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Dynamics of labour
transformation: Natural rubber
in Southeast Asia
a
Alec Gordon
a
Chulalongkorn University Social Research
Institute , Bangkok
Published online: 14 May 2007.
To cite this article: Alec Gordon (2004) Dynamics of labour transformation: Natural
rubber in Southeast Asia, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 34:4, 523-546, DOI:
10.1080/00472330480000251
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523
Dynamics of Labour Transformation:

Natural Rubber in Southeast Asia
Alec Gordon*
For many areas of the world economy "globalisation" is no new phenomenon. ~ Numer-
ous commodities have been "globalised" from their birth years ago. We remain aware
that these episodes were somewhat particularised occurrences and not in the more total
form of today's "globalisation." Looking at globalisation from the perspective of the
commodity involved, we propose a historical analysis. Perhaps the spice trade was the
first stage of globalisation. An internationalising of marketing whilst the labour force in
Southeast Asia and South India was routinely exploited, marginalised and sections of it
slaughtered by trading companies in support of their respective monopolies. The Afri-
can slave trade was another tragic example. Coffee is a somewhat later case in point.
But possibly none was globalised 3 more than natural rubber growing, that now em-
ploys over 10 million people.
The article will analyse the transformation of labour in natural rubber in this historical
process of a century, attempting to link to the generalised globalisation of the 21 ~ century.
The late 19th and early 20th century saw an era of liberalising trade and invest-
ment. It marked the heyday of the "Free Trade''4 of that world's greatest power, the
United Kingdom. There was freedom of movement for workers to go to almost any
country they chose. The forced migration of African slaves had been replaced by the
apparently free movement of peoples from Europe to the Americas. And in Asia mass
migrations of Chinese, Indians and Javanese had sprung up. Multinationals had come
into existence. Globalisation and liberalisation. And no commodity was more
"globalised" or "liberalised" than the natural rubber that was planted in Southeast Asia.
The plant from Brazil was not native, the capital was foreign-owned and for decades
the labour supply was foreign, immigrant and migrant. None was consumed in the
producing areas. All of it was "globalised" to feed the burgeoning automobile industry
(which was also creating indirectly another globalised item, petroleum.)
Born commercially in 19th century Brazil, rubber seedlings were quickly pirated
to London in 1876 and thence to Sri Lanka, Malaya and Indonesia. By the late 1920s
well over one million workers were employed in rubber growing in Southeast Asia.
Today workers, now mainly in smallholdings, must number around 10-14 million
throughout the world and about 10 million in the three largest producers.
We may note that in rubber, "intellectual property rights" and "indigenous knowl-
*Chulalongkorn University Social Research Institute, Bangkok

Journal of Contemporary Asia, Sol. 34 No. 4 (2004)
524 JCA 34:4
edge" were treated in the globalisation process much the same way then as now. The
meticulous definitions given to each miraculously appear to operate firmly in favour of
one party. We may define "intellectual property" as the ideas and inventions of intellec-
tuals which are appropriated by international corporations or by governments. "Indig-
enous knowledge" is mainly the lost (or stolen) intellectual property of developing
countries. The fate of those rubber seedlings indicates that they were classified (uncon-
sciously) as "indigenous knowledge" and treated accordingly. In this case there is little
doubt in my mind that in 1876 the agents of Kew Botanical Gardens took the rubber
seedlings out of Brazil illegally. That is, they were stolen. Had the seedlings been con-
sidered "intellectual property" the Brits would never have got away with it. It is never-
theless interesting to note that the administrators of Kew had no specific aim in mind
for rubber. They thought that it might turn out useful some time.
For the colonial rubber plantations of Sumatra, it was the neighbouring island of
Java and for those of Malaya it was South India, that provided the bulk of the plantation
labour force, mainly of Tamils in a massive state-sponsored immigration process. Chi-
nese migrant workers were also involved but in both cases their primary employment
was in tin mining - another globalised commodity.
Cultivated natural rubber is a 20th century crop that used 19th century or earlier
methods of labour management and discipline in plantations that gave way in the 20th
century to the essentially 21 st century ideal of promoting the "informal" sector through
the informal sub-contracting of labour to smallholdings. Today smallholders in num-
bers almost totally dominate natural rubber production.
In colonial times Malaya and Indonesia were the largest producers. Since World
War II, Thailand became a major producer and is now the largest producer and exporter
of Natural Rubber in the world, virtually all of it from smallholders. Although having
been overtaken by production of synthetic rubber5 and harried by plastics Natural Rub-
ber is still a prime commodity.
Basics
Before proceeding to our analysis we must touch on two basic questions. Why did
Southeast Asia dominate natural rubber production and why did it begin, and for a time
was maintained, as plantation rubber?
Southeast Asia came to predominance simply because the slaughter tapping of rub-
ber trees in Brasil failed utterly to keep pace with the growth in demand for rubber in
automobile tyres in the United States. The infant automobile industry boomed there and
rubber prices boomed with it. This encouraged planters first in Malaya and in Indonesia
and later in French Indochina to set up as rubber producers. The climate was perfect
(for rubber), large areas of suitable land were available cheap, cheap labour could be
imported and those colonies were well policed by stable and relatively efficient govern-
ments sympathetic to plantations.
Given that plantation production itself had no advantages over smallholder it, may
seem strange that plantations prevailed for so long or even were the first to get started.
Here we would rely on greed, ignorance and racism as explanations. Since Europeans
Labour Transformation 525
had been the ones to bring the tree to Southeast Asia they considered themselves the
ones who should benefit. Likewise colonial governments barely gave smallholders a
thought in the early stages. And in the later stages their efforts were designed to protect
plantations from smallholder competition. Some of those phenomena are discussed below.
Cultivation Practices
Rubber plantations are fairly typical of the general low-wage, cheap-land, foreign owned
colonial plantations. They had a large, unskilled migrant (but not an immigrant resident)
workforce. After Independence a settled workforce and growing local ownership turned
those enterprises into what I would term capitalist estates. (For more on the differences
between colonialism and independent periods and between "plantation" and "estate", see
Gordon, 1981, 2001b) Cultivation practice evolved into a pattern of planting and then
tapping starting usually in year six after initial planting, budding or grafting.
For smaUholders, rubber cultivation is fairly easy to enter and compete, provided
they have access to a little extra land or had alternative means of subsistence whilst the
trees were maturing over 5-6 years. The technology of growing and the primary stages
of processing is simple and requires little capital investment.
The usual smaUholder rubber growing and processing practices were roughly as
follows:
Tapping
Collecting latex
Cleaning and coagulating
Milling the unsmoked rubber
(all these performed in one morning)
Drying the sheets
Selling the unsmoked sheets (USS)
In some cases, usually on account of shortage of family labour, smallholders will
sell latex.
The practice of the smallholders was (and is apart from larger holdings) mainly to
produce USS without any division of labour. The habit developed of very early morn-
ing tapping during the hours of darkness. Smallholder tapping takes place every day,
weather permitting. Heavy rain makes for cancellation of tapping unless afternoon tap-
ping is possible. The USS is sold to dealers who were either government stations, plan-
tation owners or larger smallholders (mainly ethnic Chinese) with a smokehouse.
For estates, the unsmoked sheets were smoked or air dried. Or the latex may be
directly processed into crumb rubber. Here tapping of a tree is/was on alternate days or
one day in three or even four. Tapping workers did tapping early morning and then the
collecting of the latex. Other or sometimes the same workers also performed mainte-
nance activities like weeding and grass cutting which were lower paid. Once collected,
the latex was coagulated and dried into Unsmoked Rubber Sheet (USS) by the "factory"
workers and then smoked to form Ribbed Smoked Sheet (RSS) of various grades, for
long the main item in NR exports. A smaller quantity was and is preserved as latex for
export or local use. Latterly some of the latex instead of forming sheets was converted
526 JCA 34:4
directly into crumb rubber but this is mainly on estates or larger collecting stations.
... As a general rule all clones are opened and tapped on a day/2 basis except for seedling
materials and all brownbast clones which are tapped third daily. This recommendationis
generallyobservedby the estatesector.But in some smallholdingsdue to a varietyof socio-
economicreasonsthe tapping frequencyinvariablybecomesa dally tapping system.Daily
tappingis not recommendedbecause,apartfromincreasedbarkconsumption,barkrenewalis
affectedand the likelihoodof paneldrynessincreases.
(RubberResearchInstituteof Malaysia, 1983:83)
The euphemism "variety of socio-economic reasons" is a euphemistic way of refer-
ring to the need for most smallholders to tap every day to earn cash because their holdings
are so small and on account of their relative poverty. This need has never been realised by
any of the official bodies in that none has developed a tree suitable for smallholder cultiva-
tion. Namely, one to withstand daily tapping. The trees cultivated by smallholders are (usu-
ally outdated) varieties of the high-yielding species developed for plantation or estate needs
and consequently when used by smallholders are shorter lived and lower yielding.
The dry season reduces the flow of latex in the tree to near zero and tapping does
not normally take place. Most rubber is grown north of the equator and the months
December-February mark a seasonal downturn in world production.
Over the past 20 years or so block rubber has become important as a product of
standard quality. This would appear to have had little effect on the smallholders' mar-
ket. The smoked sheets containing impurities that would continue to exist from small-
holder unsmoked sheet are cut out from them by hand shears in the smoke house. With
the impurities gone, the smoked sheets are then compressed to form the block rubber. A
high grade product from very little extra effort.
Estates produce mainly RSS No. 1, crumb rubber, technically specified rubber and
latex. The USS of the smallholders becomes the lower grades of RSS Nos. 3 and 4
which are lower priced and greatly in demand from many consumers.
Up to about WW II smallholder output per hectare was higher than that on planta-
tions. It was this that led Bauer to observe, "... the basic processes (and the equipment)
are essentially the same both on estates and smallholdings" (Bauer, 1948: 1). Partly this
was because the smallholder trees were planted more closely together and partly because
the planters' practice of heavy weeding between the tree rows caused erosion. Plantation
technology was originally extremely primitive. Early plantation tapping had been done
with hammer and chisel or by axe which damaged the trees. It was this kind of practice
that gave rise to expert recommendations such as the tree should be tapped only once
every three years - instead of the routine later adopted of once every two-three days!
Beginnings of Cultivated Rubber
In Malaya, Java, Sumatra and Ceylon, other plantation crops had been grown before
rubber. In Indonesia and Ceylon, the owners were European because only indigenous
peoples could own land and plantation leases were accorded only to Europeans. In
Malaya, Chinese owners operated small plantations.
By 1908 rubber was the main interest of the planting industry in 19'h century Malaya ... plan-
tation agriculture was quickly becoming monocultural. It was also becoming increasingly
European-dominated.
By 1921rubberreignedsupremein the agriculturaleconomyof Malaya....As the new admin-

