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

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.