Rehearsals for Employment

Strikes by high school students were a common feature of Old Order Indonesia.These "aksi," whether in response to problems within the school or to national political issues, helped define high school students (siswa) as part of the amorphous yet politically charged category "youth" (pemuda).But under the New Order "youth" has been all but expunged from the Indonesian vocabulary.1 In its place, school students are more likely to be called "pelajar" and "teenagers" (remaja) than "youth," more likely to be blamed for naughtiness than praised for social concern, let alone activism.2Yet, over the past two years, while politicians debated the virtues of "openness" (keterbukaan), while university students protested the state-sponsored lottery (SDSB) and workers continued to strike for higher wages, junior and senior high school students have offered their own challenge: they too have gone on strike.3This article has two goals: first, to illustrate a new, perhaps unsuspected, site of social unrest in contemporary Indonesia; secondly, I hope to offer a provisional argument that the origins of these strikes are intimately related to the ongoing labor unrest, and, by extension, the formation of a new proletariat.1 The word appears most frequently now in reference to the 1928 Youth Pledge (Sumpah Pemuda) and in connection with the still active reactionary organizations that provided the storm-troopers of the 1965-66 anti communist putsch, the members of which are now well into middle-age. A recent edition the scholarly journal published by the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, LIPI, entitled "YoungPeople and the Social Environment: Case Studies of High School Students in Several Cities," avoided both the words "pemuda" (youth) and the corresponding term "siswa" in favor of the politically neutral "pelajar."The question of student strikes was never mentioned.See Masyarakat Indonesia, X, 3 (December 1993).3 For the purposes of this article, high school students refers to both junior and senior high school students (SMP and SMA), both public and private.Reference to the few cases of strikes by elementary school students will be made explicit.Strikes are defined as collective refusals to attend class in order to protest school or local government policy.This rather narrow definition is employed in order to exclude both mass absenteeism and demonstrations in which high school students may participate but which are not directed at the school as an institution (e.g. the anti-SDSB demonstrations of 1993).13 This strike was at SMA 84 in West Jakarta.See

Economics · Indonesian · Labour economics · Linguistics · Political science · Sociology · Asian Studies and History · Psychology

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  Andrew Rosser, Anuradha Joshi•The Journal of Development Studies•2013

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