istration took root, a policyemergedwhich clearlyfavouredthe European planterat the ex-
penseof the Chinese...By 1921 plantationagriculturein Malayawas organizedon the lines of
a westerncapitalistenterprise.
(Jackson,J. C. 1968: 234, 266)
That just about sums up the managerial, technical and financial organisation of
rubber in Malaya and in the Netherlands Indies too. And it indicates the role of the
colonial state. The only significant difference between those two was that the Sumatran
plantations were more receptive to technical innovation and generally rather more effi-
cient, partly on account of their greater openness to foreign investment from countries
other than the colonial power.
Until about 1913 Brazil had been the largest exporter. Those quantities were achieved
through the slaughter tapping of wild rubber trees and abuse of the indigenous inhabit-
ants, and physical reserves were becoming progressively smaller and quite inadequate
for the explosion in demand from automobiles.
Planting of rubber began in Malaya at the very end of the 19th century AD. Whether
the first commercial planting was by a British or a Chinese planter does not concern us
here. Smallholder rubber apparently began in the 1900's in both Malaya and Indonesia
but was ignored in the records or under-recorded. From 1914 total cultivated rubber
exports exceeded those of wild rubber for the first time. The following year Malayan
exports alone exceeded the wild rubber exports.
Table 1: Early Natural Rubber Exports (Long tons)
Year Wild Malaya Ceylon Indonesia Siam/Thailand
1850 1,500
1900 43,300 821
1904 51,156 1,898
1905 53,219 130 2,269
1910 83,034 6,500 1,600 2,400
1914 48,586 47,000 15,800 10,400 ?
1922 26,874 214,000 47,000 94.000 3,000
Source:Drabble, 1973:220
Indentured Migrant to Contract Migrant
From the earliestdaysof the rubberindustrythe mostimportantproducing areasdependedon
immigrantlabour....
Indeed the comparativelyeasy access to the amplelabour supplies of India, China and Java
was an importantfactorin the establishmentof the plantationindustry in South-eastAsia.
This was indentured labour.., it often resulted in very bad labourconditions.
(Bauer, 1948: 217, 219)
First we must realise that plantations depended on cheap migrant labour. Together
with the cheap land they had acquired, this formed their economic basis. Secondly, the
planters went for the harshest form of labour discipline available to them, namely labourers
working under indentured contracts. The harshness of the indentured labour system was
528 JCA 34:4
threefold: First, the worker being a poor migrant had to borrow money to cover the
journey if not for the employer from one associated with him. He was in debt. Secondly,
were the severe conditions of the work contract itself which bound the worker to remain
on the plantation until the debt was paid and as the Sumatra Coolie Ordinance put it,
Art 8. Each voluntarybreaking of the work contract will be punished, on the employer's side
by a fine not exceeding fl 100, on the part of the employeeby hard labour on public works
without pay for a period not exceedingthree months.
The contract, with the knowledge of the Administrateur will be extended for that
period. The actions by which the employee acts towards voluntarily breaking his work
contract are named as: a) desertion, b) continued refusal to work
Art 9 Punishmentfor insulting or threatening behaviour,incitement to desert, brawling and
drunkenness, in cases where it was not considered a misdemeanour,a punishment of a fine of
up to fl 25 - or of a maximum of 12 days hard labour.
(De Kat Angelino, 1931: 570-1)
The legislation, it may be noted, effectively denied the workers the right to combine in
a trade union. Thirdly, the supposed misdemeanours of the worker were treated as infrac-
tions of the Criminal Code. Under this Penal Sanction the worker was treated as a criminal.
The horrendous conditions of the workers on tobacco plantations at the turn of the
19th century who were becoming increasingly Javanese as well as Chinese, were ex-
posed at the time by Brandt and Rhemrev and after an absence of eighty years re-ex-
posed by Breman (1987/1989). Like their peers in Malaya the rubber planters in Sumatra
were somewhat less enthusiastic over the Penal Sanction than other plantations. Yet
they accepted existing conditions no matter how brutal and went along with the tobacco
plantations in clinging to indentured workers.
For us the importance of the earlier plantation crops was that they set the pattern for
labour discipline and management in rubber. The rubber plantations took over their
practice of utilising indentured labour, that form of near slavery. "This system of [in-
dentured] contract was without a doubt one of the harshest forms of work that ever
existed .... it resembled slavery." (Giacometi, 1993: 38)
In fact, for the planters this system was even better than slavery. A slave being a
permanent possession has to be cared for on account of economic reasons otherwise his/
her health and work capacity would deteriorate. The reproductive costs were borne by the
slave plantation. For a temporary contracted migrant worker there is no such safeguard.
The planters under those conditions have every incentive to work him as hard as possible,
even to death. The term "sucked oranges" became a current description of Indian migrant
workers returning home from Malayan plantations. Furthermore, in comparison with a
resident free worker the migrant worker's costs of reproduction are not borne by the plan-
tation. That is to say the cost of producing a worker (birth, childhood and education) and
the cost of his/her old age are not borne at all by the plantation. Additionally, the worker
was normally paid a single person's wage. These missing elements were all given by the
families and societies of origin of the migrant as a subsidy to the plantation.
To anticipate somewhat, it was precisely this situation that was undermined after (or
shortly before) Independence by the ending of worker migration to plantations. Then the
plantations and the host society had to begin to cover at least minimal costs of education and
health for workers and families. Then the former colonialist estate had to pay taxes for those
matters as well as provide some services themselves. A great contrast with previous times
when plantation taxation was exceedingly light. Yet it was at the planters' wish and not by
workers 'pressure nor even by public opinion that the indentured contract system was ended.
The indentured contract ended for Sumatra abruptly in 1931 and did so for causes
very similar to the earlier Malayan abandonment of it in 1910. This kinship must be
examined in tandem. The endings took place twenty years apart. In Malaya, the deci-
sion was in a period of boom whereas for Sumatra it was a response to the Great De-
pression. Paradoxically, after the planters had defended the Penal Sanction for years it
had become in their economic interests in both cases to dispose of it rather than its
termination being the result of some reforming, planning success.
For the Straits Settlement colonies of Malaya the formal use of indentured Indian
workers in agriculture and public works had been going on for a long time and the use of
Chinese workers under informal indentures had preceded the British takeover of what would
become the four Federated Malay States in 1874. However, the one fly in the ointment for
British planters was that the recruitment of Indian workers was in the monopoly grip of
two or three companies (also British) which raised considerably the cost of securing the
indentured workers. An opportunity to change this was presented by moral pressure on the
British government by NGOs 6 beginning in the 1880's, and after a good deal of debate and
of changing recruiting practices by the planters, the rubber plantations secured an end to
indentured labour and a "non-indentured" form of migrant worker in 1910.
The nub of the matter in Malaya was the increased demand for workers sparked off
by the boom in rubber and the poor condition of the workers recruited by indenture. The
older indentured system's way in which it tried to cope pushed up the price of labour. It
did not necessarily push up wages. It did increase the cost of a recruited worker. For
example, a limited kangany system for the Straits Settlements in 1903 had seen a fall in
recruiting costs from about Straits $34 to $ 25. (Jackson, R. N. 1961:" 109) (Straits $ = 2/
4d sterling or 40 US cents.) In 1910, "The recruiters" fee has varied but was finally
about Rs 22 per head. Plus some other smaller items, the total recruiting cost was $17-
18. In contrast around 1910 "The kangany recruiter receives a fee which varies from
$3.3 -$10." (Further Report ... on Indentured Labour 1910: 41) By 1916 this "had
fallen and rarely exceded $8." Report on Indian Labour Migration... 1917 p.32) The
planters and the Malayan government were in effect cutting out the middleman.
Planters found that kangany recruited workers were cheaper to recruit, were healthier
and although higher paid they worked better.
"The usual [dailylwages stipulated under [indentured] contractappearto be for men ...25
cents local currencyand for women... 18 cents..." [Plus an allowancefor rations.] "These
wages are low; unindentured men would earn at least 35 cents on any estate and womenat
least 25 cents." (Further Report... p.42)
Daily wage levels fluctuated with the price of rubber and were not related to the
cost of living. In 1924 on the insistence of the Indian government a daily minimum
wage of 35 cents for men and 27 cents for women was imposed. But these were dropped
again after the 1930 recession.
530 JCA 34:4
In 1910 a commission was appointed by the High Commissioner of the FMS to inquire into
the condition of indentured labour. The commission's report painted some very pathetic pic-
tures of the condition of Malaya's indentured labour. Nevertheless, the commission~instead of
recommending aboh'tion of the indenture system, suggested that it be extended to include
rubber plantations....a kangany system..... [Our emphasis]
(Li, 1955/1982: 137).
The new system operated roughly as follows.
A kangany (a headman or labour overseer of an estate in the Federated Malay States) is sent
by the estate to India to recruit labour. He is provided with a licence to recruit by the Indian
Immigration Department and collects labourers from villages he knows, bringing them to
Negapamam or Madras ....
The passages of these labourers are paid from the Indian Immigration Fund and neither cost
of passage nor any advance made is recoverable from them.
(Further Report... : 41)
Table 2: Indian Labour Immigration

