangerously.Footnote 44 Lasting damage was furthermore done to civil society by government regulations that excluded “professional agitators” from the labor movement. Trade unions were only allowed for particular occupations or trades, and their leaders needed to have at least three years of professional or occupational experience in that specific sector.Footnote 45 Later on, this Cold War instrument would prove of invaluable service to the authoritarian Mahathir government to tame organized labor and keep wages structurally lagging behind economic growth.Footnote 46 One can only conclude that after having suffered from pre-war suppression, the cause of labor was taken hostage by the Cold War; a trend that was reinforced during the authoritarian export promotion regimes. In 1983 for example, the government of Malaysia started to officially encourage in-house unions to further erode the position of the nationwide counterparts.Footnote 47
A comparable combination of repression of the communist labor unions and opening up to collective bargaining emerged in the Philippines during the 1950s. It happened under the formidable pressure of the United States, which held the leverage of a free trade agreement with the Philippines. During the war, the Communists had strengthened their position in the countryside through their guerilla actions against Japanese Occupation under the name of Hukbalahap, and after 1945 this continued as a resistance movement, posing a direct threat to the haciendas. Meanwhile, associated communists held key positions in the urban unions, which claimed a membership of one hundred thousand.Footnote 48 In 1951 and 1952, the government took on the labor unions, hundreds of which were deregistered; a policy that did not curry favor with the United States, however. The latter impressed upon the Philippine government the wisdom of taking the wind out of the sails of Communism by leading the labor movement in the direction of collective bargaining.Footnote 49 The shift in 1953 toward freeing up labor unions was less radical than hoped for by the United States, as the courts retained wide discretion over what was considered a legitimate strike. It therefore continued to be a volatile situation, particularly because in those years the Philippines was still the most industrialized country in Southeast Asia, with an articulate labor movement.Footnote 50 Yet the Philippine labor unions were not able to break the iron grip of the Philippine landed elite on the political system, which was solidly clientelistic and lubricated with a substantial amount of money.Footnote 51 The result was social polarization, a rising number of strikes, and workers’ militancy that contributed to the declaration of martial law by president Ferdinand Marcos in 1972.Footnote 52
Whereas Malaysia and the Philippines were directed by Britain and the United States on a course of legitimizing moderate unionism while repressing communist organizations, in Indonesia, the struggle between the military and the radical labor organizations would eventually culminate in a dramatic showdown. At the time of the transfer of sovereignty in 1949, workers were militant, but the union density among them was 3 percent, at best. After almost twenty-five years of union suppression, most strikes were wildcat, which the nascent unions could only follow.Footnote 53 Tensions between national interests and workers’ demands were manifest even before the formal transfer of sovereignty, when spontaneous labor unrest in Dutch-owned sugar factories was curbed in the territories under Republican control. This was because the emerging Indonesian state had a distinct interest in getting the plantation exports up and running again.
The most important Indonesian labor union was the Sentral Organisasi Buruh Seluruh Indonesia (SOBSI). Established in 1946 and initially the sole relevant labor union in the Republic of Indonesia, it came increasingly under communist sway. During the 1950s, SOBSI lost its monopoly position but was still a dominating force among the Indonesian labor unions, which together counted about two and a half million members, predominantly plantation workers in Java and the plantation belt of Northeast Sumatra.Footnote 54 SOBSI and other trade unions began to fall more in line with government policies over the course of the 1950s. They played a key role in the nationalization of Dutch enterprise in that year, but they had to hand over this property to the military, their main rival for power. After the declaration of martial law in 1959, the army emerged as the most powerful force in Indonesia. The PKI resisted, upping the ante, but was finally crushed in 1965 by the military, and SOBSI went down with the communist purge.
