Editor’s Note:
The rise of the Indonesian Nickel Belt marks a profound transformation of both landscape and workers’ lives, as state mandates and massive Chinese investment forge a new industrial frontier. In this article, Alfian Al-Ayubby traces the reconfiguration of the Nickel–Labor Assemblage—a dense web of forces that has pushed a generation of workers from the seasonal rhythms of the land into the 24-hour discipline of the industrial clock. Within sprawling nickel industrial parks, “modernisation” is lived as a killing shift, where continuous production depends on the continuous extraction of energy from human bodies and their environments.
Al-Ayubby also maps the emerging terrain of resistance. Despite aggressive containment strategies—from paramilitary deployment to management-controlled “yellow” unions—workers are carving out space for unionisation. He details how unions and NGOs combine grassroots recruitment, legal advocacy, and militant collective action to strike at the heart of production. Essentially, he argues that the fixity of nickel extraction—unlike mobile manufacturing capital—provides a distinct source of workers’ power. If these fragmented struggles can be bridged across the Nickel Belt, workers may yet disrupt the supply chains the state is so intent on consolidating.
I first visited the Indonesian Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP) in Morowali Regency, Central Sulawesi, in September 2018. This was five years after the construction of the nickel industrial park began and three years after it commenced operations. Bahodopi, a village that was once largely agricultural and now houses IMIP, was already surging with 24-hour activity. Across the landscape, makeshift worker boarding houses (kos-kosan), cafes, restaurants, laundry services, roadside gasoline vendors, and money-transfer agents were springing up to meet the demands of the industrial boom. At that time, workers told me that fewer than ten smelters were in operation, employing roughly ten thousand people.
IMIP is Indonesia’s first Chinese-owned nickel industrial zone, built as a strategic response to the former President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s mandate to ban raw ore exports and prioritize domestic processing. Established well before the current proliferation of smelters, it served as the pioneer for the nickel industrial park model. Today, over a decade since construction began, IMIP has expanded into a sprawling industrial complex hosting approximately 52 companies, including smelters, coal-fired power plants, and supporting factories. The park now directly employs 85,423 workers. But this figure excludes the number of outsourced workers on short-term contracts engaged in construction, electrical installation, and other temporary projects. Some media reports suggest that when these contract workers are included, the total number of people working within IMIP reaches as many as 120,000.
Described as the world’s largest vertically integrated stainless-steel production centre, IMIP is controlled largely by the Chinese metals giant Tsingshan Holding Group. The scale of IMIP’s growth and indeed the rise of Tsingshan in Indonesia cannot be explained by corporate ambition alone. Tsingshan’s expansion has been actively enabled by the Indonesian state. Successive governments after Yudhoyono frame the export ban regulations and policies as natural resource downstreaming. The state cleared a path for the industry through tax holidays and a wide package of incentives. Equally important, it granted National Strategic Project (PSN) status to the majority of these nickel smelters and designated them as National Vital Objects. This status matters because it reframes private industrial sites as essential state assets, providing the political and legal cover for intensified policing and the routine deployment of paramilitary forces – and, to certain extent, the military – to secure the nickel zones.
With this government support, Indonesia now hosts 190 smelter projects, with roughly a quarter already operational and the remainder still under construction. Chinese investors own half of these facilities. Although stainless steel remains the primary output, an increasing number of smelters are shifting towards producing battery materials for electric vehicles. Many have rightly condemned the nickel boom for what it has done to land, water, and communities. It is also built upon a labour regime that drains and exhausts the physical bodies of workers to keep the smelter furnaces alive, alongside a constant struggle to reclaim space, unionise, and fight for their rights.
