Kretek Capitalism: Making, Marketing, and Consuming Clove Cigarettes in Indonesia

Welker, Marina Book Kretek Capitalism: Making, Marketing, and Consuming Clove Cigarettes in Indonesia Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century, No. 13 Provided in Cooperation with: University of California Press Suggested Citation: Welker, Marina (2024) : Kretek Capitalism: Making, Marketing, and Consuming Clove Cigarettes in Indonesia, Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century, No. 13, ISBN 9780520399686, University of California Press, Oakland, https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.184 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/305372 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ KRETEK CAPITALISM Making, Marketing, and Consuming Clove Cigarettes in Indonesia marina welker KRETEK CAPITALISM Making, Marketing, and Consuming Clove Cigarettes in Indonesia welker Indonesia is the world’s second-largest cigarette market: two out of three men smoke, and clove-laced tobacco cigarettes called kretek make up 95 percent of the market. Each year, more than 250,000 Indonesians die of tobacco-related diseases. To account for the staggering success of this lethal industry, Kretek Capitalism examines how kretek manufacturers have adopted global tobacco technologies and enlisted Indonesians to labor on their behalf in fields and factories, at retail outlets and social gatherings, and online. The book charts how Sampoerna, a Philip Morris subsidiary, uses contracts, competitions, and gender, age, and class hierarchies to extract labor from workers, influencers, artists, students, retailers, and consumers. Critically engaging nationalist claims about the commodity’s cultural heritage and the jobs it supports, Marina Welker shows how global capitalism has transformed both kretek and the labor required to make and promote it. “Thoughtful and provocative, this is a superb book that will be widely read, especially by those who are looking for an antidote to current popular support of kretek.”—Abidin Kusno, author of Jakarta: The City of a Thousand Dimensions “A magnificent book! Kretek Capitalism is destined to become a classic of both medical anthropology and public health scholarship.”—Robert Proctor, author of Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition “Marina Welker argues that ubiquitous Indonesian representations of kretek as an authentic, small-scale industry in fact rest on a toxic addiction that is as cultural as it is chemical. A brilliant, beautiful, and disturbing book.”—Carla Jones, Professor of Anthropology, University of Colorado Boulder “Detailed, attentive, and careful, Kretek Capitalism is easily the most granular, informative, and textured ethnography of labor in the tobacco industry.”—Peter Benson, author of Tobacco Capitalism and Stuck Moving Marina Welker is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University and author of Enacting the Corporation: An American Mining Firm in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia. A Philip E. Lilienthal Book in Asian Studies Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century, 13 University of California Press · www.ucpress.edu A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Cover design by Michelle Black. Cover photos of kretek production by Marina Welker. ISBN: 978-0-520-39967-9 9 780520 399679 6 × 9 SPINE: 0.62 FLAPS: 0 Luminos is the Open Access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.org The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Philip E. Lilienthal Imprint in Asian Studies, established by a major gift from Sally Lilienthal. Kretek Capitalism ATELIER: ETHNOGRAPHIC INQUIRY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Kevin Lewis O’Neill, Series Editor 1. Mortal Doubt: Transnational Gangs and Social Order in Guatemala City, by Anthony W. Fontes 2. Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the United States, by Kathryn A. Mariner 3. Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean, by Jatin Dua 4. Fires of Gold: Law, Spirit, and Sacrificial Labor in Ghana, by Lauren Coyle Rosen 5. Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea, by Sarah Besky 6. Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala’s Infrastructures of Disposability, by Jacob Doherty 7. The Industrial Ephemeral: Labor and Love in Indian Architecture and Construction, by Namita Vijay Dharia 8. Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire, by Nomi Stone 9. Stuck Moving: Or, How I Learned to Love (and Lament) Anthropology, by Peter Benson 10. A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands, by Sahana Ghosh 11. Where Cloud Is Ground: Placing Data and Making Place in Iceland, by Alix Johnson 12. Go with God: Political Exhaustion and Evangelical Possibility in Suburban Brazil, by Laurie Denyer Willis 13. Kretek Capitalism: Making, Marketing, and Consuming Clove Cigarettes in Indonesia, by Marina Welker Kretek Capitalism Making, Marketing, and Consuming Clove Cigarettes in Indonesia Marina Welker UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS x Acknowledgments Ray Craib, Simone Pinet, Saida Hodžić, Roger Moseley, and Parisa Vaziri. I have also benefited on numerous occasions from the insights of fellow authors in UC Press’s Atelier series, including Darcie DeAngelo, Namita Dharia, Jatin Dua, Anthony Fontes, Duana Fullwiley, Lauren Coyle Rosen, Christien Tompkins, Kaya Williams, Laurie Denyer Willis, and Emrah Yildiz. It is hard to sufficiently thank Kevin O’Neill for all his support, advice, and energy as the Atelier series editor. At the University of California Press, Kate Marshall has provided unfailingly swift and sage advice, and I’m grateful to Chad Attenborough and Stephanie Summerhays for shepherding the manuscript through later stages. I am also thankful for Richard Feit’s careful copyediting and to Amron Lehte for indexing the manuscript. I appreciate the immensely helpful feedback that Sarah Besky, Matthew Kohrman, Abidin Kusno, Tania Li, Robert Proctor, and Nancy Smith-Hefner offered during a book manuscript workshop. My thanks to the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University and to the Atelier series for funding this workshop. I am also grateful to Pete Benson for his inspiring work and critical engagement with the manuscript as a whole, and to an anonymous reviewer for UC Press. I benefited at multiple critical stages from Philip Sayers’s development editing and copyediting skills. For logistical support, I owe thanks to Fakultas Ilmu Budaya, Universitas Brawijaya; Kementerian Riset dan Teknologi Indonesia; and Aminef (American Indonesian Exchange Foundation). I received material support from a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and Cornell’s Einaudi Center for International Studies and Institute for Social Sciences. For writing support, I am grateful to Cornell University’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future. I am also grateful to the organizers and audiences at institutions where I presented early drafts of this work, including Universitas Brawijaya; the School of Culture, History and Language in Australian National University’s College of Asia & the Pacific; the Centre for Society, Technology and Development and the Institute for the Study of International Development at McGill University; the “Corporate Rights and International Law” Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar at Duke University; Cornell University’s Anthropology Department, Global Development Department, Science and Technology Studies Department, and the Southeast Asia Program; and Yale University’s Agrarian Studies Colloquium. I published an earlier version of Chapter 5 in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Welker 2018), and developed some of Kretek Capitalism ’ s arguments in an article in Comparative Studies in Society and History (Welker 2021). I appreciate the unwavering support of my mother, Ann Welker, and my sisters Renata Welker and Carla Shumaker. I am especially grateful to my partner, Paul Nadasdy, and our children, Zoli and Andor, for accompanying me on this long journey and making each day special. 1 Introduction Causing harm and death when used as intended, the cigarette is no ordinary commodity.1 The kretek, in turn, is no ordinary cigarette. The Indonesian government makes a simple distinction between kretek and “white cigarettes” (rokok putih): kretek tobacco filler contains cloves, while white tobacco filler does not. The difference is also communicated through product packaging; kretek must be sold in packs of twelve or sixteen and white cigarettes in packs of twenty, and three-letter acronyms on the side of Indonesian cigarette packs indicate whether they are kretek or white (sigaret kretek or sigaret putih) and hand rolled or machine rolled (tangan or mesin). Hand-rolled cigarettes must be made with hand-operated tools like wood-handled rollers with canvas belts. In everyday vernacular, Indonesians often reserve the term kretek for handrolled clove cigarettes and classify machine-rolled cigarettes, whether or not they contain cloves, as white. Machine-rolled kretek are made on European machines and look like white cigarettes with their uniform rod shape, synthetic filters, and decorative flourishes (brand names, colored bands, white or faux-cork filter covers). All kretek afford a distinct sensory experience, beginning with their powerful clove scent and saccharine-coated tips, which deposit sweetness on smokers’ lips. When clove fragments ignite as smokers inhale, kretek sometimes make the crackling sound that is the source of their onomatopoeic name. Smokers associate kretek with sensations of warmth and heat (hangat, panas), tastes of sweetness and spice (manis, pedas), and, especially in the case of the hand-rolled kretek and its smoke, qualities of thickness and heaviness (tebal, berat). The white cigarette, by contrast, is bland, tasteless, and light (rasa tawar, enteng) and tends to disappear quickly; once lit, the wind stealthily consumes it even if it’s not actively smoked. A white cigarette takes about five minutes to smoke, compared to ten minutes for a machine-rolled kretek and a half-hour time commitment for a hand-rolled kretek. The latter weigh two grams, whereas machine-rolled cigarettes weigh a single gram or less. 2 Introduction The kretek industry and its supporters celebrate kretek in museums and books and on social media as embodying a valuable cultural heritage. In the new millennium, as government regulations over tobacco have modestly tightened and civil society restrictions have significantly loosened, a kretek nationalist