Year Indentured, Indentured, Kangany "Voluntary"
Written Verbal
1880 1,191 2,500 1,000
1900 7,615 1,000 2,000
1907 5,499 500 21,260 856
1910 2,523 500 52,440 1,327
1913 80,528 2,750
1937 5,337 26,894
Source: Sandhu, 1969: 307, 309.
In 1907, this system had been greatly perfected by setting up the state-run Indian
Immigration Scheme that proved such a boon to the planters. Its main task was to pro-
mote a greater flow of migrant workers at lower cost, to control the kangany, to pay for
the passage of the worker and to tax the planters to fund the scheme. Strictly, this meant
that the migrant worker was no longer in debt because the cost of passage and mainte-
nance were covered by the Immigration Scheme. Once those circumstances were fully
operating the legal abolition of the Penal Sanction was almost a formality.
Legally speaking the immigrant was free from debt after 1910. The practice was dif-
ferent. Formally, this kangany system had no directcontact with advances to the individual
worker nor was the Penal Sanction mentioned in the workers' contract. 7 This was enough
for the government of British India which wished to free the trade of indentures, it was
enough for the British government and both government and planters in Malaya were happy.
This was a wonderful invention for the planters. It dispensed entirely with the need
for indentures. No longer had the plantations to recruit all their workers, pay advances,
then get them back from individual workers. Their contribution to the Fund, which did
pay the passage and other expenses, depended on the number of workers they were
already employing in plantations. Then since the pool of arrived "assisted migrants"
depended on the overall demand for new labour from the planters they could almost
always get as many new recruits as they wanted. A plantation might lose two or three
workers through what would previously been "desertion" but since they knew no other
trade they could go only to work on another plantation. Besides their kanganys would
mostly want them to stay. The kangany was not only a recruiter but was usually also a
foreman employed by the plantation and
... usually had a vested interest in ensuring that the labourerdid not abscond..... a kangany
often received"head money' from each recruited coolie for every day worked .... [and] fre-
quently also relatedto the laboureras shopkeeperand moneylender .... He also had a greater
interest in the quality of labourers recruited .... But it must be emphasisedthat the kangany
systemwas only a variant oftbe indenture system,as in effect,the debt-bondagerelationship
between masterand servant still remained,althoughindirectly
(Jomo, 1988: 189)
The plantation industry did not make a sacrifice. A plantation would not lose an
advance payment to a "deserter" because it had made none for the individual workers.
In general, "As long as the shortcomings and abuses in the Kangany system did not
affect the volume of immigration, there was little inclination to try to remove them..."
(Panner, 1961: 61).
The great advantage to the planters was that on a one month contract a swift re-
sponse could be made to the many downturns in rubber prices by quickly reducing
wages. Something that the stricter but more cumbersome Indenture System in Sumatra
found it difficult to do.
Halim appears to overestimate the changes in labour discipline certainly in the
early post-indenture period. Nevertheless he does make a point in noting that in 1910
the overtasking of indentured workers was common. And adding, "The [indenture] sys-
tem also provided little scope for improvement in productivity because tasks allocated
to labourers were already too severe and further tasking could only cause their gradual
death" (Halim, 1990: 18).
Although no longer indentured, for the workers problems still abounded. ' ~ h e kangani
system greatly improved Malaya's labour supply but its method of recruitment left a lot
to be desired" (Sandhu, 1969: 191). Bribery of officials and the shanghaiing by the of
recruits were common features. The short passage from India was made on grossly over-
crowded ships (as even the planters pointed out) until a moderate improvement in 1927
and were carriers of cholera and other diseases that regularly broke out in epidemic form
on landing (Parmer, pp.58-61). As late as 1918 there were only 8 doctors to the 1006
plantations in the Federated Malay States. In 1924, according to the official report, "the
health of the estate workers was poor.., the modest health and medical facilities required
of estate employers under the existing law was not being provided and where provided
was often inadequate." Of the 1,434 plantations in the FMS in 1925 there were only 168
plantation "hospiials" staffed by dressers with little training to care for a quarter of a
million workers. (In Ramachandran, 199X:170) In 1909, the death rates for Indian plan-
tation workers in Selangor was 35 per thousand and in Negri Semhilan 85.5 per thousand.
(Further Repor t... Appendix E: 47) "It seems probable.., that more than 750,000 Indian
immigrants may have died in Malaya" (Sandhu, 1969: 171). Even as late as the 1930's
some despicable estate managers were dumping severely ill or dying workers by the
532 JCA 34:4
roadside knowing that since the worker did not speak Malay or English he could not
disclose the name of the plantation. Besides how free could a worker be given the inci-
dence of his debt. The Malacca state planters enquiry of 1934 found it to be so stagger-
ingly high that the other planters' state associations promptly abandoned their own enqui-
ries! (Kondapi, 1951: 78) In Sumatra, at least till the 1920's, we had "the endless beating
of 'coolies'" (Reid, A. "Introduction" to Szekely, 1925/1979: x).
"The Penal Sanction is dead" chorused officialdom. "Long Live the Penal Sanc-
tion" muttered the planters. According to one shrewd analyst, "It should be understood
that the local enactments.., did not interfere with the liberty of contract nor with the
civil remedy for breach of contract. It was an indentured system with penal sanctions
that was abolished" (Campbell, 1923/1971: 25). In other words, the workers remained
very much contract migrant workers.
Before Indentured labour was abolished legally in Sumatra, a debate over the Penal
Sanction had been going on for 30 years. Stubbornly and led by the tobacco planters, t h e
plantations held out for it until an amendment to the United States TariffAct forbade the
importation of goods produced under conditions of forced labour. Not really a humanitar-
ian gesture this move was aimed at protecting American tobacco growers. Almost simul-
taneously the Great Depression struck and rubber planters found themselves bound to
pay according to the old price level whilst the cost of living fell by 50% and the price of
rubber was only one-sixth of the 1927 level. The year 1930 saw the abandonment of the
Penal Sanction and a new contract binding the worker to remain for one month only. In
1929, 87% of the East Coast of Sumatra plantation workforce had indentured contracts
but by !934 only 4% were still under the Penal Sanction (Rothe, 1946: 323). "The cur-
tailment of the penal sanction in the Coolie Ordinance of 1931 followed the plan of the
Labour Inspection [Office]; the abolition that followed shortly thereafter was an initia-
tive of the employers themselves" (Taselaar, 1998: 300). It was more profitable to do so.
The End of Immigrant Labour
Usually in colonial times workers not under the Penal Sanction were called "free" workers
when in fact they were still working under migrant contracts as was pointed out by a
Dutch prime minister in one of the few valid remarks in an otherwise generally tenden-
tious if often quoted account of colonial policy (Colijn, 1928: 131-133). The end of
migrations was brought about by a cluster of globalising influences. First, the Great
Depression caused all planters to cut back on demands for labour. Indeed, hundreds of
thousands were repatriated from Malaya and Sumatra thus transferring the cost of up-
keep of the unemployed back to their home areas and away from the plantations. Then
the colonial government of India under pressure from the National Congress, banned
further migration in 1938 and the further invasion of China by Japan ended the outflow
of workers from there. The beginnings of settled workers were being laid. World War II
froze this situation. Then the Independent governments of India and Indonesia refused
to permit the further migration of labourers abroad. Additionally, whether by choice or
inability the Indonesian government failed to revive the recruitment scheme for Sumatra.
In both plantation workers, unions sprung up. Initially very militant, those unions were
later replaced by others that were "responsible" and acted "with restraint and good
sense" (Allen & Donnithorne, 1962: 132) that resulted in a "failure to significantly
improve the socio-economic welfare of workers..." (Ramachandran, 1994: 300). This
no doubt led to the rapid fall in union membership.
Nevertheless, the fact that workers are now mainly settled residents has ended the
reliance on cheap migrant labour. This together with the fact that land has become
rather expensive has ended the plantation as such. What remains is closer to a normal
capitalist estate operation which in the case of rubber has been subject to rapid decline
in output and even more rapid in the numbers employed.
S M A L L H O L D E R versus P L A N T A T I O N
... in the great expansion o f export crops from the tropics in the late 19th and early 20th
century there was no compelling technical reason why production should have taken the es-
tate rather than the smallholding form... This appears true of rubber cultivation.
(Drabble, 1979: 91)
So far we have analysed rubber plantation workers and their situation. But in num-
bers, the small holders had already overtaken them as early as 1920 and their preponder-
ance progressively increased. For a long time it was not generally realised how numerous
smallholders were and how competitive their product would be. The planters' associa-
tions and their governments made sure that public ignorance stayed. This was not the
result merely of planters' (racial) prejudice but it had even more important material aims,
namely to preserve the planters interest against effective smallholder competition.
Those figures are my estimates derived from available information which is not very good.
Estate numbersfromofficialstatistics in Malaysiaor calculatedaccordingto othertables.
For Indonesia,calculatedSumatraestatenumbersplus estimatefor Javaestatesderived from
area.
Smallholders numbers estimated on basis of 3 people per average size holding (see Appendix
Table).
Thus, smallholder employed is derived from area + average plot size x 3 workers.
The exception is India where. Indian employmentfigures for estates are very high for low
output and presumablyreflecteffect of occasional workerssigning on. Indian smailholdings
are verysmall(average0.5 hectare)and cannotsupport 3 workersper holding. Takenhere as
one personper holding.
As Malcolm Caldwell so forcefully pointed out the entry of Southeast Asian
smallholding peasants into cash cropping rubber (and into rice cash cropping) was an
action of great enterprise on their part. This was a behaviour of which they esteemed
incapable by their colonial betters. Moreover, it was an enterprising entry into globalisation
that had been hindered at every step of the way by colonial planters and officials.
By comparison smallholder numbers appear already to have overtaken plantation
workers by 1920. By 1930 the difference is even more marked and by 1939 had there
been any previous doubt that was relieved in favour of the smallholders. However, their
volume of production overall did not overtake that of plantations until the 1950's and it
took some time after that for their value to exceed that of plantations:
534 JCA 34:4
Table 3: Estimated Numbers Employed in Rubber Cultivation (thousands)