Indonesia was a unique case, because of its epic struggle between radical labor and the military generals. South Vietnam, as a US dependency, instead followed the Philippines and Malaysia in summarily jailing communist activists while legitimizing politically cooperative unions. The United States and its allies—Japan, Korea, and Taiwan—heavily invested in the industrial sector in South Vietnam, particularly in a textile sector that mainly employed women, partly because the male population had been drafted into the army in massive numbers.Footnote 55 South Vietnam had a militant labor movement that after 1975 was subsumed under the North Vietnamese labor unions. Contrary to what one might expect, however, these unions showed some degree of independence, reflecting a long history of resistance and the fact that the wars of independence and unification had made the Vietnamese people assertive enough not to passively follow the country's political elites.Footnote 56
With its predominantly ethnic Chinese population, urban setting, egalitarian political culture, and admiration for China's revolution, Singapore embarked on a course of cooptation.Footnote 57 The powerful and communist-inclined labor unions—uniting 56 percent of all wage worker—aligned with the People's Action Party (PAP) in an assertive stance under late British rule.Footnote 58 Once the PAP had taken the reins of government after independence in 1958, the trade unions moved from a confrontational to a collaborative stance.Footnote 59 In the 1960s, the PAP distanced itself from its Communist wing; however, without committing to a pro-Western course.Footnote 60 Its government imposed mediation as the dominant mechanism for solving labor disputes, practically outlawing strikes. From the late 1960s onward, Singapore's National Trade Union Congress (NTUC) developed into an organization supporting the government in its technocratic approach to labor issues as a matter of “manpower planning.”
Labor and authoritarian modernization
The Cold War did not end the repressive policies toward organized labor, despite efforts by Western labor unions and governments to open up the space for non-communist unions. In fact, postcolonial governments added new instruments, such as obligatory mediation, the exclusion of professional union activists, and political cooptation. However, these policies proved to be only partially successful at times of rapidly rising levels of education and urbanization; and thus rising levels of political consciousness. Social tensions and outright confrontations did not abate. By the 1970s, the optimism of the 1950s that Southeast Asian countries would find a stable path to democracy and prosperity—as described by the modernization paradigm—had vanished, and authoritarian leadership styles were apparently the most successful.Footnote 61 Mahathir, the strong man of Malaysia, insisted that Western values had little to offer, and that Japan and Korea epitomized the successful Asian moral economy. In his view, strikes were simply a threat to economic growth, and he succeeded in practically banning them.Footnote 62 Under President Suharto’s New Order in Indonesia, visions of labor unionism were enmeshed in Thomist Corporatism, in which all sections of society had their own particular role, fitting together as a harmonious whole.Footnote 63
Labor unionism was seriously curtailed in Southeast Asia between 1968 and 1976, with the banning of SOBSI in Indonesia in 1968, the tightening of control over labor unions following the communal unrest in Malaysia in 1969, the declaration of martial law in the Philippines in 1972, the end of South Vietnam in 1975, and the military coup in Thailand the year after. Meanwhile, the risks of popular revolt caused by the explosive mix of extremely long working days, youth unemployment, and rising levels of education and urbanization could only be mitigated through rising living standards.Footnote 64 The authoritarian regimes, therefore, keenly exploited the new opportunities for labor-intensive industrialization that came within reach through the declining competitiveness of Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore in this sector. The Philippines and Malaysia were the first two beneficiaries of this relocation, followed by Indonesia and Thailand. It gave their governments a new argument to repress labor unions; namely, that pliant labor forces were required in order to attract foreign direct investment.Footnote 65
While the male workforce was favored in the import substitution phase, under export promotion policies, the preference shifted to cheap—and usually not unionized—female labor, both in the garment and the electronics industry.Footnote 66 The creation of industrial enclaves allowed factories to turn up the work pressure on young female migrant workers, who were generally employed for only three or four years, a fact that further eroded the basis for labor unionism.Footnote 67 In the Philippines, 70 percent of garment and electronics workers in such enclaves were female, and only six thousand were unionized in the 1970s.Footnote 68 In Malaysia, the two hundred thousand workers employed in the textile and garments industry in the 1980s could not be unionized at all, because they were not hired on a wage contract basis. Incidentally, severe exploitation was not confined to the low-capital garment industry, but was also ubiquitous in the capital intensive computer components industry, which operated under cut-throat competition.Footnote 69 In Malaysia, labor unions were only allowed in the electronics industry after 1988, and this was thanks to pressure from the ILO.Footnote 70 While equal pay for men and women had been adopted as a principle by early postcolonial governments, it quickly disappeared from Southeast Asia in the 1980s, where the gender disparity could amount to as much as half the wage.
