The company’s bosses "are just exploiting the workers, getting their profit and then leaving," said Rustam Aksam, president of the Indonesian Textile, Garment, and Leather Workers’ Union. Workers said that PT Doson had offered them "consolation" payouts of between $66 and $132. "We just want proper severance pay," said one.

Forty-eight Indonesian factories employing 123,000 workers operate under contract to the giant U.S. shoemaker, producing an annual total of between 45 million and 55 million pairs of shoes, all but 2 percent of which are exported. Some 300,000 Indonesian workers toil in factories contracted to foreign shoe companies.

On July 29, 1,000 workers from PT Primarindo Asia Infrastructure, a Bandung factory that manufactures shoes for Reebok, staged their own protest in Jakarta to condemn the company’s reductions in their orders, which have left 5,400 workers jobless. "Reebok are killers! Reebok are exploiters," chanted the workers as they set fire to a giant cardboard replica of a training shoe.

According to the chairman of the Indonesian Footwear Manufacturers’ Association, the bosses have slashed the jobs of 200,000 workers over the past three years. "Indonesia’s non-oil exports fell 6.7 percent in the first half of this year," reported the August 14 Wall Street Journal, "as businesses such as garment- and shoe-manufacturing lost billions of dollars in orders to competitors in China and Vietnam, where wages are lower and strikes fewer."

The Indonesian government says that unemployment may be as high as 38 million people across the country. The May 2 Singapore Straits Times reported that "analysts’ estimates put the number of Indonesians without full-time, steady jobs at closer to 80 million, more than one-third of the population."  
 
Plantation workers strike
Strikes and protests in the country extend beyond the shoe and garment industry and also beyond Java, the most developed of the four main islands. On August 13, for example, some 25,000 workers walked off the job at PT Perkebunan Nusantara II, a government-owned producer of palm oil and tobacco on the island of Sumatra.

"The workers went on strike because management refused to make hundreds of contract-based workers permanent and to comply with the standard minimum wage for the province," said Teruna Sinulingga, the deputy chairman of the union at the plantation. The monthly minimum wage stands at 464,000 rupiah (US$52).

"After three decades of sometimes brutal suppression under President Suharto," reported the August 14 Wall Street Journal, "workers are fighting for their rights and turning up the heat on managers, who never had to worry about labor negotiations before." The U.S.-backed dictator came to power through a bloodbath unleashed in 1965–66 against growing labor and peasant movements. Washington and other imperialist powers backed the regime as it slaughtered up to a million workers and peasants, whose potential power had been politically demobilized by the Stalinist-dominated misleadership of the mass organizations.

Suharto resigned in 1998 in face of mounting student protests, which began to draw in workers and others. The mobilizations convinced Washington and growing layers of the Indonesian bourgeoisie that he could no longer maintain stable rule.  
 
Ranks of unions grow
"From just one state-sponsored union during the Suharto era, Indonesia now has 62 national unions and an estimated 11,000 operating locally," continued the Journal. "Using strikes and political lobbying, labor groups have won minimum-wage increases of as much as 85 percent a year in some regions."

Indonesia’s labor department reported in May that in 2000, the latest year for which statistics are available, the number of strikes jumped to 273, more than double the previous year, and involved 1.3 million workers.

The Jakarta Post, an English-language daily, noted on August 20 that "Bandung has been rocked" by "several labor rallies and student demonstrations over the last few years...held to protest low minimum wages, increases in the price of basic commodities, fuel price increases, and hikes in telephone and electricity rates."

In the last month workers in a number of cities have led actions against antistrike legislation introduced by the government of Megawati Sukharnoputri. Workers prosecuted under the law "would be liable to fines of Rp 400 million (US$45,000) and four years in prison," said Etty Rostiawaty, coordinator of the Action Committee for Laborer Solidarity in Bandung. On August 19 the committee mobilized more than 3,000 workers from textile and other factories to protest the proposed legislation.

Policemen attempting to block the path of people joining the demonstration opened fire, hitting two workers in the head and leg. Both were hospitalized. The police chief claimed that "we had no choice" but to shoot.  
 
U.S. aids Indonesian security forces
Although initial and not widespread, this restiveness among working people provides the backdrop for the U.S. government’s moves to expand its collaboration with the Indonesian police. During a recent visit to Jakarta, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell said the time is right to "start down a road toward greater military-to-military cooperation and more work with [Indonesia’s] police forces."

The police will be the biggest beneficiaries of a two-year package totaling $50 million in training and other assistance. Providing cover for this intervention, administration officials have repeatedly alleged that Indonesia--in the words of the Washington Post--"risks becoming the next haven for international terrorism."

The package helps pave the way for moves to restore open links between Washington and the Indonesian security forces, and to undermine Congressional measures enacted in 1992 and 1999 that ended official training programs and arms sales. Through these bans, U.S. politicians attempted to publicly separate Washington from bloody attacks on independence forces in East Timor organized by officers of the Indonesian armed forces, which have long received Washington’s political and financial backing.

On August 15 an Indonesian court cleared two police and four army officers of charges of failing to stop a 1999 massacre by anti-independence forces of at least 27 people on East Timor. Human rights activists in Indonesia said that crucial evidence had not been presented, and that the Indonesian government had refused to guarantee the safety of East Timorese witnesses.

"It would be inappropriate for me to comment on the legal proceedings," said Adm. Thomas Fargo, the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, who was in Jakarta at the time of the verdict. An unnamed U.S. official described the result as a "disappointment."  
 
Mounting foreign debt burden
Meanwhile, the Indonesian government has appealed for the restructuring of its debt to imperialist banks and financial institutions. The country’s public debt amounts to $155 billion. The World Bank estimates that payments on the debt will take 44 percent of national revenue in 2002. "The huge amount of Indonesia’s domestic debt is really scary," said Soedradjad Djiwandono, quoted in the January 12–13 International Herald Tribune. "The sad thing," he added, "is that the banks are not healthy yet." The Tribune noted that the prices of "rice, sugar, palm oil, fish, and meat have...risen sharply, raising fears of social unrest in a country already riven by sectarian and separatist conflict."  
 
 
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