Item/Year 1906 1910 1920 1930 1940 1960 1987 1998 2000
indonesia
Estates 4 52 450 470 360 (250) 263 275 (270)
Smallholders m 1 21 742 1,860 1,989 3,450 3,933 4,000
Malaya/sia
Estates 20 167 282 222 (226) 285 135 43 23

Smallholders 1 69 477 657 756 1,101 2,082 1,899 1,812
rhailand
Smallholders 21 267 (600) 822 1,650 2,307 2,500
TOTALof Big 3
Estates 24 219 732 792 (590) 535 398 318' 290
Smallholders 1 70 519 1,666 3,220 3,912 7,182 9,139 9,312
India
Estates 32 (50) 229 210 200
Smallholders (10) 30 250 971 1,000
TOTAL above
Estates 618 (585) 627 528 490
Smallholders 2,976 4,697 7,432 10,110 10,312
Sources: See Appendix Table.
Table 4: Recent Smallholder Rubber Production (Thousand tonnes)

1990 1995 1998 1999 2000 +/.
Indonesia 947 1,114 1,383 1,296 1,267 +320

Malaysia 741 688 521 428 360 -381
Thailand 1,275 1,804 2,216 2,266 2,525 +1,250
India 324 499 591 620 629 +305
China 264 424 450 460 445 +181
Brazil 30 44 66 70 72 +42
Source: Rubber Statistical Bulletins
The rough balance in numbers probably actually achieved in the immediate pre-war
period appears to have held into Independence. Indonesia's estate production, area and
employment had fallen but Malaysia's held up with enormously increased productivity,
mainly the result of re-planting rubber trees. The year 1974 saw what came to be a long
term decline in output and more so for plantation numbers in Malaya despite a moderate
recovery for those in Indonesia. In 1998 Malaysian estate rubber employment was only
43 thousand and by 2000 a mere 23 thousand. Mainly because of the surge in Thailand's
output, smallhoider numbers and production in the late 80's and '90's.
Those shortfalls have not caused an overall decline in small holder rubber produc-
tion or area mainly on accounts of Thailand's expansion which has made it the world's
largest producer and exporter of natural rubber.
Restriction
On the basis of the foregoing and bearing in mind the quotation from Drabble we may
wonder why it took smallholder rubber so long to edge out the estates. The main rea-
sons were (and partly still are) restriction and discrimination.
During the first 40 years of cultivated rubber exporting (1906-1946) only the seven
early years up to 1914 were without restrictions on output. Throughout the 1914-18
War and after, the Stevenson Restriction Scheme 1922-1928 and then the International
Restriction Scheme from 1932-1940 and the British and United States price controls
for the rest of the War. The period between the restriction schemes was filled by a boom
and then the setting up of the next set of restrictions.
The Stevenson Scheme was designed to suit two not entirely compatible aims. First
to push up the price of sterling rubber against the dollar to service UK debts to the US and
with the deliberate (Lim, 1977: 145-7) underestimation of Malayan smallholders area to
protect planters from their competition. After the Scheme collapsed since neither Nether-
lands East Indies planters nor smailholders were party to it a new scheme to cope with the
Great Depression blight on rubber prices included them The United States being this time
a member it was not so directly directed against it but interms of estimates of their quota
for export and restrictions on new planting blatantly discriminated against the smallholders.
"After the estates were assessed the sum total of their assessments was deducted
from the Malayan basic quota, and the smallholdings were given the residue" (Bauer,
1947: 95). Thus in Malaya it was possible physically to restrict smallholder output.
Given their widespread distribution and large numbers this was not possible in the Indies.
However, "the 1930's also saw a series of attempts by the Netherlands Indies Govern-
ment to strangle the Indonesian rubber-producing peasants" (Lee, 1973: 455).
Smallholders could be and were subject to an export tax in addition to the normal duty.
This was, putting it mildly, punitive. In the two and a half years 1934-1936, the export
price was highest in 1936, averaging 25.8 guilder cents per half kilo. In that year after
taxes and transport were deducted the smallholder got 1.7 cents! Not only was small-
holder out repressed but, "The replanting of the estate acreage with high yielding mate-
rial together with the prohibition of new planting would in the longrun have eliminated
the smallholders" [my emphasis] (Bauer, 1946: 403. See also Lee, 1973).
After the recognition of Independence, 1949 for Indonesia and 1957 for Malaysia, it
was no longer possible to discriminate directly against national smallholders. However,
the bias in all three of the national research and development organisations continued to
favour plantations. To this day not one of them has developed a strain of rubber tree to suit
the real smallholders needs to tap daily. All the trees in smaUholdings if they are not the
original types are derived from trees suitable for plantation 2-3 day tapping schedules.
536 JCA 34:4
Most of the supposed development or replanting programmes have been based on the
ludicrously incorrect assumption that smallholders act like capitalist firms. Furthermore,
the combination of heavy taxation which was relieved for plantations by their re-planting
grants which smallholders were unable to take up placed a remarkably high tax burden on
smallholders. It took decades for independent governments to remove this obstacle.
G e n d e r Issues 9
Here, it must be realised that in general women are better rubber tappers than men. It is
widely recognised that women are normally more careful in their tapping and damage
the tree bark much less than do males. Paradoxically, no effort seems ever to have been
made to utilise this in the division of labour either in plantations or smallholdings. In
the earlier colonial stages women were brought in first as temporary sexual partners for
plantation managers or workers (See the accounts by plantation managers, Szekely,
1937/1979, which is romantic; or the more coy one by Ainsworth, 1933). Then women
came in increasingly as cheaper workers. To the very end of the colonial period, planta-
tion women workers were being paid less for the same or better work than men.
Many migrants in Sumatra, however, refused to leave and this marks the real be-
ginning of a resident pool of plantation workers. Already by 1930 the number of those
living on plantations had numbered 435,000, one third as much again as those em-
ployed. Another feature of this period, similar to Malaya, was the increase in the numbers
of women workers whose wage rates as in Malaya were lower than those for men (despite
the fact now recognised that the average women tapper is more skilful than the average
male). Employers were utilising the new contract to lower wages. The statistics for East
Sumatra below appear to indicate that already beginning with the recession in the 1920's
and certainly in the 1930s the rubber employers' tactic of immediately reducing the pro-
portion of women employed during periods of dismissals on the supposition that they
would remain. Then they would employ them again directly the price upswing began
even before fresh immigration from Java could be organised. In the good years 1913-
1920 Javanese women accounted for 30% of the Javanese workforce in the East Coast,
dropping to an average of 25% in 1921-1923, then in the booming later 1920's rising
again to just over 30%. In the slump 1930's it fell to 26% then sharply recovered in 1935
to 36% rising to 38% at the beginning of the war. This must indicate the existence of a
reserve pool of resident female workers, presumably wives of male workers. Thus the
Depression period saw a deepening of a pattern already appearing earlier- a special form
of utilising and exploiting women inside and outside the plantations.
Despite productivity increases and recovery in consumer price levels, in the Sumatra
tobacco plantations by 1939 men's wage rates were only slightly above their level in
1913 and women's were lower whilst for rubber both were lower. ~° Male wages actu-
ally paid were marginally higher, indicating greater use of items like overtime. For
Malaya the employers' concessions in the wake of the first Tamil plantation workers'
strikes in 1941 brought them sizeable increases in money wages. Whether this would
actually have compensated for the great rise in the cost of living is very doubtful.
Table 5: Workers in Colonial East Coast Sumatra Plantations (Thousands)

Year Chinese Javanese Javanese Indian Total Ofwhich Other' Non °
Total Women Tobacco Indentured
1883 21.1 1.9 1.1 31.5 (5.7)
1893 41.7 18.0 2.0 61.2 [55.01 (6.8)
1898 50.9 22.3 3.4 76.6 [70.0] (6.4)
1900 58.5 25.2 3.3 94.0 [80.0] (4.8)
1906 53.1 33.8 (6.2) 3.3 90.2

