The Emergence of a New Precarity: The Indonesian Trajectory

Continuing with the historical and comparative approach (discussed in Chapter 2 ), Chapter 3 examines the historical trajectory of the expansion of a new form of precarious work, tied to large-scale capital accumulationCapital accumulation, amid the neoliberalisation of Indonesia’s economy. This chapter examines some developments that have conditioned the normalisationNormalisation of the new form of precarious work and limited workers’ collective resistancecollective resistance, both under the New OrderNew Order authoritarian government and after the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis1997–1998 Asian financial crisis. These include the inaccessibility of social welfare, the increased casualisation of the formal sectorCasualisationcasualisation of the formal sector in tandem with the large size of the informal economyinformal economy. Meanwhile attempts to mobilise precarious workers (in the formal and informal sectors) to respond to the structural underpinnings of their precarityprecarity have been far from effective.