Life Under Rhythms of Production
The massive inflow of Chinese investment has given rise to a new spatial configuration often described as the Indonesian Nickel Belt. This belt is characterised by a stretch of nickel smelters and mining concessions spanning South, Central, and Southeast Sulawesi, as well as North Maluku. Although these smelters and mining sites are geographically dispersed, they are far from isolated; instead, they are tightly linked through integrated supply chains and ownership links. These smelters are also connected by physical and social infrastructures, such as roads, kinship ties, and hometown associations, that facilitate the continuous movement and migration of workers and their families between the Sulawesi and North Maluku islands in search of jobs.
While mining has long existed in the region, earlier operations were far less extensive and labour-intensive than those of the current boom. Consequently, they had not yet produced the standardised labour regime we see today. Prior to this transformation, the nickel belt was defined by relatively low levels of formal economic development. With the arrival of the smelters, the region has become a powerful magnet, drawing waves of young people into the extractive industry and reshaping the social landscape of the region. These smelters recruit workers from diverse educational backgrounds, ranging from those holding bachelor’s or master’s degrees to high school graduates. Regardless of their credentials, they are predominantly absorbed as shop-floor workers.
Official data on the total number of workers across the nickel belt remains unavailable. However, estimates from several major smelters provide a useful indication of worker concentration and the ongoing dynamics of proletarianisation. Based on a compilation of field interviews and available reports, my estimates suggest that roughly 140,000 workers are concentrated in the Sulawesi segment of the nickel belt, with an additional 100,000 in North Maluku. Yet, these figures do not account for the full demographic reality, which includes job-seeking migrants and workers’ families.
Many workers migrate with their families and reside in kos-kosan (boarding houses) near the industrial parks. While some spouses settle in these areas awaiting recruitment opportunities within the smelters, others are absorbed into burgeoning informal economic networks, such as laundry services, food stalls, drinking-water depots, and roadside gasoline vendors. Given that many smelters are still in the construction phase or undergoing expansion, the working-class population across the nickel belt is set to expand significantly in the coming years.
The transformation of the nickel belt has reshaped how workers experience time and space, their bodies, and social relations. Most of these workers, in their twenties to forties, are first-generation wage workers whose lives are now defined by industrial labour. For their parents’ generation, livelihoods were often built through farming, small trading, fishing, or other informal work, where daily life followed seasons and local rhythms rather than the discipline of the clock. Smelter work fractures these two generations. It introduces something new: rigid shifts, a fast production tempo, and constant supervision.
Suryadi, a local resident who now works at IMIP, reflected on the drastic transformation of the landscape, “If you look at the development of the IMIP industrial complex, it is extraordinary. No one believed that factories would ever be built here. And yet, here they are. This used to be nothing but grassland, farmland, and forest.”
Behind this physical transformation, workers’ lives are entirely dictated by a production logic that disregards human biological rhythms. Work in the smelters is broken down into a fragmented sequence of tasks, ranging from unloading nickel ore from ships or nearby mines, drying, and feeding, to smelting and waste handling. Each stage is governed by deadlines, cycles, and output targets, monitored through multiple layers of technical supervision. The intensity of this labour process takes a heavy toll on workers’ health, producing chronic fatigue and high levels of stress, and contributing to frequent workplace accidents and sudden deaths.
It is through this logic of work that production continues for 24 hours across the smelters. Ore must keep moving in, slag must keep moving out, furnaces must be kept alive, and power must remain stable. In such a system, workers must ensure the production line keeps running because even the slightest pause is treated as a threat. Continuous production depends on continuous extraction from the human body.
One worker described working at IMIP as a “killing shift”, stressing that twelve-hour shifts without adequate recovery time had pushed him beyond the limits of physical endurance (see the report Workers Waiting to Die in Morowali for further details on IMIP’s production logic and hazardous working hours). The effects are so severe that several workers admitted to routinely taking paracetamol after night shifts to relieve intense headaches and help them sleep during the day.
