This chapter explores the question of whether the increased electoral engagement of Indonesia’s unions has fostered the development of a working-class constituency. After explaining the specific challenges of developing such a constituency, we utilize evidence from surveys conducted in working-class communities in four union-dense districts in Bekasi and Tangerang to assess workers’ views on political issues and to analyze their voting behavior in the 2009 and 2014 legislative and presidential races. We find evidence that there is a stable if not growing proportion of workers with politicized collective identities. In legislative races, we argue that these politicized collective identities have not resulted in the formation of a working-class constituency but rather an organizational constituency rooted in the membership of one union, FSPMI. In presidential races, however, we find stronger evidence that union engagement in politics has contributed to the formation of a working-class constituency that crosses organizational divides.

This chapter examines the forces that produced Indonesia’s highly mobilized but politically independent labor movement. It describes the authoritarian legacies that shaped the first phase of its evolution when the labor movement had no choice but to use street politics as its primary weapon in the struggle for more worker-friendly labor policy. In a second phase, new opportunities opened by the decentralization process led unions to experiment with electoral engagement. The focus of these efforts was at the local level where union activists backed executive candidates from many different parties, pragmatically trading their political support for pro-labor measures. In a third phase, unions drew on their past organizational learning and experimentation to extend their electoral engagement to the legislative arena. Reluctant to tie themselves directly to a single party, union strategists chose to place union cadres on legislative tickets of many different political parties. Autonomous electoral participation now complemented street politics as central features of labor’s political strategy.

This chapter examines the Indonesian labor movement’s unusual strategy of running union cadres as legislative candidates with a large number of non-programmatic parties. It begins by assessing parties’ motivations for entering into these partnerships with unions, tracking the evolving strategies of the two parties that engaged most systematically with unions. It then turns its attention to SPN and FSPMI, the two union federations that had the strongest organizational commitment to running legislative candidates in the period between 2004 and 2014. In both cases, the initial decision to engage in the legislative arena was necessarily taken by the central leadership. But, in SPN’s case, the poor showing of its candidates in the 2009 elections created internal friction, and the union quickly backed away from its organizational commitment to electoral politics. By contrast, FSPMI deepened its engagement in the 2014 legislative elections, resulting in the election of two union cadres to local legislative office in Bekasi. Unperturbed by the setbacks it experienced during the first Jokowi presidency, it again refined its institutional strategy for 2019.

This chapter focuses on the Indonesian labor movement’s increasingly assertive and offensive posture in the second decade after Suharto’s fall. At the national level, unions learned to lobby more effectively, generate favorable media attention, and leverage judicial institutions to complement street mobilization. They played a central role in the passage of a groundbreaking social security law. They made even greater strides at the local level, where they embarked on an unprecedented round of mobilizations around wages. Having consolidated their networks and their position on the wage councils, they transformed them into institutions that delivered sustained real wage gains. In doing so, they exploited the opportunities presented by direct local and provincial executive elections, leveraging electoral cycles, and harnessing regional patterns of wage-setting to win massive gains. Massive protests in several core industrial areas and stronger coordination among national confederations also allowed unions to nationalize local conflicts. Even after this support vanished, unions in some parts of Indonesia sustained substantial real minimum wage increases through their local organizing efforts.

This chapter provides a detailed account of the backlash against unions in Jokowi’s first term in office and some reflections on the lessons that can be learned from the Indonesian case. These lessons include the importance of geographic and institutional factors in allowing the labor movement to mobilize on a massive scale despite its low density and high levels of fragmentation, the role of the broader regime context in creating a political climate conducive for advancing a labor agenda through street politics, and the conditions under which decentralization can offer new opportunities for unions to pursue prolabor policies at the local level. However, they also include the ways in which the Indonesian labor movement’s diffuse, networked forms of power constitute a distinctive type of unionism, one that can compensate for weakness on classic measures of union strength.

