Finished half of the chapters of this book, and there are several ‘insights’ that I could take and formulate (or at least pin-point) around “how many annual leave days will you take”, especially when you are living and working in Indonesia.
Annual leave isn’t merely a question of whether a country is rich or poor, it can be viewed as an institutionalized outcome of a historical struggle over how much of a worker’s time can be commanded and how much remains outside the labour process.
This book doesn’t state or establish that Indonesia (or poorer countries) have inadequate annual leave because of the labour reserve, but it inherently gives us a structural mechanism through which you can ask that question.
Patnaik states, in one passage: “large labour reserve with capital seeking higher profits could reproduce a mass of mobilization of cheap labour under conditions of super-duper-mega exploitation”
Another passage that can be formulated: “European imperialism helped establish an international economic structure in which tropical/sub-tropical regions become important sources of commodities and labour… however, following decolonization, this disparity of structure wasn’t necessarily abolished, instead, capital increasingly mobilized the large labour reserve for industrial production”
Based on that, the causal inference that we could synthesize is: if the labour reserve is structurally abundant and has weaker bargaining power relative to capital, this relationship can manifest not only in wages but also in the conditions under which labour is sold or offered, such as:
- working overtime
- annual leave
- social protections, etc.
⇒ and it may help to explain why workers in countries such as Indonesia remain subject to relatively weak bargaining power and labour protections