This brutal labour regime has become the norm across nearly all smelters, including Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park (IWIP), Virtue Dragon Nickel Industry (VDNI), Gunbuster Nickel Industry (GNI), and others. While management uses these standardised production logics to enforce discipline, this uniformity has unintentionally created a common ground for shared consciousness. These workplace experiences have become central to everyday worker interaction. In kos-kosan, in union meetings, and when they return to their hometowns, workers exchange stories about workplace realities, from routine accidents and harsh conditions to moments of anger directed at supervisors.
Labour Struggles
Regions within the nickel belt have long been sites of conflict between local communities and large-scale development projects, including national parks, dams, palm-oil plantations, and mining operations. In Central Sulawesi, community resistance dates back to the expansion of Inco’s operations in the 1990s (now Vale, a Canadian–Brazilian mining corporation), particularly around land acquisition, compensation, and displacement. In North Maluku, the seeds of resistance emerged in the early 2000s, alongside the intensification of mining activities. This means that nickel smelters today operate within a space and landscape that has long been marked by tension and resistance. Worker and union resistance has grown, although its strength varies across sites.
In several smelters across Sulawesi and North Maluku, workers with prior union experience, alongside former student activists, have established a number of unions. Within IMIP Morowali alone, union membership is estimated at around 8,000 workers, spread across more than ten organisations, representing only a small proportion of the total workforce. Two unions I encountered frequently during my fieldwork were the National Workers Union (Serikat Pekerja Nasional, or SPN) and the Morowali Industrial Workers Union (Serikat Pekerja Industri Morowali, or SPIM).
The SPN was founded by workers with prior union experience and former student activists, whereas SPIM was established primarily by former student activists with left-wing leanings. The experience of these veterans and activists has proven to be a vital resource in building organisations resilient to management co-optation and undermining tactics. They subsequently led these unions to affiliate with national federations to bolster their legal advocacy, refine their organising strategies, and amplify their struggles on a broader scale.
From the outset, organising and recruitment of new members relied on direct interaction, inviting friends and co-workers to join union activities, handling individual labour cases to build trust through small victories, and distributing leaflets during demonstrations. However, these organising efforts were limited to Indonesian workers. While attempts were made to reach out to Chinese workers, they never succeeded due to language barriers and residential segregation; Chinese workers are required to live in dormitories within the smelter complex, whereas Indonesian workers are not.
Despite their relatively small size, unions at IMIP have played an important role in mobilising collective action capable of disrupting nickel production. Without downplaying the many quieter gains won through workplace negotiations, several episodes of collective action are worth noting, both those led by individual unions and those coordinated through alliances. These actions have targeted not only specific smelters within the industrial zone, but also IMIP management as a whole.
First, in August 2020, unions coordinated protests demanding the reinstatement of employment status and the payment of wages for workers laid off during the pandemic, an end to the criminalisation of union leaders, and a relaxation of leave requirements. The protests escalated into a demonstration that included the blocking of access roads and interrupting the production flows. IMIP management responded by dismissing three union leaders, including the chair of SPIM. Rather than instilling fear, the episode had an opposite effect. For SPIM in particular, it served as a catalyst that hardened militancy and expanded organising capacity inside the park.
A second episode followed the fatal industrial accident on 24 December 2023, which killed 21 workers and injured dozens more. Initially, IMIP management was reluctant to issue a public apology, even as workers voiced anger and criticism. A union alliance responded with protest letters and demonstrations, including actions that blocked access to the main entrance of the IMIP complex. They also threatened to escalate further through strike action. Under mounting pressure, management backed down, issuing an official apology and agreeing to provide financial compensation to the victims’ families ranging from IDR 400 million to IDR 1 billion.
Beyond these two episodes, protests have continued on multiple occasions, led either by individual unions or by alliances. Since December 2023 in particular, demonstrations have become more frequent. Workers’ actions are no longer confined to IMIP’s outer gates, outside the industrial zone, as was often the case in earlier protests. Instead, some demonstrations have taken place inside IMIP itself, signalling a more assertive union movement that is increasingly willing to challenge management’s control over the industrial park from within.
