Worker Consciousness and Labour Unions in Colonial Java

Abstract

F ROM THE 1870s the rate of urban growth in Java probably began to outstrip the rate of general growth for the first time, a process which accelerated from the early 1900s.' Together with the crisis in the rural areas, which was becoming obvious even to colonial administrators, urbanization paved the way for new forms of social and political organization endeavouring to reintegrate people and communities in both kampong and villages and give them a sense of common identity and purpose. Historians of Indonesia have begun to analyze social and economic change in the rural areas-and the attendant peasant protest movements-but there has been little attention paid to the growing number of Indonesians in the towns and cities and their efforts to create structures and institutions which helped make sense of their new urban world. The pioneering synoptic works of Wertheim and Van Niel have yet to be followed by studies of the process of urbanization, the living, housing and working conditions in the late colonial cities, or the changes in the mental horizons of urban dwellers and the emergence of labour unions.2 The first labour union in Java was formed in 1905 in the State Railways, but this and other early unions were under European control and recruited only small numbers of native workers.3 Labour unions led by and catering exclusively to Indonesian urban workers began to be formed in the 1910s, and blossomed in the years immediately after the end of the First World War when they were most visible in an almost continuous and largely successful wave of strikes