Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses how the practice of democracy has created limited changes in workers politics, especially at the grass root level.

Paper long abstract:

Workers in Indonesia have enjoyed a new democracy for more than 15 years since the fall of the Suharto's authoritarian regime that depoliticized the working class for decades. This new political climate has enabled the organized labour to set up agendas that incorporate broader political interest into union conventional agendas. In 2009 and 2014, many union leaders made some important political experiments by competing over local parliamentary seats. However, most of them ended with failures. The weak point refers to the disconnection of representation relations between the layers of workers particularly in the field of politics. Union representation at the shop floor was the lowest layer involved in movement politics, but they failed to establish a class-based politics at the rank and files. Intensive political discourse, ideological construction, strategic agendas only circulated among union leaders. The regular members stuck into everyday workplace problems lacking in political meaning and letting their consciousness remained depoliticized. While the rank and file was dealing with various corporate modern strategies that were seeking constantly to control workers, the upper layers of union became a contestation zone of various local power and even national elites. The conception of representation became vulnerable to the pitfalls of dilemma between political pragmatism and idealism of movement.