Resistance and Containment
At the Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park (IWIP), another Tsingshan-owned nickel industrial complex located in Halmahera, North Maluku, the space for union activity has remained relatively open, comparable to IMIP. At present, around ten unions operate at IWIP, with an estimated 7,000 to 8,000 union members in total. Some unions have taken a more confrontational stance towards management, while others have tended to adopt a more cooperative approach. The peak of mobilisation at IWIP occurred in May 2020, on May Day, when workers raised demands relating to wages and working conditions. The action escalated into a large demonstration, which in turn led to the burning of IWIP facilities and the subsequent criminalisation of several union leaders.
The aftermath of this episode temporarily dampened open resistance and slowed union organising on the ground. However, according to some IWIP workers, union organising has grown again over the past two years. This has been driven partly by leaders with student activist backgrounds, alongside NGO support in the form of training programmes, learning forums, and research collaborations. More recently, there have also been efforts to build new union alliances at IWIP in response to ongoing problems relating to wages and working conditions.
By contrast, in smelters owned by Jiangsu Delong Nickel, a competitor of Tsingshan Holding Group, organising has generally weakened as management control has tightened, although the situation varies across sites. This is evident at GNI in North Morowali, Central Sulawesi, and at VDNI and Obsidian Stainless Steel (OSS), which are located close to one another in Konawe Regency, Southeast Sulawesi.
At GNI, following a workplace explosion in December 2022 that killed two workers, a series of demonstrations took place in the days that followed, organised by SPN at GNI alongside other workers. These mobilisations escalated into clashes between Indonesian and Chinese workers in January 2023. The state subsequently intervened by deploying paramilitary police to patrol both inside and outside the smelter. Some workers reported police intimidation, including warnings that those who joined the strike would be punished for “causing trouble for investors”. GNI management also issued a strong warning that anyone participating in the protest would be dismissed. Police later criminalised and labelled two union leaders as instigators and detained dozens of other workers.
Soon afterwards, SPN at GNI became inactive and effectively dissolved under sustained intimidation directed at its remaining members and leaders. In February 2023, GNI management promoted a new local union that was unaffiliated with any national federation. It was presented as a vehicle for supporting “company productivity and employee welfare”, though in reality it served to reinforce management control. While a union affiliated with a national federation has recently been established at GNI, the environment for organising remains restricted and the prospect of confrontational mobilisation remains distant.
At VDNI and OSS, several smelter-level unions exist, some affiliated with national federations and others unaffiliated. Strikes and demonstrations have occurred intermittently, including a notable action in December 2020 where workers demanded wage increases and permanent employment status. That mobilisation led to clashes with the police, damage to company property, and the subsequent criminalisation of several union leaders. Today, union activity continues at VDNI and OSS, but organising takes place in a tense and constrained environment, where management frequently warns workers against joining unions or taking part in demonstrations or collective actions that could disrupt production.
In the Bantaeng Industrial Area (KIBA), a nickel industrial industrial park in South Sulawesi, three unions are present. At least one union has taken a combative stance towards management. Since July 2025, workers at KIBA, supported by the Mining and Energy Industry Labour Union (Serikat Buruh Industri Pertambangan dan Energi, or SBIPE), have staged a series of demonstrations and strikes. Their demands include stronger workplace safety standards; an end to unilateral wage deductions and wage theft; the reinstatement of laid-off workers; and the payment of unpaid overtime. Workers have also accused the company of practising forced labour. SBIPE escalated pressure by setting up protest tents at the company gates. In response, the state and the company deployed hundreds of paramilitary police to intimidate workers.
Fragmented Struggles
These stories suggest that the labour movement in the nickel belt remains fragmented. Some unions retain relatively independent organising capacity, while others operate under management influence. Overall, union density remains low across the nickel belt, reflecting a combination of internal and structural obstacles. Internally, according to union officials, fragmentation among unions, limited resources, and the absence of a consistent organising strategy undermine collective capacity. Structurally, the brutal labour regime—characterised by long working hours, insufficient rest days, and the relentless tempo of continuous production—leaves workers with little energy for organising.
