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Substitute Trade Union or Novel Form of Labour Movement Organisation? Understanding Indonesia’s Labour NGOs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2023

Michele Ford*
Affiliation:
CAPSTRANS, University of Wollongong

Abstract

Labour non-governmental organisations’ (NGOs) role in the reconstruction of Indonesia’s organised labour movement has been widely acknowledged. They are not, however, generally recognised as a legitimate part of that movement. This paper uses the Indonesian case to demonstrate how the existing scholarly literature has failed to consider labour NGOs as a form of labour organisation in their own right because they do not fit within practitioners’ and scholars’ definitions of what is, and is not, a legitimate industrial relations actor.

Type
Symposium on Alternative Ways of Organising: Asian Labour’s Response to the ‘New’ Globalisation
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2003

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