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Historically, the processes in place to govern the recruitment and contracting of Indonesian migrant fishers have fostered situations of labor abuse and exploitation. The Indonesian government has introduced a new regulatory framework designed to meet international expectations that it creates rules and systems for recruiting migrant fishers in its territory. This article analyzes the state of play immediately before this new regulatory framework was operationalized, generating insights into practices around recruitment and contracting, and providing a baseline for future analysis of the new framework’s impact.

This article examines the Japan–Indonesia Economic Partnership Agreement, an agreement that has allowed Japan to supplement its local healthcare workforce while continuing to sidestep the thorny issue of labour and immigration policy reform and Indonesia to increase its skilled workers’ access to the Japanese labour market at a time when it was making a concerted effort to reorient migrant labour flows away from informal sector occupations. Despite the programme’s many problems, it has contributed to the use of trade agreements as a mechanism for regulating labour migration, and so to the normalisation of migrant labour as a tradable commodity rather than a discrete area of policy-making, with all the attendant risks that normalisation brings.

This article examines attempts by Indonesian migrant labor NGOs, migrant worker organizations and trade unions to promote the labor rights of Indonesian migrant workers employed overseas. In recent years trade unions in Indonesia have increasingly been forced to acknowledge the existence of overseas labor migrants. But NGOs have dominated migrant labor advocacy initiatives, and grassroots migrant labor organizations such as the Indonesian Migrant Workers' Union (IMWU) have developed independently of existing trade unions. Unions in Indonesia, like unions in other countries of origin, have been only marginally involved in migrant worker issues because of their physical boundedness within the nation-state and their focus on the formal sector. In other words, the fact that unions operate primarily at the national and sub-national scales and the difficulties they have had incorporating workers employed in less structured workplaces, and particularly in the informal sector, limits their capacity to assist or organize citizens employed outside the boundaries of the nation-state. This paper argues that unions must move beyond their traditional structures and spheres of influence in order to address the needs of overseas migrant workers, who represent an increasingly important union constituency in countries such as Indonesia.

Over the last two decades, the needs and interests of temporary international labor migrants in Southeast Asia have overwhelmingly been the concern of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) rather than trade unions. However, in recent years unions have increasingly been forced to acknowledge that migrant workers are a potentially important trade union constituency. This introduction provides the theoretical framework for a collection of articles which grew out of a project involving academics, trade unionists and migrant labor NGO activists on the extent of union-NGO cooperation on migrant worker issues. It argues that while unions are now much more engaged with both with temporary migrant workers and the NGOs who advocate on their behalf, unions' approaches towards transnationalism and citizenship (and the concomitant issue of legality) — along with entrenched inter-sectoral divisions and prejudices — continue to limit their preparedness and ability to engage fully with issues concerning temporary labor migration.

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.

There were considerable changes in Indonesia's industrial relations climate and regulatory framework during the Habibie interregnum. This article explores the implications of those changes for informal workers' organizations, unions and labour-oriented NGOs. The article is divided into two sections. The first section reflects upon the philosophy, institutions and practice of labour relations under Suharto's New Order and describes organized opposition to the industrial relations system, while the second describes the ways in which labour relations and representation changed during the Habibie interregnum.

The concepts and structures of corporatism have been used by the governments of many industrialising states to barness workers in the name of 'development'. One such state was Subarto's New Order Indonesia, where tbe translation of corporatist structures of industrial relations through discourse into practice underpinned the much- vaunted 'success' of Indonesia's development-driven economy. Now, as Indonesians struggle with the socio-economic and political cballenges that have accompanied the bursting of the development bubble, it is timely to reflect on the insights the Indonesian corporatist experiment provides into the operation of corporatism in an industrialising economy.

Abstract: Investigatory behavior with novel, inanimate objects by two groups of four juvenile greater bushbabies (Otolemur garnettii) was examined in the laboratory. Substantial investigatory behavior was shown by all subjects. In the first study, subjects showed interest in a wide variety of nonfood stimulus objects. In the second, subjects displayed sustained interest in and investigation of non-food stimulus objects over three sessions. Bushbabies showed preferences for larger, more manipulable objects and variations in total contact over days. Individual differences were observed in the duration and types of contact with objects. These observations contradict earlier reports that prosimians show little interest in inanimate, non-food objects.