Among the major industrial parks across the nickel belt, IMIP and IWIP still offer a relatively open, though contested, space for worker organising. In both sites, unions are not easily suppressed by management. This can be traced back to the early phase of smelter operations, when management was still experimenting with methods of labour control, while workers with union experience and student activist backgrounds used available openings to build organisations and extend their reach.
By the time management at IMIP and IWIP began to tighten its controls, including requirements for union members to submit official leave requests in order to attend union activities, and holding periodic workplace “update” meetings that functioned more as surveillance than dialogue, unions had already established a strong enough presence. Management often had to weigh the political and operational costs of direct confrontation with unions. The space to organise was not “given”; it was carved out by the unios early on.
Even at IMIP today, management has struggled to contain union resistance. Following the fatal industrial accident on 24 December 2023, the industrial park was hit by a wave of criticism. In this climate, management found it difficult to maintain an assertive line and shifted instead towards a more cautious public-relations posture. Seizing the momentum while IMIP was on the defensive, unions have moved with greater confidence. As previously noted, on several occasions they have been able to stage bold demonstrations inside the industrial park itself, securing a number of meaningful concessions.
But this relatively open terrain at IMIP and IWIP has not automatically produced a broader, coordinated strategy across these two industrial parks, let alone across the wider nickel belt. Cooperation among unions remains limited, even within a single industrial zone, let alone across smelters and islands. Although several unions are affiliated with the same national federations, efforts to build cross-smelter coordination have been slow and often lack clear direction. One further trend that undermines organising is union splitting. At IMIP, at least five of the ten existing unions are offshoots of earlier organisations. The reasons range from disagreements over tactics to personal rivalries.
This tendency is also reflected in the formation of union alliances. In recent years, several unions at IMIP have attempted to cooperate through loose alliances, most notably ASPIRASI and POROS Buruh. ASPIRASI was established in September 2023 as an alliance focused on wages and better working conditions, yet it remained unstable as shifting priorities and disagreements over specific demands repeatedly strained cooperation. Some unions eventually withdrew and, in December 2023, helped launch a separate alliance, POROS Buruh. Even before these two alliances emerged, other short-lived attempts at coalition-building had surfaced but quickly faded.
Watching what unfolded at IMIP, other nickel smelter operators have tracked these developments closely and learned their lesson. Many have sought to prevent similar organising momentum by narrowing the space for union activity from the outset. Taken together, these cases show that the nickel belt is not a single, coherent labour landscape. Where unions gain an early foothold, they can interrupt production and force companies to respond. Elsewhere, co-optation, intimidation, and union-busting tactics are used to push organising to the margins before it can harden into a durable force.
Organising Across the Nickel Belt
While current union strength and struggles remain fragmented, the development of a broader labour movement across the nickel belt is vital. The belt is seeing a rapid process of proletarianisation driven by the ongoing expansion of smelters and downstreaming policies. Building a unified movement is necessary not only to fight for workers’ rights but also to address issues where worker and community interests intersect.
A useful comparison can be found in the labour movement in Java’s major manufacturing hubs. Much like the nickel belt, these manufacturing hubs are defined by dense industrial zones employing millions of young workers connected through toll roads, ports, and labour migration. Between 2009 and 2015, unions in Java coordinated organising across industrial parks and cities by building broad alliances with civil society. This allowed them to mobilise mass actions, orchestrate industrial-zone strikes, and mount waves of national strikes through which substantial concessions were secured. This series of mobilisations achieved crucial victories, including the rollout of the national social security system (BPJS), judicial recommendations for stricter limits on agency work, the incorporation of sixty wage components into ministerial decrees, and a historic wage increase of over 50 per cent in 2012.
