Quite simply, this is the best and most important book yet written on labor politics in post-New Order Indonesia and probably the most comprehensive work on any aspect or time period of Indonesian labor or mobilization published in at least 20 years. It is also among the most detailed analyses of Indonesian democratization and nascent party and electoral politics since Reformasi. This should come as no surprise because, between them, the book’s coauthors have produced many of the other contenders for these distinctions. But this collaboration bears extraordinary fruit, delivering something both additive and qualitatively different from prior work.

The central argument is that Indonesia’s labor activists adapted their strategies as general political and structural conditions evolved to influence workplace conditions, wage policies, and other regulations. In the immediate post-Suharto years, authoritarian legacies and the Left’s continuing exclusion from politics pushed workers and their advocates to use street protests and other disruptive tactics to garner attention and force local-level change. After the shift to the direct election of local and regional executives in 2005, unions struck bargains with individual candidates for these offices, opting not to form a labor-based party. Later, after a 2008 Constitutional Court ruling brought an end to Indonesia’s closed-list proportional representation legislative elections, unions began running candidates (or striking deals with preferred candidates) across multiple parties, contesting open-list elections at both the local and national levels. Unions adopted a kind of syncretism in practicing contentious and electoral mobilization, such that by the 2010s, workers were still engaged in frequent street protests but were also aligning with contenders for executive office and running legislative candidates.

Caraway and Ford spend the first two chapters laying out the argument, tracing the general historical dynamics of labor activism and mobilization, and then explaining the use of street protests as a tactic for advancing local and national policy changes. They then spend a chapter each on how unions have approached local executive contests since 2005 and legislative elections since 2009, before opening up their discussion to more general concerns of building a working-class constituency in a new democracy. Throughout, they base their analysis on extensive field research—including not only surveys but also rich qualitative and open-ended interviews—in five localities: Bekasi and Tangerang in Greater Jakarta, Gresik in East Java, Batam in Kepulauan Riau, and Deli Serdang in North Sumatra. Both the depth of this research and its geographic breadth are largely unparalleled in prior work on Indonesian labor politics, and the authors enrich and enhance their analysis in every chapter with details and illustrations drawn from interviews, as well as with local and national-level statistics and documents.

Chapter 3 draws primarily on secondary sources, newspapers, published documents, and, unfortunately sparingly, from the authors’ interviews. Rather than the rich regional comparison promised up front (and found later in the book), this chapter sticks mainly to a summary of national-level trends and developments to present a basic narrative of the evolution of labor politics and regulation during the first decade after 1998. It does a truly excellent job of this, however, offering the best such summary I have found anywhere. Though at times redundant and elucidating points already mentioned more than once earlier, the chapter goes into greater depth and presents already covered points in a more fine-grained context.

Chapter 4 describes how labor unions and activists “shifted to offense” in the years between about 2003 and 2014. This chapter presents more original data and begins to go into the promised subnational comparative analysis. It too is somewhat unsatisfying, however, as this analysis appears only in the last parts of the chapter and is far too cursory. The prose and organization of this chapter are also notably lacking relative to the high standard set in the rest of the book.

Chapters 5 and 6 deliver what I had been awaiting since the introduction: a truly systematic subnational comparative analysis of five regions based on extensive original field research. This is done absolutely beautifully, delving into details of how specific unions struck bargains and entered pacts with one another and with one or several political parties or candidates depending on local conditions, shifting national-level rules (e.g., closed vs. open lists), and the agency of individual leaders. These two chapters make the book the magisterial and field-defining work that it is, in my opinion. Without them, it would be solid but diminished in many ways. My only qualm is that the research is uneven across regions, with Greater Jakarta and Batam privileged over Sumatra and East Java.

Chapter 7 expands on the previous two chapters, adding quantitative and survey analysis to examine how labor leaders managed to build at least the foundations of a working-class voting constituency in East Java, Greater Jakarta, the Riau Islands, and North Sumatra. This perhaps too brief chapter also offers the reader more than what can be found elsewhere, going beyond prior literatures on labor and electoral politics in Indonesia to explain how unions actually drew (or failed to draw) support from workers for particular candidates and how presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto and organized labor eventually courted one another, with somewhat mixed success and implications, in 2014.

If Chapter 7 is too short, the conclusion is even shorter—essentially it is just a summary of the main arguments and some tentative speculation about lessons from Indonesia to be applied farther afield. As such, however, it is fine. But a bolder and more extensive closing statement might have been able to take the book to a different level of creative theory-building and offer greater guidance for the future study of workers and contention, not just in Indonesia but also around the world.

In all, an important weakness of the book as a whole is the relatively scant use of the impressive original data collected by the authors. Because they have collected so much more data than just about anyone else, this should have been a vital strength. In addition, although the general argument is clear (and clearly presented, even repeated, across the first chapters), the book does not make as strong or far-reaching a contribution to wider theoretical debates as it could. Although their discussion of the evolving mixed strategies of Indonesian workers breaks new ground, the authors could have told us much more about how their findings might make us reconsider some basic tenets of prevailing theories of contentious politics. Classical ideas about the rise and potential of labor-based parties could also have been challenged more directly. Finally, basic conceptions of what maturing processes and institutions of democratization look like—drawn usually from experiences in Europe or Latin America—could have been more systematically picked apart and refined based on the authors’ extensive new research in the world’s largest new democracy.

Leaving aside these quibbles, however, Labor and Politics in Indonesia is clearly the best and most important work on its topic in many years. It is a well-written and masterfully researched book that will remain essential reading for many years for all scholars of labor politics, contentious politics, or democratization—whether in Indonesia or farther afield.