1913 53.6 118.5 (42.9) 4.2 176.3 (36.7) (139.6) (6.7)
1920 27.7 209.5 (64.5) 2.0 239.2' (23.4) (215.8) (12.1)
1929. 26.8 189.4 (83.3) 1.4 302.7 (29.7) (273.0) (41.1)
1930 26.0 234.6 (78.3) 1.0 261.6i (26.8) (234.4) (49.0)
1934 12.6 106.4 37.4 0.6 160.1 (19.5) (146.6) (154.0)
1939u 8.6 129.8 (80.0) 0.4 223.0 (20.1) (202.9) (222.9)
Source: Thee: 39; Langeveld, 1978: 315, 363-5. Figures may not add up to totals.
*Mainly in rubber plantations.
* Note that from 1935 on the numbers of "temporary" or "seasonal" workers, particularly women, were not
necessarily included in these figures. Consequently, figures for women, non indentured and total should be
higher. See Langeveld: 364.
After Independence the course of women's wages in Malaysia and Indonesia parted
company. In Malaya in the 1950's women achieved equality of pay rates with men. By
contrast in Indonesia the male-dominated union held out for a payment based on a fam-
ily wage although without ever achieving it. Hence to this day women are paid less than
men for the same job. Again paradoxically, the proportion of women workers in Malaya
increased despite their higher wages whilst in Sumalra it decreased despite their being
paid less. According to Stoler there were actually no women rubber tappers in East
Sumatra at all by the 1980's. (Stoler, 1980: 23) Support for this evidence is found in
West Java where at least in two small plantations the numbers of women tappers did not
in total reach double figures. (Suryakusuma, 1986: 43, 46) These despite the widely
recognised phenomenon of women's greater proficiency at tapping than men.
There are reasons external to the wage bargain that may explain these discrepan-
cies. In Sumatra, whilst the information is sketchy, according to Stoler the number and
proportion of permanent workers had declined from 282,000 in 1965 to 120,000 in the
1970's. This is where full-time women workers were originally employed. However,
the number and proportion of temporary and part-time workers bad increased quite
dramatically to between one-third and one-half of the total. Most of these who were
paid less anyway were underpaid women. (Stoler, 1986: 138)
For Malaya a feature even more prominent amongst smallholders occurs where the
family can no longer be considered in terms of being exclusively rubber growing. Fam-
ily members and particularly males have sought alternative employment particularly in
construction and road building. This has placed the family whilst retaining residence on
the rubber estate with wife and other female members tapping rubber or weeding and
538 JCA 34:4
with males increasing absent doing other work.