movement has gathered around the claims that the commodity is culturally distinct due to its combination of indigenous cloves and New World tobacco and that the industry provides employment and government revenue crucial to national development. Well-resourced kretek nationalist organizations and advocates work to contest tobacco control, which they portray as a foreign, neocolonial threat. Indonesians smoke over three hundred billion cigarettes a year. The world’s fourth most populous country, Indonesia has the second largest cigarette market, made up of approximately 75 percent machine-rolled kretek, 20 percent handrolled kretek, and 5 percent white cigarettes (World Bank 2018, 4). In addition to its colossal size and unique product composition, the market features striking gender disparities; two thirds of men smoke compared to only about 5 percent of women. Mass cigarette consumption produces mass debility and death, with tobacco-related diseases claiming an estimated 290,000 Indonesian lives each year, over 50,000 of which are attributable to secondhand smoke exposure.2 This book asks how kretek capitalism—understood as the accumulation of capital through the making, exchange, and consumption of clove cigarettes—enlists Indonesians to labor on its behalf in fields and factories, at retail outlets and social gatherings, and online. I focus on the efforts of Sampoerna, a Philip Morris International (PMI) subsidiary that claimed about one third of the Indonesian cigarette market during the 2010s. Kretek Capitalism charts how Sampoerna uses contracts, gamification, self-improvement logics, and class, gender, and age hierarchies to extract overtime, shift, seasonal, gig, and unpaid labor from workers, influencers, artists, students, retailers, and consumers. By centering labor, I develop an account of kretek capitalism that acknowledges but goes beyond the addictive hold of nicotine over individual smokers. Scientists have found that tobacco is harder to quit than alcohol, cocaine, and opiates, underscoring the lively and agentive potential of plants and their significant role in shaping human life (Bennett 2010; Galvin 2018; Langwick 2021; Myers 2017; Russell 2019). The younger a person is when they start using tobacco, the more likely they are to become addicted. Adolescent nicotine exposure disrupts normal brain development, changing how synapses are formed and harming the brain’s capacity for attention and learning. Scientists have explicated the physiological mechanisms through which nicotine is absorbed, moving from the lungs into the blood and altering the chemistry of the brain and central nervous system by flooding the brain’s reward circuits with dopamine and sparking an adrenaline rush that increases heart rate and raises blood pressure.3 This kind of universal biochemical rendering of nicotine addiction is critical but insufficient to understanding kretek capitalism because it rests on an individualizing, internalizing, and often pathologizing logic that neglects “broader Introduction 3 issues of context, history, power, meaning, violence, inequality, and subjectivity” (Garriott and Raikhel 2015, 479, 486). The biology of nicotine addiction cannot explain why smoking rates have increased in Indonesia while falling elsewhere or why most Indonesian men smoke and most Indonesian women do not.4 Warren Buffett praised the cigarette industry for making an addictive product for a penny and selling it for a dollar, but this special ability does not rest on the commodity’s addictiveness alone; it also depends on cultivating exploitable labor, natural resources, media, government, and consumers (Proctor 2011, 42). The industry has never shied away from “making the Government a little more dependent on the habit,” as one Philip Morris vice-president put it (Rosenblatt 1994). Tobacco capitalism is not simply a consumer-driven phenomenon, and cigarettes are not born on store shelves or in smokers’ mouths (Benson 2012). Kretek capitalism thrives by fostering attachment and dependency among leaf buyers, farmers, factory workers, influencers, athletes, artists, students, journalists, retailers, and governments. By claiming an essential role for itself, it reworks more than brain synapses; it also reworks society itself (Russell 2019, 66, 69). For Indonesians who are proponents of or work for the kretek industry, kretek capitalism may sound troubling if not outright offensive. A supervisor in one handrolled factory I toured fumed, “Someone called Philip Morris capitalist [kapitalis]. I got angry at them. Don’t talk like that!” At her feigned punch, the plant manager jokingly warned, “She’s a thug [preman]!” Although for more than half a century, Indonesia has been a staunchly anti-communist country that encourages foreign investment and domestic private industry, capitalist remains a jarring, dirty word, a slur reserved for enemies (Welker 2014, 109). Capitalism evokes negative connotations and asocial imperatives such as maximizing profits, exploiting labor, externalizing social and environmental costs, and taking license to reap private benefits from social suffering—a set of associations that help explain why ordinary Indonesians might take umbrage at the notion that the kretek is the product of processes that are both cultural and capitalist. For those who regard kretek as Indonesian cultural heritage, kretek capitalism is, moreover, oxymoronic, because that which is traditional, cultural, and valued cannot be capitalist. This kind of reaction is indicative of the perennially vexed nature of the relationship between culture and capitalism, which has led some social theorists and anthropologists to omit culture from analyses of capitalism, to treat it as an external resource for capital, or to approach culture as the province of subalterns (e.g., workers, indigenous peoples, downstream communities) in contrast to bourgeoisie, who are supposedly governed by a universal capitalist logic (Yanagisako 2002). Against such approaches, Yanagisako (2002, 21) insists that capitalism is always and everywhere a cultural phenomenon. I share her perspective; my use of the term kretek capitalism is deliberately provocative and meant to promote reflection on how capitalist goals shape the industry, but it does not preclude recognition of cultural processes and meanings or the nongeneric ways in which tobacco capitalism flourishes in particular historical contexts and geographic settings (Benson 2012). 4 Introduction Kretek capitalism is shaped by the often competing political and economic interests of a wide variety of actors. Among these, four in particular are worth highlighting: the Indonesian government, the tobacco control movement, the kretek nationalist movement, and the large companies that produce most of the cigarettes that Indonesians smoke. The Indonesian government’s own ambivalence toward the cigarette industry manifests in mandatory pack features. Text on the side of packs states, “Sale to children under 18 years or pregnant women is forbidden,” while front and rear pictorial and textual warnings stress the hazards of secondhand smoke and graphically depict tobacco-related cancers. But excise tax stickers underscore the revenue that enters government coffers with each pack purchase. Indonesia has an unusually complex multitiered cigarette excise tax structure that reflects producer size, cigarette type, number of cigarettes produced, and per-unit maximum retail price. It has been simplified since 2011 (when there were nineteen tiers), but it continues to reflect the state’s moral valorization of kretek over white and hand-rolled over machine-rolled cigarettes, as well as small producers over large (World Bank 2018, 5). The number of small producers and the hand-rolled market share have declined despite these protections. The government also requires that packs display nicotine and tar data, which creates the misleading impression that these are amenable to precise scientific measurement, that some cigarettes are safer than others, and that people can make responsible decisions about what they smoke based on these numbers. Table 1 illuminates the contradictions that characterize the government’s moral taxonomy, most notably that cigarettes that are taxed lower because of their purportedly pro-social qualities (e.g., employing more workers, incorporating cloves, budget pricing) appear to impose greater health costs on individual smokers in the form of more tar and nicotine. Table 1 Cigarette classifications and excise taxes, 2016 Brand Cigarette type (govt. classification) Excise tax/ stick (rupiah) “Flavor” and price (industry classification)* Tar (mg) Nicotine (mg) Sampoerna Hijau/A Hand-rolled kretek 245 FF budget 38 2.2 Dji Sam Soe Hand-rolled kretek 320 FF premium 39 2.3 Magnum Black Machine-rolled kretek 480 FF mid-priced 33 2.3 U-Bold Machine-rolled kretek 480 FF budget 32 2.1 A-Mild Machine-rolled kretek 480 LTLN premium 14 1 U-Mild Machine-rolled kretek 480 LTLN budget 14 1 Marlboro Red Machine-rolled white 495 FF premium 13 1 Marlboro Black Menthol Machine-rolled white 495 LTLN premium 8 0.6 * The industry classifies brands as “full flavor” (FF) or “low tar, low nicotine” (LTLN). Introduction 5 International tobacco control regulations and tobacco industry research have singled out the clove cigarette among its “killer commodity” peers for harboring special dangers (Singer and Baer 2009). Kretek are effectively banned in forty countries in response to public health regulations combatting industry reliance on flavors as a way of marketing cigarettes to youth and masking tobacco smoke’s harshness.5 Studies by Philip Morris found that tar from white cigarettes and kretek is equally toxic but that kretek deliver far more tar, nicotine, and carbon monoxide per stick than white cigarettes. British American Tobacco (BAT) research found that clove-derived eugenol is toxic when inhaled and implicated in acute illness, pulmonary hemorrhage, and edema (Hurt et al. 2012, 307). Eugenol’s topical anesthetic properties decrease “the harshness of smoke inhalation by numbing oropharyngeal pain receptors,” allowing smokers “to deeply inhale smoke containing more tar and particulate matter” (Hurt et al. 2012, 307). Mentholated cigarettes, which have an anesthetic effect similar to kretek, are considered easier to inhale deeply and harder to quit. Notably, the cigarette industry has disproportionately targeted Black people with menthols, with racialized marketing tactics helping to make tobacco the number-one killer and disabler of Black people in the United States (Jain 2003, 296–97; Wailoo 2021). PMI’s and BAT’s decisions to acquire Indonesian kretek