Women were putatively already disciplined by the patriarchy of their homes and village societies, and thus prepared to carry out repetitious work that required a high degree of concentration for eight hours, and often more, per day.Footnote 71 Despite all this, young women might have seen these factories as offering an opportunity to escape from family patriarchy and obtain some autonomy, a mechanism also noted in Java.Footnote 72 Even though mistreatment on the factory floor was often depressing, steady employment and income also empowered women. The confinement of women in industrial enclaves could morer easily turn into a hotbed for collective action. Pansapa's description of the conditions for women in Thai garment factories depict a life filled with exhaustingly long working days, but since they worked in the same factory and might have stayed in the same dormitories, their sequestered conditions proved to be a basis for collective action, too.Footnote 73 Throughout Southeast Asia, and contrary to what was expected, young women were a relatively restive labor force, as long as they had no children to feed or parents back home to care for.Footnote 74
The resurgence of labor activism in Southeast Asia
In the Philippines and Indonesia, the authoritarian production regimes began to crack over the course of the 1980s. Labor unions continued to enjoy high membership rates in the Philippines and obtained support from community organizations, including the church. Their militancy was an important factor in forcing Marcos out. In those days, Suharto was being pressured by Western governments and the ILO into relieving restrictions on labor unions, which he did. Instead of this easing tensions, the effect was that the number of strikes only grew.Footnote 75 Organized labor played a major role both in the 1986 revolution in the Philippines and in the 1998 Reformasi in Indonesia. The Philippines and Indonesia saw a surge of strikes in the years prior to the ousting of, respectively, Marcos and Suharto. New labor unions emerged in the early 1990s, outside the formal structures and supported by NGOs, and were more or less tolerated by the government.Footnote 76 In 1998, Habibie signed the ILO “Freedom of Association and the Right to Organize” (No. 87).Footnote 77
Conversely, the relatively low level of labor activism in Singapore, Malaysia, and Myanmar might have contributed to the survival of these authoritarian regimes, as Neureiter argues.Footnote 78 This observation does not, however, take into account the economic factor. All of the governments in Southeast Asia regulated and curtailed labor unions, but while Singapore and Malaysia—as well as Thailand, for that matter—saw rapidly increasing employment opportunities and rising living standards, enabling them to pacify labor, the prospects were more gloomy in the Philippines and Indonesia.Footnote 79 Thailand did go through a democratic transition in the 1990s, but in this case without a large role for the labor unions. Union density was an important factor, which in the 1990s was low in Thailand, as well as in Indonesia. This was not an independent variable, however, but predicated on historically shaped opportunity structures.Footnote 80 In this regard, it should be noted that although the entire region had suffered under authoritarian rulers, the military regimes of Indonesia and Thailand had apparently inflicted additional damage on the labor unions.Footnote 81
At any rate, Thailand's rapid economic growth in the 1980s enabled its government to steer a course comparable with that of Malaysia, and to keep collective action predominantly within individual factories.Footnote 82 Similar to its Malaysian counterpart, the government of Thailand had prohibited professional labor unionists in 1975.Footnote 83 Quite a few factories had therefore been able to flaunt labor legislation and demote or fire labor activists among their workers.Footnote 84 That the government could engineer the declining power of the labor unions was not unlike the situation in Malaysia in the 1990s thanks to increasing wage levels. The two countries were no longer at the bottom of the wage levels in Southeast Asia, whereas the global textile production chains were always looking for the cheapest sites of production. Thailand saw an exodus of Thai workers to better paying industries after wages had sunk to below subsistence level in the garment industry.Footnote 85
The NGOs and the labor unions
The governments of Southeast Asia were certainly not immune to pressure from the ILO and Western governments to improve labor conditions. This strengthened the position of workers protesting against extreme exploitation, but without effective labor unions in place, their position continued to be structurally weak. Moreover, the crisis of 1997 coincided with a relocation of textile and garment production to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Bangladesh, which seriously reduced the options for unionizing labor in the textile sector. Workers’ organizations in Thailand and Indonesia became increasingly reliant on international solidarity and support from organizations, such as the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung foundation and the ICFTU. Grass roots organizations, NGOs, and migrant associations became the new, highly visible vehicles of the labor movement. In Thailand, their role was even considered to be indispensable because of corruption and the high turnover of leadership within the unions.Footnote 86 Neither in Indonesia nor Thailand, nor in the Philippines, for that matter, has organized labor been able to alter the political system that is still owned by the elites.Footnote 87