For rubber smallholders the term has become increasingly misleading (at least in Ma-
laysia and Thailand) for there more family income has been made from activities other than
rubber growing. Initially it would have been males going to work either temporarily or
permanently in other jobs like labour road building but latterly with increasing numbers of
females going too. At least for smallholdings this may explain the lack of of gender or
indeed any other regular division of labour. Whoever is on the farm will do the work. Inci-
dentally, this destroys the idea that smallholders are essentially a man and wife alone opera-
tion. Grandparents, children, relatives even the occasional sharecropper play a big part too.
Starting the wrong way round we note that the norm in all official rubber small-
holder support schemes it is the male who is entered as the "land owner," irrespective of
the actual (or previous) situation. In Malaya, RISDA who actually looked at the posi-
tion, found much to their surprise in 1977 that almost one-third of smallholder land
owners were women. (RISDA, 1984: 27) No one in Thailand has covered the ground
but we estimate that the proportion of rubber lands owned by women was no less. In
those cases we have indications that an induced change from situations relatively
favourable to women's ownership to those less favourable is taking place. We surmise
that this position is not restricted to rubber smallholders. Here the phenomenon of offi-
cial intervention represents the thin edge of the wedge of globalisation.
Protest
Plantation Workers: Little has been said about plantation workers protests. They can
hardly have enjoyed their situations. Yet, apart from brief moments (see Parmer, 1961
and Stenson, 1972), like in Malaya in the Chinese strikes of the 1920's or the great
Indian workers' strikes of 1941 that was suppressed by military force or the short "lib-
eral" period of 1945-1948 when a communist guided labour union was very active,
organised protests have been little noted.
Yet, how could they have organised themselves? We have seen how the Penal Sanc-
tion in Sumatra forbade collective action. In all plantation area the workers lived in
company houses, were fed by company food and could not leave the plantation without
the employer's consent. Breman evidences a case in Sumatra (though not of rubber
workers) of two Javanese plantation coolies, convicted of murderous assault on a planter,
of their execution of workers actually taking place within the plantation grounds and
illustrated one with a photograph, Breman (1989: Frontispiece).
The exception to organised protest was individual assaults on supervisory staff or
in Sumatra the "running amok" of ill-treated workers, For Malaya, we show in detail a
typical form of "collective bargaining" as described by planter,
... a certain gang of coolies refused to work in the fields after their roll-call on account of the
manager having postponed their pay-day until the next day .... And refused to budge until
they had received their pay.
He [the manager] sent the Sikh watchman for two Schneider rifles and told the other assistant and
myself to cover him whilst he proceeded to beat the stuffing out of them for insubordination.
... such acts of revolt require very drastic measures...
(Ainsworth, 1933: 69-71)
We may only add that the postponement of payment by the planters was illegal at
the time, that the next day a still recalcitrant kangany had all his belongings burnt by the
management and was sacked and that the incident was considered to be "a revolt."
Under the Labour Code he was entitled to one month's salary in lieu of instant dismissal
- compensation that he did not receive. And under a different regime the planter's vio-
lent behaviour would surely have been subject to criminal proceedings.
We may also note here that in general whilst the European staff did not normally con-
duct their daily intercourse under arms with workers they always did have a supply at hand.
In the case of Indonesia the participation of plantation workers in the liberation move-
ment gave them a strong basis for yet another communist-led estate workers union, the
Sarbupri. It went down in blood in the massacres of the military takeover 1965-6. The
successors to these in both countries worked hand in glove with anti-labour governments.
One activity that must be on many occasions a form of protest was the worker's
leaving their workplace to go to another offering better conditions, whether legally or
not. This is what planters and governments described as "desertion." After the abolition
of indentured labour in Malaya "In 1915 no fewer than 40,000 workers deserted." (Re-
port on Indian Labour, 1917: 33) That was hardly a sign of content. At least in some
cases this can only be treated as a form of protest and probably in many cases a collec-
tive decision. We must also note that the planters had a rather quaint idea of what consti-
tuted "desertion." The Planters Association requested and received an opinion from
their legal advisors, "A coolie absconds by section 235 sub-section (i) of the Labour
Code by being continuously absent for more than 24 hours... He thereby commits an
offence" (Malayan Agricultural Bulletin, No. 4, 1919: 262). Even if a coolie sent in his
one month's wages later by post he would still be counted as an offender.
Smallholders: For rubber smallholders (that is for the great majority of the real rubber
smallholders) nothing much by way of overt protest appears in the evidence. H Who
listens to mere complaints? In other words, the peasant smallholders were and are
unorganised-- and unorganisable?
Labour's Post-Colonial Past
This is an era of great almost incredible complexity and of different national experi-
ences for the two great rubber plantation countries that cannot properly be encapsulated
here. Indonesia declared its Independence in 1945 and after a bitter armed struggle
achieved it in 1949-50. Plantation workers were notable for their participation in this
anti-colonial struggle became organised and with smallholders might have formed a
"national bloc" against foreign plantations. For Malaysia, Independence came later, in
1957 and under circumstances that allied the former colonial power with the Malay elite
and that extended the power of colonialism beyond its official demise.
In neither case, although labour ceased to be of the cheap, migrant kind, did the
changed circumstances bring prosperity to the estate workers.
Indonesia: After Independence was achieved, hostility towards plantations mingled with a
certain official desire to promote their export earning and tax bearing capacity. Until the
540 JCA 34:4
Suharto coups of 1965-66 labour unions were well enough organised by the Communist
Party that coupled with the inability (or unwillingness) of the central government to re-
institute the flow of migrant workers from Java to Sumatra prevented the re-institution of
cheap migrant workers. The lack of coerced cheap land for the sugar plantations of Java
had brought about their total collapse and the almost universal opposition to plantations of
all kinds in Surakarta and Yogyakarta helped set a downward path for rubber plantations
in Indonesia. This was finalised with the progressive takeover of Dutch, then British then
American-owned plantations after 1957. The ending by the anti-labour Suharto regime of
whatever worker' freedoms that had been achieved tended to reduce numbers of formally
employed workers and their replacement by temporary, part-time informal employees.
Furthermore, the oil crisis of 1973 that boosted oil prices set the seal on Indonesia's
transformation away from a plantation based economy.
Malaya:The end of the Japanese occupation saw the growth of trade union activity and
the formation of the militant communist-led Plantation Workers Union. However, this was
banned after the outbreak of the "Emergency"12in 1948 and replaced by a tame, officially
approved trade union, that still exists today. Yet the supply of cheap migrant labour had
dried up and some (small) reward had to be given to the workers. Under the circumstances
of the communist rebellion and to counter its influence one might have expected a policy
favouring rubber smallholders against estates. This is implied from Bauer's work on rub-
ber which strongly emphasised smallholder competitiveness. Certainly, there was no overt
discrimination against them as had been the case under the Restriction Schemes. How-
ever, there was such a notable bias towards the larger estates and holdings in the replanting
schemes (such as that recommended in the Mudie Report of 1954) that to this day had
disadvantaged smallholders. Because of its importance and because similar schemes oper-
ated in Indonesia and Thailand we deal with issue separately below. Besides that there was
a problem in formulating a "national" anti-colonial movement in that at this times Malays
were a minority in Malaya. It was not until after the anti-Chinese rioting of 1967 that
policies began to change some of which inadvertently transformed the foreign-owned
rubber plantations into national capitalist estates. National (Malay) ownership was pro-
moted and this in our case meant subsidies to the business arms of the government politi-
cal parties legally and quietly to take over through purchase of shares the plantation com-
panies. This it may be noted was a transfer payment. That is a subsidy (from the general
taxpayer) to the national companies acquiring the shares that compensated them for the
absence of cheap labour (and probably for cheap land too).