This chapter examines Indonesian unions’ involvement in mayoral, district head, and gubernatorial races in our five field sites between 2005 and 2018. It explains how unions negotiated with candidates to secure political contracts, oral and written, promising patronage benefits and prolabor policies in return for votes. As the chapter shows, the content of these political contracts varied, as did the process through which they were reached. In some cases, they were little different from agreements struck with myriad community leaders who encouraged members of their communities to vote for the candidate in return for money or public goods like a new road. In others, the focus was firmly programmatic, emphasizing measures like better enforcement of labor regulations; more regular factory inspections; and affordable healthcare, housing, and transport. There were also enormous differences in the extent to which unions and candidates delivered on these contracts. But, even where they failed, they had the effect of raising the profile of labor issues as political issues and of unions as political actors—so much so that some unions decided to run candidates of their own.

Vietnam has long been a predominantly agricultural country. Many researchers (Đặng Kim Sơn 2010: p. 331-358; Nguyen Van Khanh 2014: p. 11) assert that agriculture, peasants, and the countryside are the three constant features linked closely with the development of Vietnam. In traditional Vietnamese society, agricultural production was considered essential. There is even an old local saying which goes “agricultural production is the root of society” (dĩ nông vi bản).

Throughout much of its recorded history, the ups and downs of agricultural production in Vietnam have depended partly on natural conditions, but mainly on state policies. In the early twentieth century, during the colonial period under French rule, Vietnam was one of the world's top rice-exporting countries (Nguyen Van Khanh 2014: p. 11). However, around 1945, as a result of the policies of the Japanese and French rulers, agricultural production in Vietnam stagnated. This led to famine in 1945, leaving millions of victims faced with starvation. During the collectivization period from 1958 in the north to the reform period in the 1980s, agricultural production in Vietnam became increasingly underdeveloped (Nguyen Van Khanh 2014: p. 12). Consequently, Vietnam went from being one of the top rice-exporting countries to a country which had to import large amounts of food every year. In 1976, Vietnam imported 1.2 million tons of food. This figure increased to 2.2 million tons in 1979 (Nguyễn Sinh Cúc 1991: p. 9). To address this issue, initial experimental agricultural reforms were conducted in 1980 and official reforms started in January 1981 (Đặng Phong 2014: p. 238, 245).

Thailand is a country that has, in many ways, followed a seemingly conventional developmental trajectory as agriculture has progressively commercialized away from its earlier subsistence-oriented role, and has reduced in its significance compared to other economic sectors. Yet, farming in Thailand remains primarily comprised of smallholders, with there being only a relatively limited number of large agricultural properties in the country.

A further part of the puzzle is that, with the apparent persistence of smallholder farming, there is actually a high level of economic inequality. Private land ownership has one of the highest Gini coefficients in Southeast Asia. In Thailand, the relatively large number of people who still identify as farmers contrasts with the small economic contribution of the agricultural sector, suggesting a big gap in productivity and income between smallholderbased agriculture and the manufacturing and service sectors.

Further, there are great discrepancies between the realities of smallholder farming and the perceptions of urban elites and policymakers who set or constrain the conditions of rural advancement. With this in mind, it is important to understand not only the material conditions of smallholding in Thailand, but also its cultural and political meanings.

This chapter aims to examine the situation of smallholders in Thailand with an eye towards unravelling, if not completely solving, some of these puzzles. In addition, it provides the basis for anticipating the future pathways for smallholders in Thailand's rapidly changing economy and society.

In the immediate post-World War II period, observers forecast a bright future for the Philippines. In several ways, the Philippines was indeed better positioned than neighbouring Southeast Asian countries. The country was spared massive Cold War devastations and enjoyed agricultural successes in the 1960s and 1970s. The Green Revolution in rice was initiated at the International Rice Research Institute in Los Banos, Laguna in the mid-1960s with the introduction of genetically engineered high-yielding varieties, most notably the IR8 variety. The Philippines became an international knowledge centre for the agricultural sciences. Rice production surged and the country managed to achieve self-sufficiency in the late 1970s (Ulack 2000: p. 422). In addition, the plantation economy thrived. The export value of raw sugarcane, the traditional colonial plantation crop, increased from USD 137 million in 1965 to its peak level of USD 624 million in 1980 (Doner 2009: p. 143). As Balisacan and Hill (2003: p.1) noted: “By the mid-1960s there was still little evidence that things were to go seriously wrong. Indeed, the country was largely free of the major problems then besetting Southeast Asia”.