companies similarly enacts “predatory inclusion” by targeting a vulnerable population with a product that arguably contains “enhanced risks” (Taylor 2019).6 Indonesian industry activists reject any attempt to position the kretek as a pariah commodity. The industry has historically spoken for itself through the powerful kretek producer association Gabungan Pengusaha Pabrik Rokok Indonesia (GAPPRI), which sometimes was allied with the white cigarette association Gabungan Produsen Rokok Putih Indonesia (GAPRINDO), but recent decades have seen the emergence of various kretek nationalist NGOs and coalitions that promote industry interests and style themselves as grassroots champions of kretek smokers, tobacco and clove farmers, factory workers, home industries, and peddlers.7 Often closely tied to and funded by the industry, they lobby the government, stage protests, publish books, and use websites and social media accounts to disseminate the beliefs that making, selling, and smoking kretek are patriotic acts and that tobacco control is part of a neocolonial plot to destroy Indonesia. Like kretek nationalists, I am interested in the ordinary people who are involved in the kretek industry and the mundane labor they perform. Unlike kretek nationalists, I accept the scientific consensus that cigarettes (with or without cloves) are harmful and addictive, and I aim to understand how everyday kretek labor serves the interests of the large producers who orchestrate and exploit it using global tobacco technologies. Kretek capitalism is a “harm industry” predicated on “practices that are destructive or harmful to people and the environment”; harm has been “part and parcel” of kretek capitalism’s “normal functioning” from the outset (Benson and Kirsch 2010, 461). But the factors that shape kretek’s occasioning 6 Introduction of harm—who controls the means of production; which technologies and people are involved in making, promoting, and exchanging kretek; the extent of public knowledge of tobacco’s harms; and the social distribution of benefits and harms— have shifted over time. PMI’s $5 billion acquisition of Sampoerna in 2005 heralded a new era of increasing foreign control of kretek capitalism. BAT and Japan Tobacco International (JTI)—major international tobacco companies that previously confined themselves to the shrinking white cigarette sector—subsequently indigenized by taking over Indonesian kretek producers, soon realizing a combined foreign market share of over 40 percent. As PMI, BAT, and JTI have invested heavily in expanding production and sales of conventional combustible cigarettes in Indonesia, they have made commitments to harm reduction and a “smoke-free future” central to their public relations platform in higher-income countries. Such deep contradictions and inequalities, however, are not new to kretek capitalism; these kinds of tensions have animated it since it first emerged as a Central Javanese cottage industry at the end of the nineteenth century. CLOVES, TOBACCO, AND THE GENESIS OF KRETEK CAPITALISM Before the kretek industry turned Indonesia into the world’s largest consumer and importer of cloves, the spice historically played a fairly minor function in local cuisines and pharmacopoeias, with cloves primarily used to flavor and fasten together betel quids (Reid 1985, 536). Indigenous to the Spice Islands of Maluku, cloves, together with nutmeg and mace (which derive from the same plant), nevertheless fulfilled an outsized historical role in galvanizing regional trade and colonial competition, warfare, and violence. Beginning early in the Common Era, a network of Javanese, Malay, Indian, Arab, and Persian traders transported the Maluku spices as far afield as China, India, the Middle East, and Europe. Known in various languages as “spice nails,” cloves have been valued not only as a culinary spice and garnish but also as a food preservative, perfume, deodorizer, fumigant, incense ingredient, embalming agent, aphrodisiac, dentifrice ingredient, dental analgesic, disinfectant for open wounds, and ingredient in respiratory, digestive, muscular, and rheumatic medicinals variously inhaled, ingested, and dermally absorbed (Donkin 2003; Freedman 2008; Turner 2004). 8 After 1500, the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, British, and French competed for direct access to and control over the spice. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) won control and pursued a “radical policy of exploitation” that aimed to concentrate plantation production on Ambon and small adjacent islands and extirpate it elsewhere (Andaya 1993; Bulbeck et al. 1998; Donkin 2003, 169; Ellen 2003; Wright 1958). This brutal strategy disrupted ancient trade patterns and depopulated islands, although Introduction 7 the Dutch never entirely succeeded in preventing smuggling or the cultivation of “unauthorized” clove trees. In the 1770s, French and English traders broke the Dutch monopoly by capturing clove seedlings, and the plant was soon successfully cultivated in Zanzibar. The history of the kretek’s other key ingredient—tobacco—is equally tied to the global history of colonialism. Christopher Columbus was searching for a western passage to the spice trade in 1492 when he landed in the Caribbean and accepted a gift of tobacco from Taíno people whom he would later subjugate and enslave (Ortiz 1995). The New World crop reached the Spice Islands and Java in the sixteenth century, although historians have disagreed over whether it was brought by Portuguese colonizers pursuing spices or by trade networks radiating out from the Philippines under Spanish colonialism (Courtwright 2001; Reid 1985). Small-scale tobacco cultivation spread across the archipelago and into the uplands, and during the 1800s, the crop was also subject to forced cultivation and plantation production (Boomgaard 2004; Stoler 1995). In 1863, Jacobus Nienhuys established the first commercial tobacco plantation in Deli, North Sumatra, which produced cigar leaf and relied on Chinese laborers from Singapore. People smoked tobacco in pipes or wrapped in dried banana leaves or cornhusks called klobot, but mostly they chewed it in betel quids. Tobacco expanded the repertoire of additives such as cloves, cardamom, and gambier that garnished the quid’s core elements of areca nut, lime, and a betel leaf wrapper. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the introduction of the Manila cigar and cigarettes and with betel chewing and spitting increasingly regarded as unhygienic and uncivilized by colonial and postcolonial modernizers, tobacco smoking gradually supplanted betel chewing. Whereas betel chewing was an accessible and affordable indulgence across gender and status differences, smoking is largely reserved for men, and cigarette brand and price tiers serve as prominent wealth and status markers (Reid 1985, 542). Popular accounts credit Haji Djamhari, a resident of the Central Javanese town of Kudus, with inventing the klobot kretek in the 1870s or 1880s. Rubbing clove oil on his chest to relieve his asthma inspired Djamhari to incorporate finely cut cloves into his klobot. Touting the purported medicinal benefits of these klobot, which he claimed had miraculously cured his affliction, Djamhari marketed them in pharmacies. Although Djamhari realized little profit before his death in 1890, a cottage klobot kretek industry quickly sprang up in Kudus. Nitisemito, a local aristocrat who wed a klobot maker called Nasilah, scaled up klobot kretek production by hiring middlemen to oversee home-based pieceworkers and modernized klobot marketing by launching the Bal Tiga brand in 1906 and hosting promotional events with extravagant prizes like imported ceramicware, bicycles, and automobiles (Hanusz 2000, 32–49).9 As the new klobot grew more popular, Chinese entrepreneurs entered the market, and manufacturers began using paper rather than cornhusk wrappers, signaling the emergence of the contemporary kretek form. 8 Introduction INDONESIAN NATIONALISM, CHINESE INDONESIANS, AND SAMPOERNA Long a site of nationalist impulses and conflict, the kretek industry was implicated in the devastating 1918 anti-Chinese riots in Kudus. The early twentieth century was a period of growing Chinese and proto-Indonesian nationalism in the Dutch East Indies, with both Tionghoa (Chinese) and bumiputra or pribumi (native or indigenous) communities establishing schools, newspapers, and religious and political organizations. Soon after its 1912 founding in Surakarta, Sarekat Islam (Islamic Union), which evolved into a mass movement against colonialism, organized a boycott of Chinese middlemen who dominated batik supplies, sales, and marketing (Brenner 1998, 43). In Kudus, pribumi resentment rose against Chinese kretek producers, whom pribumi accused of undercutting market prices and luring workers with better wages and credit. On October 30, 1918, Chinese residents held a ritual procession to honor religious figure Tua Pek Kong and ward off the influenza epidemic. Some Javanese Muslim observers found procession participants dressed in Arab and haji garb insulting, which led to a brawl, Sarekat Islam’s involvement, and tensions that escalated the next night when Javanese rioters burned homes and businesses in the Chinese district. Nine Chinese residents died, and some two thousand—about half the Chinese population—fled the city. The precise role of pribumi kretek producers and workers in the riots is unclear, although some speculated that producers instrumentalized religious sentiment to destroy Chinese businesses (Budiman 1987; Carkner 2019; Castles 1967; Hana 2018). Pribumi kretek producers’ subsequent imprisonment instead created more opportunities for Chinese kretek producers (Badil 2011, 146; Kartajaya 2005, 81–82). The Dutch responded to the riots with arbitrary mass arrests and by militarizing Kudus. Dutch colonial policies were largely responsible for pitting Tionghoa and pribumi against one another in the first place. Under the VOC, the Dutch recruited Chinese labor, granted some Chinese middlemen tax-collecting positions and monopoly trade power, and created a hierarchy relegating Chinese to a status below Europeans but above pribumi. After the 1799 VOC nationalization, the Dutch reduced Chinese privileges and restricted where they could live, travel, and own land. With the so-called Ethical Policy in 1901, the Dutch condemned Chinese for exploiting pribumi. Chinese were often more visible and accessible, and certainly less able to defend themselves, than Dutch colonial oppressors, and they have faced recurrent racial scapegoating in the colonial and postcolonial eras. The Chinese Indonesian families