In this configuration, the role of NGOs—particularly the transnational ones—continues to be of pivotal importance. Especially in the export processing zones, the combination of state repression, highly mobile capital, and young, vulnerable female labor is largely prohibitive of any unionization. Transnational advocacy groups, however, can work at the other end of the commodity chain, by influencing the behavior of the multinationals carrying famous trademarks that order these products and bring them to the markets.Footnote 88 In the Philippines, church-led NGOs organized local support and organization, as well as international solidarity, for which the Philippine Catholic Church was exceptionally well positioned. These NGOs have also linked up with transnational advocacy organizations, such as the Clean Clothes Campaign.Footnote 89 New patterns of collaboration between NGOs and labor unions have been developing in the transitional democracies of Southeast Asia.Footnote 90 In Vietnam as well, which reportedly has a more union-friendly government than Malaysia, the anti-sweatshop movement plays a pivotal role in combating widespread exploitation and abuse of workers by transnational corporations. Nike's pledge to improve health conditions in its Vietnam factory led to the hiring of independent analysts in 1999, which proves that pressure from the media, NGOs, and consumers is of utmost importance.Footnote 91
Obviously, the main weakness of NGOs is their lack of true membership, and this is particularly a problem in Indonesia and Thailand where there is low union density.Footnote 92 However, in Vietnam, the situation is different. Union density in Vietnam is high, at between 45 and 50 percent, which is partly because workers believe—rightfully—that membership in a union pays off for them.Footnote 93 Labor activism in Vietnam has a relatively strong tradition of popular anti-imperialist mobilization, which became particularly visible when the country became reliant on EU and US markets fairly recently. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Vietnam lost its export markets for the textile and garment industry, while its own market was flooded with cheap textiles, mostly smuggled in from China.Footnote 94 The EU came to rescue Vietnam from its predicament by giving the country access to the European market in 1992.Footnote 95 A few years later, Vietnam's garment industry was employing half a million people and made up 16 percent of the country's export value.Footnote 96
Much of the garment manufacturing in Vietnam consists of subcontracting from Hong Kong, Taiwanese, Korean, or other Asian factories, and is part of what Gereffi has termed the “triangle chains,” where countries with higher wage levels were moving down the commodity chain—by upgrading their production—subcontracting out labor-intensive work elsewhere in Asia.Footnote 97 Cases of mistreatment and unpaid overtime (working days often amounting to twelve to fourteen hours) have been numerous.Footnote 98 Since the mid-1990s, hundreds of strikes have taken place each year, particularly at foreign-owned garment and footwear factories employing young women from the countryside.Footnote 99 At present, the number of laborers employed in this light industry amounts to two million, and workers in the south of Vietnam are purportedly the most willing to strike within Southeast Asia.Footnote 100 Wildcat strikes, in which the union follows the workers’ lead, form the main pattern. Workers have their own networks, through their villages and relatives, and can easily communicate using mobile phones.Footnote 101 These strikes owe their success to the high level of solidarity among workers, who act as a collective, thereby preventing the management from identifying the leaders and being able to “decapitate” the resistance.Footnote 102 Labor newspapers have furthermore been highly effective channels for workers to air their grievances against severe exploitation and employers’ disregard of labor legislation.Footnote 103
The history of labor activism in Cambodia over the past twenty years exhibits some important parallels with that in Vietnam. Since 1997, the government of Cambodia has allowed independent labor unions, and in 1999, it signed the ILO conventions 87 and 98, clearing the path for collective bargaining in the hotel and garment sectors. This endowed Cambodia with the “Most Favored Nation” status, and access to US, European, and Japanese markets, enabling the textile and garment sector to employ 630,000 workers. By 2010, the union density in the garment industry was 60 percent, and thirty-seven unions in this sector were competing for the workers’ favor.Footnote 104 Meanwhile, local and international NGOs had stepped in to provide technical advice and political support to workers aiming to establish their unions.Footnote 105 Moreover, through massive strikes, workers successfully campaigned for higher wages, defying the watchful gaze of the military. The regime had to show restraint, because its preferential status for textile exports contained clauses about labor standards, and the ILO had been given the role of assessing the compliance. In addition, there was the watchful eye of the Clean Clothes Campaign, which had also contributed to Primark and other companies pledging to pay more for the subcontracted production of their clothes.Footnote 106 As a result, the workers were able to obtain their share from a significant growth in productivity—four times as high as in Thailand and twice as high as in Indonesia. Although Cambodia was, together with Bangladesh, the cheapest producer in 2016 in the garment sector where prices constantly declined, real wages had increased since 2012.