In the 1980s however, economic development in various sectors, including those of agriculture and fisheries, started to lose vibrancy. Meanwhile, other Southeast Asian countries in the 1990s, such as Thailand, Indonesia, and especially Vietnam were enjoying a period of impressive agricultural performance, livelihood improvements for smallholders, and overall rural poverty reduction.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, Japan’s self-sufficiency in grains stands at only 29% because of wheat and feed grain imports. Despite this deficiency, the self-sufficiency rate of rice maintains at 95%. Part-time family farms continue to play a large role in rice production. The 2010 World Census of Agriculture and Forestry in Japan reports that the average paddy-holding size of Japanese farming households which produce rice was only 1.43 ha. Thus, the farm size of most Japanese farming households is small-scale. In this chapter we highlight the particular issues faced by Japanese smallholders and clarify their socio-economic and cultural position in Japan. The position of smallholder family farms has been strongly shaped by government policies over more than fifty years, since the postwar period.

During the war, the Staple Food Control Law of 1942 was enacted to solve serious food shortages and increase farmers’ motivation to produce more rice. Essentially, the government would purchase rice at the highest price from the producers (the producers’ rice price) and sell it at the cheapest price to the consumers (consumers’ rice price). As a result of the law, rice production was greatly increased as intended and Japan was able to successfully solve its food shortage.

In the postwar period, the government passed the Agricultural Basic Law of 1961, “Jiritsu Keiei no Ikusei ” (Nurturing Viable Farms) with its primary objective of accomplishing the modernization of agriculture. At the time the Agricultural Basic Law was enacted, income disparities between urban and rural areas as well as the agricultural and industrial sectors had been exacerbated by the advancement of urbanization and industrialization during the postwar period of high economic growth (Tashiro 1999).

It may be generally observed that smallholders or smallholdings have been subject to heightened attention, not just in academic circles, but also in general publics, worldwide. Decreases in social, cultural, and ecological diversity that have been witnessed in rural economies have led to increasing concerns on a global scale. One possible avenue that has been considered for maintaining the sustainability of agrarian society has been the deeper understanding and re-appreciation of the value of smallholdings, a trend that is also evident in Taiwan. Nonetheless, while global awareness of the urgent problems facing smallholders has increased, it is also important to take into account local contexts and diversity within the smallholder sector. Without local contextualization of the various situations faced by smallholders across different spaces and times, we may lose sight of the nuances necessary for understanding the specificity of issues facing smallholders in distinctive places. In practice, one size will never fit all when it comes to understanding smallholdings worldwide.

In Taiwan, the changes that smallholders have been experiencing differ according to the time period. These changes have also affected how smallholders perceive and position themselves in Taiwanese society. Society’s perceptions of smallholders in Taiwan have also shifted in dynamic ways, along with attendant changes in socioeconomic development. To better situate smallholders in Taiwan's context, the first imperative step would be to reconsider the “ hectares” definition of the smallholding, which is at present the standard recognized in many international documents and programmes.

Smallholder agriculture remains central to the livelihoods of most rural households in the Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR, hereafter Laos), though increasingly in combination with off-farm and non-farm activities as farm households respond to new pressures and opportunities. While the country's rate of urban expansion is among the fastest in Southeast Asia (World Bank 2015), this is starting from a low base. Of Laos’ relatively sparse population of 7 million people, around two thirds live in rural areas, with 72% of the working population continuing to derive a livelihood, according to official data, from agriculture, forestry, and fishing (LSB 2015). Because of the predominance of small-scale farming in Laos, as well as the widely perceived low socio-economic status of smallholders and particularly the landless rural poor (Saykham 2013), agriculture and forestry have long been prioritized in state planning aimed at reducing rural poverty (MAF 2010). This agriculture- and smallholder-focused approach to addressing rural poverty is in line with much mainstream theory (Dercon 2013). By grounding approaches to poverty reduction in the pursuit of a transition from subsistence to commercially oriented production, Lao smallholders are subjected to both the enabling and constraining effects of state policies, international development practices, and heightened integration with and exposure to regional and global markets (Vandergeest 2003; Rigg 2005; Lagerqvist et al. 2014).

Small-scale farming practices, and thus the areas and types of land cultivated by Lao smallholders, are at the outset profoundly influenced by the country's geography, commonly divided into “upland” and “lowland” spaces in both state planning and development discourse.