who built and ran the four largest kretek producers in the twentieth century would have to navigate the harmful “wealthy Chinese” stereotypes they came to epitomize and often emphasized their connections to Indonesian culture and nationalism and their respect for Islam. Of the four Chinese Indonesian companies that would dominate the kretek industry, Sampoerna was founded first. Liem Seeng Tee, Sampoerna’s founder, was Introduction 9 born in 1893 in Fujian Province. He lost his mother in 1897, and the following year, his father took five-year-old Liem and his six-year-old sister to Penang. Unsatisfied with conditions there, Liem’s father continued on to the port city of Surabaya, leaving his daughter behind with a Hokkien family because he could not afford passage for all three. Liem was orphaned six months later when his father died of cholera. Adopted by a Hokkien family in Bojonegoro, Liem lacked access to formal education and moved to Surabaya to work in a restaurant at age eleven. He later peddled charcoal from a secondhand bicycle and sold food on railway cars. In 1912, at the age of nineteen, Liem wed Siem Tjiang Nio, a fifteen-year-old Peranakan (culturally hybrid Chinese) girl, and they began selling general provisions out of a stall in front of their house.10 After briefly working for a cigarette manufacturer in Lamongan where he learned to blend tobacco, Liem began selling his own blends, both directly through his wife’s stall and to retailers and wholesalers. In 1913, he incorporated the business as HM (Handel Maatschappij or trading company) Liem Seng Tee. When an opportunity arose to buy tobacco cheaply from a trader going bankrupt, Siem funded the purchase with a wad of cash she had saved and stashed in the bamboo roof, illustrating the role women’s capital often plays in family businesses and challenging narratives that center masculine enterprise and patrifilial succession (Yanagisako 2002). Liem Seeng Tee’s family and business grew over the ensuing decades. Siem gave birth to two sons, Swie Hwa (1914) and Swie Ling (1915), followed by three daughters, Sien Nio (1921), Hwee Nio (1926), and Kwang Nio (1928). Liem began selling a blend of tobacco, cloves, and the heavy flavoring mix known as saus (sauce) under the brand Dji Sam Soe, Hokkien for “two three four.” In 1930, Liem changed the business name to HM Sampoerna, using a Sanskrit-derived Malay term that evokes perfection, wholeness, and completion. Liem embraced the auspicious number nine—the sum of two, three, and four—wherever possible, from domestic and business street addresses to license plates, workers’ wages, the ninelettered brand and company name, and the arc of nine nine-pointed stars gracing Dji Sam Soe packs. Reflecting their increasing wealth, Liem and Siem educated their sons abroad; Swie Hwa studied business in Chicago, and Swie Ling attended high school in China and then the English Catholic University in Beijing. In 1932, Liem bought a former orphanage that dated to 1864. He renamed it Taman Sampoerna and converted the compound into a family residence, warehouse, and factory. He renovated an auditorium as a cinema and theater with a rotating stage visited by Chinese acrobats, wayang (traditional puppet theater) performers, Charlie Chaplin, and future president Sukarno, who in 1938 gave some of his trademark rousing speeches calling for Indonesian independence on the Taman Sampoerna stage. Because machine-rolled cigarettes were more prestigious than hand-rolled kretek, Liem also expanded into white cigarette production, buying seven semiautomated machines that could operate around the clock (Sampoerna 2007, 46). 16 Introduction In 2010, Muhammadiyah, Indonesia’s second largest Muslim organization, with a reformist, modernist orientation and twenty-five million members, issued a fatwa declaring cigarettes haram. Grounded in the rationale that smoking is a slow form of suicide and harms family members and bystanders, the fatwa’s impact was limited. Although a Muhammadiyah Tobacco Control Center leader claimed that the organization was like a state that could issue orders that reached down to its roots and were scrupulously followed by loyal members, many smokers found the fatwa too extreme and dismissed it as a misinterpretation (salah menafsirkan), asserting that people were allowed to smoke but earned blessings (pahala) by avoiding it.19 Others reproduced claims that the fatwa was money motivated; kretek nationalist organization Komunitas Kretek sought to discredit it as a political maneuver and a performance for the Bloomberg Initiative, which awarded Muhammadiyah a grant of $393,000 in 2009 (Emont 2016). (To put such tobacco control funding into perspective, consider that the tobacco industry spent $378 million—almost a thousand times the size of the grant—on Indonesian tobacco advertising in 2017.)20 Indonesia’s tobacco control activists seek membership in a global order of tobacco control that promises rights to knowledge, industry regulation, an environment free of smoke and cigarette advertising, and a healthier and more prosperous future for Indonesian citizens. Many of these activists work within the framework of tobacco control justice, which involves challenging the industry’s targeting of vulnerable countries and communities. Such an approach means paying particular attention to how social inequalities interact with the environmental, health, and economic dimensions of tobacco violence. Tobacco plays a role in Indonesia’s five leading causes of death (ischemic heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, tuberculosis, diabetes, and chronic respiratory diseases), and tobaccorelated diseases strain and jeopardize the country’s drive toward universal health coverage.21 In 2015, the Ministry of Health estimated the total direct and indirect health costs of smoking at nearly $34 billion, three times the amount generated by the tobacco tax (World Health Organization 2020, 2, 8, 12). In terms of gender inequality and violence, boys and young men experience intense social pressure to demonstrate their masculinity and adulthood by smoking. Of the 7 percent of Indonesian women killed by tobacco-related diseases, many have never actively smoked a cigarette. Girls disproportionately lose education opportunities due to tobacco-related illness among parents (World Health Organization 2020, 9). In Indonesian households where the father smokes, tobacco accounts for 22 percent of average weekly household expenditures, curbing spending on food, education, and health care, contributing to high rates of child malnutrition and stunting, and diminishing health and economic life chances (World Bank 2018, 2–3). People in Indonesia’s lowest income bracket smoke at twice the rate of Indonesians in the highest income bracket, implying that the poor bear the greatest burden of tobacco-related diseases and risk of financial devastation due to chronic illness and the premature death of key household providers (World Health Organization Introduction 17 2020, 12). The heavy toll of tobacco use on the poor has led some to question the orthodoxy that cigarette tax increases are necessarily regressive (Verguet, Kearns, and Rees 2021). While statistical evidence on smoking rates in Indonesia’s queer community is lacking, anecdotal observations and ethnographic accounts suggest a higher prevalence than among straight Indonesians, consistent with trends in other countries (Blackwood 2010; Boellstorff 2005). Cigarettes facilitate new relations and identities but also create additional health risks for LGBTQ individuals and exacerbate others they already disproportionately face.22 Tobacco control has gained some ground in the post-Suharto period, but Indonesia has not joined the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), a 2003 treaty ratified by over 180 countries. Indonesian government delegates who actively participated in establishing, drafting, and approving the convention saw industry interference in the Sukarnoputri administration’s abrupt withdrawal of support just as they were preparing to sign the treaty. In the Indonesian government, only the Ministry of Health prohibits tobacco industry collaboration; politicians and political parties are not required to report tobacco industry contributions, and industry influence over policymaking is rife (Astuti, Assunta, and Freeman 2020). The Tobacco Transparency Index ranked Indonesia among the five countries with the highest levels of industry interference; its 2021 report cited Sampoerna’s leveraging of the pandemic to gain access to senior government officials and its letter requesting that a regent in Bali revoke an outdoor cigarette advertising ban (Assunta 2021, 4–5, 36, 57). Not being party to the FCTC also means that Indonesia is unable to influence its direction or access member resources, including funding for farmers transitioning away from tobacco (Chamim et al. 2011, 61–82). After President Yudhoyono’s administration signed Regulation 109 into law in 2012, followed by Health Ministry Regulation 28 a year later, Indonesia became the only country with pictorial warning labels that also allowed rampant cigarette advertising in conventional mass media, including television, radio, print media, and billboards (Anshari 2017, 28). The new laws prohibited tobacco companies from distributing free cigarettes or showing cigarettes in advertising but allowed television and radio advertising between 9:30 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. Local governments were empowered to craft smoke-free legislation but at their own discretion and without a deadline; the process has unfolded slowly and unevenly and has been subject to politicians’ priorities and industry influence (Kramer et al. 2023). Companies were forbidden from creating new brands with “misleading descriptors” like “mild” or “light,” but existing brands could keep using these terms. Prohibitions on cigarette sales to pregnant women and to children under the age of eighteen go unenforced. Indonesia’s refusal to sign the FCTC may have had the important upshot of attracting PMI to acquire Sampoerna in 2005, thereby setting in motion the current era of increasing foreign stakes in kretek capitalism (Chamim et al. 2011, 69). Indonesian kretek company acquisitions are strikingly at odds with the 18 Introduction public commitments to harm reduction and a “smoke-free future” that PMI, BAT, and JTI have made. PMI boasts that it has invested $9 billion since 2008 in “reduced risk products,” resulting in the launch of various e-vapor products and heated (rather than burning) tobacco devices such as IQOS that are meant to “disrupt” the