Finally, the end of a plantation economy was hastened by the 1970's increase in
energy prices (although not so markedly as in Indonesia) and by a growth in manufac-
turing. The latter preceded that of Indonesia on account of greater openness to foreign
investment and (despite official preference for Malay business) greater freedom for the
much larger Chinese business community which dominated private business.
The Replanting Seam 13
All three countries adopted fairly similar schemes to promote the re-planting of older
low yielding rubber with high yielding varieties. In fact it was a real Green Revolution.
As this procedure involved the grower in a temporary loss of income whilst the new
trees were growing a subsidy according to the area being replanted was given. The cost
of the subsidy was covered in part from loans (mainly from the World Bank) that were
not repaid by the rubber growers and increasingly by a "cess" or special tax on rubber
exports. Natural rubber being a price taker in world trade the export cess was effec-
tively deducted from the export price to give (subtracting also some other items) the
farm gate price. In other words the cess was borne alike by estates and smallholders.
Not so the subsidy. Ideally re-planting should occur on large areas but on part of the
land holding. Easy enough for an estate but not for a two hectare smallholding. Further-
more, the official predeliction was to favour estates partly as a hangover from the good
old days and partly to achieve quick results. In short, while the schemes lasted (for
some 20 years) most of the replanting subsidies went to estates or larger holdings whilst
payment of the export tax was borne by both estate and smallholders. Particularly in
Indonesia the bulk of the export tax was borne by smallholders whilst the benefits of the
subsidy went to estates. Indeed, we may generalise to say "smallholdings have subsidised
the modernisation of the larger holdings" (Gordon & Sirisambhand, 1987: 43).
The short-term and long-term results of the Restrictions have been truly tremen-
dous and for those who have been working in rubber gardens and plots, truly atrocious.
We shall consider this in the next section of the article.
Conclusions
The consequences of the Restriction Schemes and other colonial period plantation favouring
activities were enormous and lasted to keep rubber plantations in business for a generation
or more after the end of World War II. 14 Let us recollect that for Malaya in the 1930's the
lowest costs for good rubber plantations was about 6d per lb against 1l/2d for smallholders.
In the Netherlands East Indies the comparison was about 6¢ as aginst 2¢ per half kiologram.
At prices of around 5d a lb. most plantations would have gone out of business and either
returned to jungle or bought up at distress prices and sub divided into smaUholdings. In
other words, the post-war era instead of facing as it did an officialdom favouring planta-
tions would have had no plantations to cope with but instead vast numbers of smallholders.
For the tree re-planting that was essential - and the age of many smallholder trees
necessitated this - a different strategy would have been necessary. No longer could a
Mudie Report (1954) blithely ignore them for Malaya as it did and went on to back the
plantations to the hilt. The re-planting schemes would have had to be different, newer
species would have had to be developed to be tapped daily, the progress would have
slower but the whole thing quite feasible.
The rubber labour force in the immediate post-colonial Southeast Asia would have
been totally different- much closer to its present preponderance of workers in smallholdings.
But they need not have lived the marginalised existence that present day sinai!holders do.
Finally, we may note that, without the prices built up by the Restrictions and with
a post-war preponderance of smallholders, the synthetic rubber industry of the United
States - born of war-time necessity and government subsidies - would not have sur-
542 JCA 34:4
vived as it did. Today it produces as much rubber as does Southeast Asia but with a
different scenario it could have been reduced to producing specialty rubbers.
Rubber Growing Labour's Future
What conclusions may we draw from the foregoing pages that have left us in an era
without the British anti-American, anti-smallholders restrictions and with a vast world-
wide synthetic rubber industry?
The role of the state cultivation in the various colonial and metropolitan countries in
regulating and favouring certain groups in rubber was clearly immense in colonial times.
In post-colonial times the international role of the state in the producing countries has
been curtailed drastically. However, and perhaps strangely, the state in the independent
countries whilst relaxing formal restrictions on smallholders has discriminated fiercely
against them in terms of punitive taxation, poor R & D assistance and in re-planting.
We have at last arrived at a situation where smallholders rubber does predominate.
What is the future for its labour force? Is it really composed of"unorganisable" peasant
smallholders and share croppers? It is true that many planters classified as smallholders
have holdings of 20 ha. or even more. No doubt they attract their governments' atten-
tion but for the greater rest we see little hope. This conclusion derives in part from the
economic and political small scale, scattered, atomistic and class ridden nature of peas-
ant existence and not only for rubber smallholders. Peasants have not been totally
unorganised in the post-colonial past. As experience has shown in Vietnam, China,
India and Indonesia, peasants can be organised. But it would seem in special circum-
stances. And we have to ask what has happened to those movements? Crushed beneath
the weight of repression or of bureaucracy. My problem here is that I do not at the
moment see the circumstances emerging under which wage labourers, sharecroppers
and peasants can be organised again and this time with more participation.
Finally, for those of us who support labour movements the problem is equally great
for the difficulties of organising stretch beyond the peasantry to those in cities and whether
formal or informal in their being. We are faced with an infinitely more modulated mosaic
of classes and sub-classes than was envisaged on behalf of Asian workers movements. The
worker-peasant alliance envisaged by Lenin and the early Comintern is (and probably
was) too simple. Now are seen "peasants" who are workers and workers who are peasants.
In the urban labour force there are, for example, "the labour elite, the petit bourgeoisie, the
sub-proletariat and the paupers" (Breman, 1980: 22). There are settled and migrant work-
ers as well as seasonal migrants. There are contract workers, women workers, child work-
ers and ethnic divisions between these. Each group has its own interests and whilst com-
mon ground must be found this would have to occur under the eyes of a triumphant capital-
ism that finds it easy to uncover and foster diversive movements. Even failures of capital-
ism open not the doors to socialism but the Pandora's Box of neo-fundamentalist religious
movements. The only positive feature is the demise of the Soviet Union and the disappear-
ance of its false claim (long dead) to be a workers' state. Even there this seems to have
dumped most socialists into near despair. None of this bodes well for rubber workers.
Labour Transfi~rmation 543
The relationship between the "formal, and "informal" sectors, their respective sizes
and what is actually happening to people seem to me to be key elements in future
critique and investigation. Yet I would say that our debate must go beyond and be deeper
than that moralistic tone implies. It goes almost without saying that the lives, conditions
and ambitions of the workers and their families whether in natural rubber or not are o f
prime importance - but only to those people themselves and to the few who care about
them. The globalisers D O N ' T G I V E A D A M N . A n d that is the economic reality. Mo-
rality needs a material base to become a movement.
APPENDICES
Appendix Table 1: South East Asia Rubber Areas
Th. Hectares
Year Indonesia Indonesia Malaya Malaya Thailand
Smallholders Estates Smallholders Estates Smallholders
1900 3
1905 ? 13 ? 20
1910 ? 104 (50) 169
1917 (15) 348 ? 499 17
1922 (80) 497 372 570 ?
1930 (450) 573 483 763 142('28)
1940 1,301 626 547 843 434('41)
1950 1,392 427 642 795 630('52)
1961 1,392 506/430 823 784 958('62)
1974 1,854 438 1,118 574 1,054('72)
1977 1,862 465 1,118 539 800-2,000
1980 1,875 1,205 492 1,280 ('86)
1,500 ('86)
1990 2,620 535 1,488 349 1,640
1,844
1995 2,382 1,425 254 1,700
1,949
1998 2,795 549 1,373 195 1,800
1,972
Sources: For Plantations the most reliable looking official data in RSB.
For Smallholders the data, official and other, are very poor.
Indonesia, Up to 1930 Sumardiko at al, Up to 1974 Saad & 8abarsja; Later from International
Rubber Statistical Bulletins (RSB). Up to 1930 underestimates for smailholders.
For Malaya to 1922, Drabble; up to 1973 Barlow; up to 1983 Jomo 1988; 72, thereafter RSB. Up
to 1940 the data underestimates smallholder area even the Census data for 1921/2.
Thailand, Up to 1972 UNDP/FAO 1973:9 but 1966 and 1972 mature areas only. Then up to 1985
local estimates are too confused of which the range for 1977 is an example. Thereafter lower figure my own
estimates derived from 1986, upper figure RSB figures.
544 JCA 34:4
All this m a y s e e m a l o n g w a y f r o m rubber. A n d it m a y s o u n d like the p e s s i m i s m o f