Exploiting the most vulnerable
Thailand and Malaysia did not wait until their entire garment sectors had left for Vietnam, Cambodia, and Bangladesh, but encouraged the relocation of production outside the cities in cheap labor enclaves. They did this also, as Arnold and Pickles observe, in response to the fact that in the urban centers of Southeast Asia, labor conditions had come under increased scrutiny and labor regulations were better observed.Footnote 107 Relocation of the factories went along with rapidly deteriorating labor conditions, for example through the conversion of hour-wage payment into piece-rate payment. While the Thai and Malaysian workers moved on to better paying jobs, laborers were imported from poorer Southeast Asian countries. The Malaysian textile industry massively imports Vietnamese labor under conditions that exhibit striking similarities with the indentured labor contracts of colonial times.Footnote 108
Over the past decades, huge wage enclaves of migrant labor have emerged. One of these is Mae Sot, near the border with Myanmar, where most of the garment sweatshops are subsidiaries of Bangkok firms. The Mae Sot workshops are at the lowest end of the global commodity chains, with, for example, brands such as Tommy Hilfiger.Footnote 109 Many of the about two to three million Myanmar workers in Thailand live in this center of the garment industry, driven by poverty and persecution. By 2010, Thailand was employing two and a half million immigrant workers from Burma and half a million from Laos, who received a third to half the minimum wage.Footnote 110 On arrival in Thailand, workers are obliged to register with the Thai authorities, who allow employers to hire them for one year. Their identity cards are usually held by the employer, severely restricting the mobility of the labor migrants.Footnote 111 The working conditions are extreme. Thai legislation regarding minimum wage and gender equality in payment are flaunted, working days of between twelve and sixteen hours are normal, and workers are not allowed to leave the factory compound.Footnote 112 The refugees have no leverage, as their supply of labor exceeds the demand, their residence status is precarious, and Thai labor legislation prohibits unionization by alien workers. That does not mean there is no resistance against the draconian labor conditions; on the contrary, wildcat strikes are frequent.Footnote 113 Slowly, Mae Sot industrial workers, 70 percent of whom are women, have been able to improve their conditions, and NGOs have played an important role in this.Footnote 114
Conclusion
The case of Southeast Asia demonstrates that rather than being the consequence of globalization and export-oriented industrialization, adverse opportunity structures for labor unions are rooted in colonial and Cold War legacies. Favorable opportunity structures include first, the absence of cooptation mechanisms; second, the absence of military leadership; third, support by colonial metropolitan unions and transnational advocacy groups; and fourth, trade treaties that include clauses on labor standards.
Transnational activism has played an important and powerful role in the region's labor history over the past century. Mechanisms of repression applied by colonial administrations were updated and extended during the Cold War. The arrival of export-oriented industries offered a perfect pretext to continue this repression once the threat of Communism had begun to rapidly recede. The 1980s and 1990s saw labor discontent being pacified by rapidly rising living standards, as the cases of Thailand and Malaysia demonstrate, whereas labor discontent became a source of democratic transition in the Philippines and Indonesia. Meanwhile, the insertion of the Southeast Asian export industries into global commodity chains became increasingly to the advantage of collective labor. To obtain and preserve access to European and US markets, the governments had to consider applying at least some of the ILO standards, and thereby appease the criticisms of the global anti-sweatshop movement. The result was a halting of the race to the bottom for citizens of Southeast Asian countries, particularly in Vietnam and Cambodia—countries with a high level of collective action—and tragically, the turn toward a new source of exploitation in specific enclaves like Mae Sot, namely that of immigrant labor, often undocumented and refugee. This obviously goes a long way to explain why Thailand, in contrast to Cambodia, still has not signed the ILO conventions 87 and 98.Footnote 115