conventional combustible cigarette industry.23 The company has set striking targets, such as ending cigarette sales in the United Kingdom by 2030 and seeing “at least 30 percent of PMI’s adult consumers who would otherwise continue smoking switch to PMI’s smoke free products by 2025” (Jackler 2022, 134; Sampoerna 2022, 159). Meanwhile, PMI aggressively pursues conventional combustible product growth in Indonesia, where it claimed the largest market share beginning in 2006 and celebrated a new milestone in 2012 with over one hundred billion sticks sold. PMI constructed a $250 million mechanized kretek factory near Jakarta at the same time as it was building a ($120 million) reduced-risk product facility in Switzerland and launching IQOS in Japan. By becoming major kretek capitalism players, foreign firms have pursued growth and reaped profits from conventional combustibles while confronting dramatic smoking declines in higher-income countries where they more heavily market “reduced risk products.” Critics claim that PMI uses profits from growing deadly production and sales in lowerand middle-income countries like Indonesia, Tanzania, Uzbekistan, and Egypt to develop and promote its “reduced risk products” in higher-income countries (Chaudhuri 2017; Jackler 2022, 131–34). PMI has not issued bold calls for an end to cigarette sales outside of the United Kingdom and has instead spent millions of dollars opposing tobacco control policies in underdeveloped countries. Kretek capitalism thereby provides vital support to foreign tobacco firms and shareholders at the expense of ordinary Indonesians. COMMODITY NATIONALISM In their efforts to promote and defend the commodity, kretek nationalists appeal to nationalist sentiments of both love and hatred. The most prominent voice of kretek nationalism, Komunitas Kretek (kretek community), evokes these sentiments with its self-description as a “fun community that celebrates kretek as the cultural heritage of Indonesia .. . upholds national independence and opposes foreign threats toward a local commodity.”24 Founded in 2010 and abbreviated as Komtek, the organization refuses to disclose its funding sources but claims that it accepts money exclusively from domestic rather than foreign-owned firms. Djarum is widely rumored to be the group’s primary funder. The Komtek website recommends a range of “LTLN” (low-tar, low-nicotine) kretek brands for the starting smoker, all artfully arranged and photographed to hide grotesque warning labels.25 Komtek stages the kretek as an affectively and ethically potent “matter of care” when it emphasizes the vulnerable “little people” (wong cilik Jv) who depend on the industry and the lofty ideals of cultural heritage and national independence (Puig Introduction 19 de la Bellacasa 2011). Whereas tobacco control activists often depict Indonesia’s lax regulatory environment as embarrassingly backward, kretek nationalists insist that Indonesia’s bestselling tobacco product is a distinctive cultural heirloom and should be a source of pride rather than shame (Sunaryo 2013). One of Komtek’s taglines insists, “The kretek is not a cigarette” (kretek bukan rokok), and Komtek members occasionally employ neologisms like to kretek (mengkretek) and kreteker (pengkretek, Handayani 2012b) to underscore the commodity’s distinctiveness and distance it from conventional terms derived from the Dutch term for smoking (roken, i.e., rokok [cigarette], merokok [to smoke], perokok [smoker]).26 Kretek nationalists celebrate as heroes (pahlawan) women smokers who brave public condemnation and factory workers and farm laborers who “selflessly struggle for a form of independence, in pursuit of lofty goals for the nation” (Yoska 2012, 175). Books and photos offer a nostalgic, aestheticized, and romanticized view of the industry, evoking seductive sights, textures, and aromas through bucolic agrarian imagery of tobacco and clove agriculture, scenes of factory workers and cigarette peddlers, smokers convivially interacting or enjoying a solo smoke, reproductions of colorful and whimsical vintage cigarette labels, and depictions of cethe, the art of inscribing delicate and intricate swirling designs on cigarettes with toothpicks dipped in coffee grounds (Badil 2011; Basjir et al. 2010; Hanusz 2000; Puthut 2013; Santosa 2012). In 2015, kretek industry supporters snuck an article into a culture bill that was up for debate in the House of Representatives; the article’s language subversively coopted UNESCO definitions of intangible cultural property and heritage by listing kretek as cultural heritage (warisan budaya). This would have obliged the government to inventory, document, facilitate, and promote the industry. Kretek protections were struck from the law, but attempts to weaken tobacco control legislation by having kretek declared a national heritage item persist (Astuti and Freeman 2017). In their more oppositional mode, kretek nationalists stir up fear, hatred, revulsion, and anger toward tobacco control, which they portray as part of a foreign, neocolonial, capitalist plot bent on destroying Indonesia and its cherished commodity and callously killing off industry dependents (Abhisam, Ary, and Harlan 2011; Daeng 2011; Pinanjaya 2012; Wibisono and Yoandinas 2014). They intensify run-of-the-mill commodity nationalism—that is, marketing and advertising agencies’ tactic of interpellating potential consumers by invoking a communion with unknown fellow patriotic consumer-citizens achieved through consumption (Foster 2002; building on Anderson 2006)—by infusing it with postcolonial affect and counterhegemonic appeal as a purported expression of opposition to colonialism. Although cigarette demand tends to be fairly inelastic and shifts very slowly in response to regulation and price hikes due to the addictiveness of nicotine, kretek nationalists treat the tobacco control threat as urgent, with a histrionic “sudden death” myth casting regulation as tantamount 20 Introduction to immediate and total closure (Industri mati besok pagi!; see Chamim et al. 2011, 57–58). Komtek denounces as foreign threats both tobacco control and multinational takeovers of domestic kretek firms alike, claiming that tobacco giants like PMI and BAT are scheming to stealthily convert Indonesian consumers to white cigarettes by gradually eliminating cloves from kretek.27 Kretek nationalists constitute themselves as a counterpublic that holds a threatened, endangered underdog status in relation to a purportedly dominant public and tobacco control orthodoxy (Warner 2002, 86). They claim that tobacco control criminalizes and pathologizes smokers as sick, addicted, and infectious and victimizes them in ways akin to organized discrimination based on age, gender, class, race, and sexual orientation (Arymami 2012, 301). Kretek nationalists proffer an alternative and oppositional identity through kretek consumption and “a sense of active belonging that masks or compensates for the real powerlessness of human agents in capitalist society” (Warner 2002, 81). By focusing on little people and the cultural and historical significance of kretek, Komtek avoids engaging with the kretek industry as a capitalist phenomenon. Kretek nationalist literature even figures the commodity as antithetical to capitalism; Handayani (2012a, 30) describes an artist and Sampoerna A-Mild smoker named Willy who dismisses white cigarettes as not delicious, referring to them as “capitalist cigarettes.” Willy is either unaware of or unperturbed by the fact that his kretek brand is made by a PMI subsidiary. Similarly, Aini (2012, 218) insists, “Kretek belong to the people [rakyat] because they are produced and consumed by the people. It is not a mass product and does not belong to giant global capital. Even when the kretek is produced by a large company with global distribution reach, the kretek serves as a national ambassador because it carries the unique taste of Indonesia.” The claim that the kretek is not a mass-produced product is as extraordinary as the claim that the companies producing them are not part of global capital. Giving up kretek culture, another kretek nationalist writes, is the same as giving in to capitalist culture, which destroys everything (Prasetyaningrum 2012, 227). If loving kretek is identical with loving Indonesia (Prasetyaningrum 2012, 229), tobacco control is equivalent to murdering Indonesia and those who rely on the tobacco industry (Abhisam, Ary, and Harlan 2011). Kretek nationalists frequently advance their claim that tobacco control represents sinister neocolonial interests (kepentingan) by pointing to Big Pharma in general—and former New York mayor and philanthropist Michael Bloomberg specifically—and their goal of creating a nicotine replacement product market (Kurniawan 2012). As kretek nationalists uncover this hidden agenda and excoriate the Indonesian traitors (penghianat) and lackeys (antek-antek) who support tobacco control, they fail to question the more basic and obvious motivations of kretek capitalists, for example whether the three wealthiest Indonesians (Djarum’s Hartono brothers and Gudang Garam’s Susilo Wonowidjoyo) make and sell kretek to promote national interests (Astuti, Assunta, and Freeman 2020). Kretek nationalists claim to follow Spivak in clearing space for subalterns to speak, but their Introduction 21 work ventriloquizes for the industry and stifles industry critique (Ardianti 2012, 35). And although kretek nationalists cast tobacco control as foreign and incite hatred toward Indonesian tobacco control activists, they voice no objection to the kretek industry’s uptake of foreign technologies for making and marketing kretek. A closer examination of what transpires in mechanized factories and of the kretek that emerge from them reveals how thoroughly large kretek producers have incorporated global tobacco materials, technologies, and deceptions. MECHANIZED FACTORIES AND MACHINE-ROLLED KRETEK Heralding a “cleaner, healthier, enjoyable taste” (lebih bersih—lebih sehat—rasa nikmat) and a filter “kretek revolution” (revolusi kretek), Bentoel’s taglines for Biru International, the first machine-rolled kretek, illustrate how the mechanizing kretek industry adopted global manufacturing and marketing technologies to provoke and allay health fears. Mechanized kretek factories were designed to make tobacco control discourse work to the industry’s advantage via global technologies. Bentoel promised an Indonesian taste—cloves and saus—with white cigarette features that made machine-rolled kretek appear more modern, prestigious, uniform, and quality controlled and healthier than unfiltered hand-rolled kretek, which were stigmatized as