t h e will as well as p e s s i m i s m o f the intellect. It m e r e l y is r e c o g n i t i o n o f s o m e o f the
facts that m u s t b e a n a l y s e d b e f o r e p a r t i c i p a t i o n o f all t h o s e w o r k e r s ' g r o u p s c a n h a p p e n .
Appendix Table 2: Average Size Rubber Smallholdings 1970's

Country Area Size Holding Families
Indonesia 2,795,000 ha 2.1 h a 1,131,000
Malaysia 1,373,000 h a 2.17 ha 633,000

Thailand 1,800,000 ha 2.34 ha 769,000
Notes
1. Chnlalongkorn University Social Research Institute, Bangkok. <alecg@thai.com>
2. We recognise the dangers of utilising the term which is applied by many in a deceptive way reminiscent
of Marx's ideological concept In one sense it refers to a surface reality but does so to distort reality to the
advantage of one party. We use "globalisation'" here as a term in the neutral, general descriptive sense of:
a quickening and broadening of the pace of imernationalisation of an era in production, trade, investment,
political and social activities, communications, population migration and/or cultural diffusion.
3. Rubber like most other colonial crops seems, however, to have experienced a sort of "segmented"
globalisation. Colonies in general were permitted only to trade internationally (to globalise) on all levels
only through the respective mechnisms of their colonial overlords. Although not so segmented as in the
18th century their international relations were certainly not open globalisation.
4. In parenthesis to indicate that trade was not free.
5. Synthetic Rubber, it may be observed, is as much a globalised commodity if an industrial one as its
natural rival. Hampered in their attempts to deal with the virtual British-Dutch monopoly that forced up
natural rubber prices partly by lack of unity and more importantly by the refusal of United States chemical
corporations to break their collaboration with the German patent holders, the American tyre manufacturers
had to wait for the war with Japan for synthetic rubber. Then after the Japanese occupation of Southeast
Asia's rubber areas the US government at some expense set up state owned synthetic rubber plants. After
the end of the war they were privatised at prices favourable to their buyers, mainly their own consumers,
American tyre and rubber manufacturing companies.
6. The use of the term is anachronistic but it fits.
7. The Penal Sanction, the deployment of the Criminal Code procedures, was dropped from the work contract
in 1910. Strangely, however, the overall law governing work procedures, the Labour Code, contained it fully
until 1923 and partially until 1926. The discontinuation was at the insistence of the Government of India.
8. Technically speaking srnallholders do not produce or export much finished natural rubber. This calculation
is based on assumtions about exports RSS No 3 and lower. These are produced from smallholders' USS.
Unlike many of the plantations the smallhoiders are not in fact concerned with exports.
9. These remarks depend on the available literature and on personal observation. For the post-war period
most of the material is from estates in Peninsular Malaysia. Material on Indonesian estates is meagre.
For smallholdings and smallholders overall the literature is disgracefully small and weak.
10. Langeveld, pp.381-2.
11. Well, actually the demonstrations by Malay rubber smallholders in 1977 did once shock the cosy Malay-
dominated government coalition into some sort of activity. They were not mere "Chinese." These were
Malay protesters behaving not at all according to their sh~p-like stereotype and a astonished "leader," a
Deputy Prime Minister, took action. Predictably perhaps, initial government price support withered through
the pressures of the global market. Stoler (1986) also provides valuable information about post-1965
smallholder activities in Sumatra.
12. The "Emergency" is the official euphemism to describe the communist (and mainly ethnic Chinese) led
insurrection. Whether it had been planned or was an enforced response to colonial repression is debatable.
13. For sources see: Booth, 1986; Girling, 1986; Gordon & Sirisambhand; Khoo, 1978;
14. A human generation is usually taken to be 33 years. By coincidence the estimated economic life of a
rubber tree is reckoned at 30 years.
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This article was downloaded by: [University of Connecticut]

On: 12 October 2014, At: 04:17

Journal of Contemporary Asia

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Dynamics of Labour Transformation:

*Chulalongkorn University Social Research Institute, Bangkok

By 1921rubberreignedsupremein the agriculturaleconomyof Malaya....As the new admin-

Table 2: Indian Labour Immigration

Table 3: Estimated Numbers Employed in Rubber Cultivation (thousands)

Estates 20 167 282 222 (226) 285 135 43 23

Table 4: Recent Smallholder Rubber Production (Thousand tonnes)

Indonesia 947 1,114 1,383 1,296 1,267 +320

Table 5: Workers in Colonial East Coast Sumatra Plantations (Thousands)

1906 53.1 33.8 (6.2) 3.3 90.2

with males increasing absent doing other work.

All this m a y s e e m a l o n g w a y f r o m rubber. A n d it m a y s o u n d like the p e s s i m i s m o f

Appendix Table 2: Average Size Rubber Smallholdings 1970's

Malaysia 1,373,000 h a 2.17 ha 633,000

Malayan Agricultural Bulletin., (Kuaia Lumpur) Various Issues.

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