These victories proved beneficial for people in general. Through these struggles, Indonesia established its first universal healthcare system; while it has its flaws, its benefits are felt by the wider public. Furthermore, the wage increase set a new standard that was immediately enjoyed by new workers entering the factory. Significantly, those achievements did not emerge from a unified movement. Unions in Java also split, alliances dissolved, and coordination was often messy.
Yet, workers learned a fundamental lesson about power: while they were physically separated across different factories, the industrial landscape connected them through shared infrastructure, supply-chain links, labour migration, and the everyday exchange of organising experience. Even when union structures at the branch and national levels clashed over strategy, workers at the grassroots remained aware of their shared problems. It was this material commonality, and the solidarity it enabled, that made mass mobilisation possible and helped workers achieve these major gains.
Unfortunately, since 2017-2018, in many of Java’s industrial zones, particularly in the garment sector, companies have responded to strong union presence by relocating to lower-wage regions or moving offshore. When capital loses such battles in manufacturing, relocation becomes a primary exit option. Consequently, the leverage gained from these victories has begun to wane as capital has adjusted its spatial strategies.
The nickel belt, by contrast, presents a different terrain. Smelters are far less mobile because they are typically anchored to nickel mines to minimise costs and maintain competitiveness. This fixity is not merely a technical feature of the industry but also a source of political leverage for workers. When organised labour hits the right chokepoints across the nickel belt, production slows and losses mount, forcing both capital and the state to the negotiating table.
Interestingly, the work of opening space for organising across the nickel belt is being driven less by unions than by NGOs. As concerns grow over the impacts of nickel downstreaming, international and Indonesian NGOs have developed intervention programmes that create opportunities for workers to meet across sites and organisations. Alongside their community-level work, many of these NGOs also work with unions to provide training on labour rights, gender-based violence, and worker empowerment. In workshops hosted by these NGOs, discussions are typically guided by specific programme objectives, but participants also use the space to share experiences of work and organising, exchange contacts, and explore joint activities.
The role of these NGOs remains complementary to, rather than a replacement for, the role of unions. Their work takes place while many unions have not yet developed a common strategy to consolidate workers across the nickel belt. Unions affiliated with national federations at IMIP, IWIP, and other smelters still tend to focus primarily on increasing their own membership and fighting local site battles. Even when these unions organise across different smelters, they often do so within organisational silos, competing with one another. Furthermore, unions belonging to the same federation in different smelters do little in the way of collective mobilisation.
However, some organisations have already begun to move in that direction. SPIM offers an instructive example. From its early stages, SPIM was already affiliated with the Confederation of United Indonesian Workers (KPBI / Konfederasi Persatuan Buruh Indonesia), a left-leaning organisation with strong bases in logistics, ports, and related sectors. Recently, SPIM helped bring several smelter unions in Morowali and Halmahera into a new federation named FSPIM (Federation of Independent Industrial Workers Unions), which also maintains its affiliation with KPBI. The aim of FSPIM is explicitly to organise smelter and mining workers throughout the sector. In Morowali and Halmahera, FSPIM-affiliated unions have been active in organising as well as engaging in local alliance-building and mobilisation.
In other words, FSPIM’s approach adopts a bird’s-eye view of the industry. This perspective treats the nickel belt as an interconnected landscape of production, corporate networks, supply chains, and shared labour regimes. This responsibility naturally rests with union federations, as they are better positioned to mobilise resources and identify how various production sites are structurally linked. By leveraging their broad base, federations can map out these connections, allowing them to formulate strategies that move beyond isolated factory-level strategies. Emphasising the role of federations does not diminish the importance of unions on the ground; rather, it situates them within a broader movement. Only by bridging these fragmented struggles can workers exploit capital’s immobility and win meaningful change. Such a movement could push for high labour standards across the entire mining and nickel sector and demand solutions to the serious public health crises and environmental destruction caused by extractive industries.