low class, coarse, dirty, and cheap (Kartajaya 2005, 101). Brand names with English words like “International” signaled cosmopolitan aspirations, and although relatively few would be exported and consumed abroad, the machine-rolled kretek would indeed be made on imported machines with imported tobacco, cloves, and other ingredients. Mechanized kretek producers purchased and tailored machinery made by European companies rather than adopting an import substitution path by developing Indonesian machinery specific to kretek. This remains the case in Sampoerna’s mechanized factories today. Machines made by Italian firms Comas and Garbuio dominate the primary process of treating tobacco, cloves, and additives and converting them into tobacco filler. German Hauni brand machines make filters and cigarettes, and German (Focke & Co.) and Italian (Senzani) machines package cigarettes with supplies printed on Swiss (Bobst) machinery. British (Cerulean) and German (Borgwaldt) machines smoke cigarettes in Sampoerna’s labs to generate deceptive nicotine and tar numbers.28 Kretek producers have adopted global technologies for manipulating tobacco to make cigarettes with a lower quality and smaller quantity of tobacco. Through a process akin to papermaking, reconstituted tobacco (“recon”) is made from a pulp of mashed tobacco stems and dust that would otherwise go to waste. Sprayed with nicotine, the pulp is sliced to look like shredded leaf tobacco. Recon now appears not only in machine-rolled but also in hand-rolled kretek, which are thus subject to transformation through mechanization, even as Sampoerna markets brands like Dji Sam Soe as unchanging tradition. Along similar lines, 22 Introduction machine-rolled kretek brands often employ puffed or expanded tobacco made from leaves that are saturated with freon and ammonia gases and then freezedried, doubling in size and enabling the manufacture of cigarettes with smoke that is supposedly lower in tar.29 Kretek also incorporate many of the same additives as white cigarettes. Tobacco filler contains as many as six hundred additives, which constitute about 10 percent of the weight of a white cigarette, and more for kretek with their cloves and heavier flavoring (Cross and Proctor 2014, 66). “Casing”—a combination of humectants, treatments, and flavorants—forms the “foundation” that diminishes negative tobacco tastes. The “after cut” or “top flavor,” which is applied later, adds “notes” or a “signature,” endowing branded cigarettes with their particular taste. Flavorants create an appealing “pack aroma” and improve tobacco’s taste and mask its harshness. The casing’s moistening agents or humectants, such as glycerine and Figure 1. In this vintage ad in the Bentoel Museum, the company markets new machinerolled kretek with filters to the middle and upper class as a “revolution” advancing cleanliness, health, and pleasure. Photo by author. Introduction 23 diethylene glycol, help stabilize the moisture content, make tobacco more pliable, and prevent finished cigarettes from rapidly drying out. Freebasing agents such as urea and ammonia help nicotine reach the lungs, blood, and brain more efficiently. Burn accelerants—oxidizing agents such as potassium citrate—keep cigarettes lit and exacerbate the fire hazard associated with discarded or accidentally dropped cigarettes. Cocoa and licorice, both common additives, appear to act as bronchial dilators that make smoke “smoother” and facilitate deep inhalation (Proctor 2011, 501). Sugary additives such as invert sugar also make tobacco smoke less alkaline and thus easier to inhale.30 Cigarette makers often underscore that they use “foodgrade” additives in cigarettes. Foods, however, are meant to be ingested rather than burned and inhaled into lungs. Combustion induces chemical shapeshifting that turns relatively innocuous substances like sugar, protein, and glycerine into potent carcinogens (Proctor 2011, 490, 499). Typical kretek flavorants, according to Sampoerna’s flavor specialist, include cacao, licorice, vanillin, furaneol (“sweet like candy”), prune extract, plum extract, jackfruit, black pepper, clove oil, nutmeg, and basil.31 Beginning in 1957 with Dutch firm Polak and Schwarz, European flavoring companies have established branches in Indonesia to supply the kretek industry; others include Mane (French), Quest (Dutch), Givaudan (Swiss), and Firmenich (also Swiss).32 Kretek paper also incorporates global tobacco technologies; it is bleached white, inked with brand labels, and permeated with burn accelerants. Cigarette designers manipulate paper porosity, thickness, width, weight, color, tensile strength, stretch, opacity, texture, spots, and pinholes (Proctor 2011, 366). Circular striations called burn rings evidence two-paper thicknesses, which serve to slow the burn rate when cigarettes are not being smoked to prolong consumption then speed it up when smokers inhale to maximize smoke intake.33 The paper, which typically constitutes 5 percent of a cigarette by weight, is burned and inhaled into the lungs alongside the tobacco filler (Cross and Proctor 2014, 77). In public perception, synthetic filters are probably the most significant features distinguishing machine-rolled from hand-rolled kretek. If rising incomes made machine-rolled cigarettes more affordable, health fears made them more appealing. The global industry popularized filters in the 1950s, using a wide variety of materials (including asbestos) and manufacturing technologies to counter growing health fears. Today, most are made with synthetic fibers, typically cellulose acetate. The industry engineered filters to turn brown when smoked, imparting the impression that they effectively trap tar (Brandt 2007, 245). Proctor (2011, 346, 355, 357) argues that filters are best understood as fraudulent gimmicks that lower manufacturing costs, keep tobacco bits out of smokers’ mouths, and, most importantly, impart the false impression of a safer cigarette (Benson 2010). Filters encourage and perpetuate smoking rather than making it less lethal. Kretek manufacturers have drawn on the global industry playbook by combining filters, ventilation holes, paper porosity, and puffed tobacco to create cigarettes 24 Introduction that yield lower tar and nicotine readings when smoked by machines. In the early 1970s, the global industry began marketing such cigarettes as (ultra) “light” and “mild.”34 These terms are now banned in many countries as “misleading descriptors.” PMI adheres to this position on its website, which dutifully informs smokers that they “should not assume” that the variety of “brands with different features ... means that one cigarette is less addictive or less harmful than others.”35 Its suggestive pale metallic and pastel palettes and advertising nevertheless imply lower risk for certain brands. The industry has long known that actual smokers tend to unconsciously cover tiny ventilation holes and inhale longer and harder to get their nicotine fix (and accompanying tar) from LTLN cigarettes, thereby negating the features that produce low machine readings. Deep inhalation increases smokers’ risk of developing lung cancers that are harder to detect and treat (Brandt 2007; Proctor 2011). Djarum first developed “low-tar” kretek in 1986 for the healthalarmed US market (Hanusz 2000, 143), and Sampoerna bet heavily on an LTLN kretek for the domestic market when it launched A-Mild in 1989. Initially disparaged as a cigarette for trans women (banci, a derogatory term), A-Mild is today the most widely smoked brand in Indonesia (Kartajaya 2005, 433). Like many LTLN kretek, its tar and nicotine levels equal or exceed those of “full flavor” Marlboro Reds. LTLN kretek are marketed using English terms mild or light rather than their Indonesian equivalent ringan. Kretek mechanizers also adopted global packaging features such as flip-top cardboard packs, shiny interior foil, and transparent exterior film with pulltabs. Philip Morris pioneered the flip-top hard pack design in 1955 when it masculinized Marlboro, a brand hitherto marketed to women (Cross and Proctor 2014, 77). Bentoel adopted this design for Indonesia’s first machine-rolled kretek. For kretek as much as for white cigarettes, package design is critical for creating the impression of brand differences amid the basic homogeneity and sameness of mechanized cigarettes (uniform length, nicotine content, and so forth; Bell 2020; Cross and Proctor 2014, 82). KRETEK MUSEUMS Museums, coffee-table books, and websites that celebrate kretek as Indonesia’s cultural heritage tend to gloss over or omit entirely discussion of recon, puffed tobacco, burn accelerants, humectants, urea, ammonia, plasticizers, synthetic filters, and German machines that produce ten thousand or more kretek per minute. The international technologies that turned the Indonesian cigarette market from majority white cigarette in the 1960s to mostly kretek by the 1980s play a muted role, if they appear at all, in kretek nationalist narratives that emphasize feminine hands, natural ingredients, slow smoking, and a rustic past rather than high-speed machines, synthetic additives, and an industrial present. Kretek nationalists use cloves to claim a distinctive tobacco history and trajectory, but Indonesia is far from unique in celebrating cigarettes as objects of Introduction 25 nation-building and displaying pride in museums, films, artwork, and literature. Claims of national heritage represent another global tobacco industry commonplace. The industry has deployed cultural pride and heritage discourses and yoked wartime patriotism to tobacco production and cigarette provisioning in soldiers’ rations, in countries ranging from China to Bulgaria, Canada, France, and Egypt (Brandt 2007; Klein 1993; Kohrman 2018; Neuburger 2013; Proctor 2011; Rudy 2005; Russell 2019; Shechter 2006). Tobacco boosterism in the United States downplays how production was rooted in slavery and remains mired in racial inequalities today (Benson 2012; Griffith 2009; Kingsolver 2011; Milov 2019; Swanson 2014). Indonesia’s kretek museums present the history of the commodity in a nostalgic and flattering light and frame kretek manufacturers as benevolent patrons. Commemorating “Indonesia’s first indigenous capitalists” and celebrating the commodity in its birthplace, the Kudus Kretek Museum, which opened in 1986, glosses over Chinese-pribumi conflict and anti-Chinese violence (Weix 1997). The Jember government in East Java runs a small tobacco museum and library, and BAT has become the custodian of Museum Bentoel in Malang, which depicts the company as a positive family enterprise. The elaborate House of Sampoerna complex in the East Javanese port city of Surabaya, spearheaded by Putera’s wife, Katie Sampoerna, is the grandest and Figure 2. The House of Sampoerna museum with columns resembling the Dji Sam Soe kretek. Photo by author. 32 Kretek Agriculture sauce.” Madurese government officials told us they safeguarded local tobacco with police operations to prevent outside tobacco from being imported and passed off as local. Finally, we visited tobacco farmers and buyers on Lombok, which has gained renown for its tobacco-friendly soil, humidity, and mild night temperatures, leading to a concentration of leaf buyers and a crop boom since the 1990s.5 Tobacco is primarily a lowland crop, whereas cloves are grown in the uplands. As the clove tree spread far beyond its Maluku origins, it has become embedded in diverse labor, landownership, and trading arrangements. Over 70 percent of Indonesian clove production is now concentrated in the provinces of North Sulawesi and Central Java (World Bank 2017, 15). Cloves are grown on roughly five hundred thousand hectares, and over a million people engage in clove labor, but cloves constitute only a small proportion of total household economic activity and are rarely a source of fulltime employment (World Bank 2017). We met with clove farmers, pickers, traders, agronomists, and industry advocates in Java and Bali. Sampoerna sources large quantities of cloves from Sumatra, Java, Bali, and Sulawesi and has been quietly experimenting with cultivating the tree at low altitudes on the island of Sumba. Farmers can sell clove to traders while it is still on the tree, just after it has been picked (basah, mentah), or after it has been dried. Under ideal sunny conditions, clove buds can dry in three days but often require five days or longer. In yards and alongside roads, farmers and traders spread cloves on bare concrete or plastic tarps, using wooden rakes to turn them every few hours so they dry evenly. Newly dried cloves lack the characteristic potent scent, which takes a year to emerge. Farmers can store cloves in hopes of better prices, but there is only a small price N Jakarta Yogyakarta Surabaya Jember Lumajang Malang Blitar Clove production Tobacco production 0 0 500 km 300 mi JAVA JAVA Java Nias Simeulue Sumatra Sulawesi Kalimantan MALAYSIA Lombok Bali Madura Maluku TIMORLESTE Singapore BRUNEI Sumba Natuna West Papua MALAYSIA Map 1. Tobacco and clove producing regions. Map by Bill Nelson. Hierarchy and Subjugation 33 advantage in selling more mature and pungent cloves (e.g., prices are 3 percent higher in Malang). The more complex practices tobacco farmers and workers employ to wrest the commodity from the tobacco plant are a historically contingent outcome of changing legal and labor regimes, technologies, and cultural preferences that valorize and foster certain plant parts and qualities (e.g., light color, first-growth leaves, large leaf size) and suppress others (e.g., flowers, second leaf growth; see Hahn 2011). The first stage in tobacco cultivation is preparing, planting, and maintaining the seedbeds. A week or so after paddy harvest, farmers and/or laborers create seedbed ridges using hoes or tractors, disperse and water seeds, and construct shelters with plastic sheeting and bamboo frames. Forty to fifty days after sowing, if all goes well, the farmer will have a crop of healthy seedlings, each ten to twenty centimeters in length, ready for transplanting. With tractors or hoes, farmers then prepare new fields by building ridges. One worker punches holes in the soil with a large stick and is followed by another who tucks seedlings into holes and pats the soil into place. Workers water seedlings after transplanting; then, for the next two to three weeks, seedlings ideally enter a “stress period” during which they are denied water, which causes their roots to extend outward in search of moisture. Nicotine is manufactured in the roots, and the plants dislike “wet feet” (i.e., soggy roots). Workers water plants twice thereafter, fertilize them with nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, and apply pesticides from plastic spray cannisters that workers wear on their backs. The dominant ideal for commercial tobacco is a round and squat profile, with thick and bubbled leaves growing broad and horizontal rather than slender and pointing skyward. To achieve these attributes, workers “top” plants when they reach the desired number of leaves for harvest by removing flowering blooms and/ or part of the stalk and topmost leaves. They generally top plants at eighteen leaves, but they may allow twenty-one leaves for a robust crop or sixteen for a weaker crop. Farmers in Madura top plants at only twelve leaves, meaning that each plant produces a lower leaf volume. Topping breaks apical dominance—the plant’s tendency to grow vertically along the main stem—and concentrates growth instead into large, heavy leaves. Topping also encourages the proliferation of unwanted side shoots or axial buds called suckers (wiwilan Jv, suli Sasak), which workers break off and prevent by applying chemical suckercides. Roughly three months after transplanting, when the leaves begin to yellow, they are ready for harvest or priming, which is done in stages. Workers first pick bottom leaves, which have seen less sun and more humidity, are dirtier and thinner, and contain less nicotine and sugar than upper leaves. Workers pick three to four leaves from each plant, necessarily squatting or stooping as they pick the lowest leaves (Jain 2006, 60–85). In the event that leaves yellow swiftly or farmers fear that swelling supply will drive down prices, workers may pick more (e.g., six top leaves, or “from the neck up”). They may also leave the lowest leaves on the stalk if warehouses 34 Kretek Agriculture are refusing lower-quality leaves. As they work their way down the rows, workers make bundles for transport to the farmer’s home by foot, car, or motorbike. Tobacco is cured in several distinctive ways, each of which entails different capital outlays, labor requirements, and risks. In Lombok, growers mostly flue-cure tobacco in thirtyto forty-foot-tall brick ovens that are expensive to construct and fuel and require workers to tie and hang leaves and monitor flues.6 Leaves must be correctly positioned and the oven appropriately ventilated, maintained, and stoked to hold optimal temperatures over five to nine days for each batch, with thicker upper leaves requiring more time (Amigó 2010, 140). Lombok farmers must grow at least one hectare to fill a barn, and they flue-cure tobacco themselves because green leaf cannot be profitably sold. Implicated in deforestation and carbon emissions, flue-curing adds to tobacco’s panoply of negative environmental impacts (Proctor 2011, 513–18).7 Farmers in the Malang and Blitar regions shred and sun-cure their tobacco. First, they ripen and ferment the tobacco indoors for three to five days until it yellows. Workers sort leaves for quality and ripeness before cutting. Sadhana required that farmers buy expensive cutting machines and set them at 2 mm, whereas independent farmers typically employ manual cutters who use hand-operated guillotines to slice tobacco more finely, to 0.5–1.5 mm.8 Chasing the sun, workers cut from around 6:00 to 9:00 a.m. and spread shredded tobacco by hand on bamboo trays that they place in the sun to dry in front of their houses, on the side of the Figure 4. Workers wearing masks to protect against dust sort tobacco leaves in a Jember warehouse. Photo by author. Hierarchy and Subjugation 35 road, and sometimes in fields. Workers rotate the tobacco at midday, a two-person job that involves laying an empty tray onto the drying tobacco and flipping it over. It takes several sunny days to dry cut leaf. In Jember, kasturi tobacco is hung whole, air-cured, and then ripened in warehouses filled with choking airborne tobacco dust. Sadhana’s sister company, Adi Sampoerna, employs six to seven hundred low-wage workers—mostly young and unmarried, and 80 percent female—for two to three months to sort the leaf and pile it in enormous cubes. Workers monitor the tobacco temperature, aiming for 40–42°C, and periodically exchange interior leaves with cooler exterior ones to prevent them from overheating and blackening. PMI exercises agency over how the entire tobacco cultivation process unfolds from a strategic distance. PHILIP MORRIS INTERNATIONAL Large cigarette manufacturers have increased their power and control over tobacco farmers by using each ounce of tobacco more efficiently and orchestrating a shift to contract farming. The contract farming transition represents another global tobacco technology that has gained ground alongside increasing foreign control over kretek capitalism. In the United States, the contract farming shift unfolded after 2004 legislation allowed the government to dismantle New Deal–era tobacco support programs by paying off active landowners with quotas (“the buyout”) and eliminating leaf production restrictions, price supports, and subsidies (Benson 2012; Griffith 2009; Kingsolver 2011). Contract farming was introduced in tobaccodependent Malawi in 2012, where it replaced a noncompetitive and monopolistic auction system through which leaf-buying companies colluded to suppress prices and paid substantial bribes for tobacco contracts and legislative influence (Otañez and Graen 2014). Under PMI, Sampoerna has been converting its Indonesian tobacco leaf buying from a multilayered open market system to contract farming through its main leaf supplier, PT Sadhana Arifnusa. Sadhana is a ramified family business owned by the descendants of Liem Swie Hwa, the firstborn son of Sampoerna founder Liem Seeng Tee. In 2011, Sampoerna sourced 12 percent of its leaf from contract farmers, but by 2015, this figure reached 70 percent, and Sadhana had contracts with over twenty-seven thousand farmers. As competition to recruit and retain contract tobacco farmers increased, leaf buyers and cigarette manufacturers expanded to new areas.9 Sampoerna and Sadhana representatives publicly frame the contract farming shift as a win-win situation benefiting all parties. From this upbeat perspective, farmers enjoy a more secure market and produce neither too much nor too little tobacco; leaf suppliers and cigarette manufacturers ensure the “sustainability” of tobacco, which must compete with food crops that the government favors and subsidizes; more stringent “product integrity” oversight mechanisms better shield consumers from the worst pesticide residues and non-tobacco related material 36 Kretek Agriculture (NTRM) like plastics; and agricultural laborers are better protected by safety equipment and training, labor monitoring, and the introduction of labor-saving techniques to mitigate child labor risks. Under its Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) program, introduced in 2002, and in response to rising NGO critique, PMI developed the Agricultural Labor Practices (ALP) Code in 2011 based on the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work and related ILO conventions. The code covers child labor, income and work hours, fair treatment, forced labor and human trafficking, work environment safety, freedom of association, and terms of employment.10 Contracts are supposed to facilitate PMI’s third-party monitoring of suppliers and farmers, but critics question how well the code is upheld and enforced. Although PMI (2020, 66) claims “the right to terminate contracts immediately in cases of severe violations impacting people, the crop, or the environment,” its softer expectation that suppliers “continuously improve the implementation of GAP principles and standards” suggests a more tolerant approach, while the downward pressure the company exerts on tobacco prices discourages adherence to minimum wage regulations. These specific shortcomings in PMI’s labor practices come in the context of a broader set of concerns regarding the political economy of contract farming. Contract farming often exacerbates unequal relations by reducing competition among buyers, weakening farmers’ bargaining position, and rendering farmers vulnerable to termination by buyers who can always claim that they have fallen short of contractual obligations (Little and Watts 1994). Contracts tend to promote land concentration and to push out small producers by favoring those who scale up and mechanize. Further, contracts deskill farmers, who relinquish substantial control over what seeds they plant, when they plant, and how they tend and process their crops. Even as PMI sponsors tobacco farmers’ protests over Indonesian government measures to increase cigarette taxes and protect public health, the company has been reducing the amount of tobacco in an average cigarette and strategically distancing itself from the tobacco plant. Innovations like “puffed” and “reconstituted” tobacco manipulate and make ever more efficient use of the plant. As noted in the introduction, Indonesia’s cigarette market has seen growing sales of machinerolled filtered cigarettes that weigh one gram or less, while the market for heavier hand-rolled kretek that contain more tobacco has declined. PMI has been publicly positioning itself as the frontrunner in an industry race to corner the market in novel nicotine technologies, in the process marginalizing the tobacco plant. PMI claims to be building a future “on smoke-free products that are a much better choice than cigarette smoking” with the vision “that these products will one day replace cigarettes.”11 In this future, tobacco leaves, along with conventional cigarettes, are stigmatized and marked for obsolescence. PMI markets some of its nextgeneration products as “tobacco-free,” despite the fact that they contain nicotine Hierarchy and Subjugation 37 “extracted from tobacco leaves.”12 PMI is thus growing less dependent on tobacco and stretching it further, even as it exercises tighter control over leaf suppliers and tobacco farmers through contracts. PMI’s decreased dependence and increased control both work to reduce the power and influence of leaf buyers and especially farmers, making them more precarious and more exploited. LEAF BUYERS AND TRADERS Sadhana is heavily dependent on Sampoerna, which has its pick of alternative domestic and international leaf suppliers. Aidan, a white Sadhana manager from South Africa, told me that the company sold 97 percent of its product to Sampoerna, understatedly adding, “Honestly, it’s not good to have Sampoerna as our almost exclusive client.” Robert, a white Sadhana agricultural operations manager from Zimbabwe, tied his more blunt and dour assessment of the relation between the companies to the global asymmetry between leaf buyers and cigarette manufacturers. Claiming that the world’s largest leaf buyers earn a small fraction in annual profits compared to the billions enjoyed by BAT and PMI, he vehemently declared, “It’s not a balanced industry. I don’t have much love for Big Tobacco, even though that sounds hypocritical. You can’t see the chain around my neck, but I can assure you it’s there. Philip Morris is a large shareholderand profit-driven company with no feel for the farmers.” The result, he explained, was a cascade of exploitation: “Philip Morris squeezes the merchants, like Sadhana, and they squeeze farmers, and they have no choice.” PMI squeezes Sadhana not only on price but also on quality and environmental and social responsibilities, which Robert grumbled are “yet another cost of business that gets pushed onto leaf buyers.”13 Despite their own misgivings, leaf-buying managers nevertheless dismissed as misguided farmers’ frequent complaints about low prices. They attributed the unprofitable nature of tobacco farming to various technical deficiencies that could be corrected by closely adhering to their requirements and counsel rather than an effect of structural inequalities (Kurian 2020). Imron, a manager in Madura for leaf buyer Alliance One, claimed that farmers ought to focus on expenditures and profits rather than obsess over price. “I say profit, not price!” he drilled, explaining that he urges farmers to consider their COP (cost of production), reduce water usage, minimize tillage, rent trucks collectively, and avoid agents. “But frankly,” he admitted, “we don’t pay them a high price.” Echoing this rhetoric, financial management was the central theme of a Sadhana manager’s PowerPoint presentation to contract farmers in Malang. Fuad urged them to invest their 2015 profits as capital for 2016 and to control their labor costs by mechanizing, among other practices. Mocking their “obsession” with “price, price, price,” he counseled, “Think instead about increasing your productivity and controlling your expenditures.” Sadhana’s Lumajang regional manager instructed technicians to encourage farmers to use family labor and to be present in their fields with workers so they would not stop 38 Kretek Agriculture to smoke and chat. He gathered farmers to agree on a worker pay ceiling, exclaiming, “You can’t pay workers 50,000 rupiah a day because you’re afraid about not getting enough workers.”14 Managers thus equivocate, sometimes blaming farmers for being insufficiently savvy in handling their capital, inputs, and labor and at other times admitting that prices are simply too low to justify tobacco production—not only for farmers but for leaf suppliers, too. At every stage of cultivation and curing, contract farming imposes precisely specified and rigidly enforced requirements on farmers for an already demanding crop. To be contract eligible, farmers must own or rent sufficient land to meet Sadhana’s regional minimum acreage. Sadhana tells farmers which variety they must plant and when. Fuad made an example of one farmer at the Malang meeting by loudly admonishing him for planting after the cutoff date, warning that Sadhana wouldn’t buy from him next year if he didn’t adhere to the schedule. He also rebuffed farmers’ requests to use their preferred seed variety the following year, insisting that such decisions rested with company leadership. Since Indonesia placed a moratorium on seed imports, Sadhana contracted US-based Gold Leaf Seeds to carry out the labor-intensive work of developing hybrid Virginia seed with sterile males to prevent farmers from producing their own seeds, which Robert cast as “a quality control and assurance mechanism.” Imron asserted that Alliance One’s efforts to get farmers to shift from “traditional” to “standard” practices started with seedbeds. The company tried to rectify farmers’ purported deficiencies by creating demonstration seedbeds and instructing farmers to prepare similar flat, one-by-ten-meter seedbeds rather than using irregular-shaped, sloping (miring) plots of land. Serving as the primary intermediaries between leaf buyer and tobacco farmers, Sadhana’s field technicians bear responsibility for imparting PMI’s requirements and ensuring that they are met. Sampoerna claimed 177 field technicians working with 27,439 contract tobacco farmers in 2019. After the COVID-19 pandemic shrank the cigarette market and Sampoerna lost market share to budget brands, these numbers fell to 112 field technicians and 21,356 contract farmers in 2021 (Sampoerna 2022, 109). Farmers identified technicians as petugas lapangan or PL, the same term used for government agricultural extension agents such as those who had promoted the Green Revolution several decades earlier during the Suharto administration. Technicians may present as “listeners, friends and educators” and deploy the idioms and practices of public extension, but they work to promote private industry interests rather than being “invested in the broader mission of rural transformation, community development, poverty alleviation and social justice” that ostensibly motivates state PL (Aga 2019, 10). Technicians are all men and typically get around by motorbike, making them more approachable to farmers of modest means and allowing them to drive rather than walk to fields along narrow, muddy, and slippery dike paths. Technicians recruit farmers to tobacco, visit their fields and homes, demonstrate approved techniques, troubleshoot problems, and Hierarchy and Subjugation 39 sometimes pitch in and help them with various stages of cultivation. One technician recounted how farmers’ insistent hospitality forced him to drink as many as seven cups of coffee in a day, leaving his hands shaking. Relations between farmers and technicians may be warm and friendly, but they are rooted in a hierarchy in which technicians, along with regional managers, assert and enforce PMI and Sadhana’s requirements. Field technicians often have agricultural degrees and are positioned as more knowledgeable than farmers whom they coach and lecture. This guidance begins with the work of planting and growing tobacco. Technicians encourage farmers to make large ridges with soft, well-aerated topsoil to promote drainage and root development before transplanting. They also instruct farmers to plant seedlings of similar size together so they will be ready to harvest around the same time and to uniformly space seedlings by tying knots in a rope tethered to stakes that can be inserted at each end of a row. Technicians tell farmers which inputs they should use and which are forbidden and instruct them to use spoons rather than hands to achieve a uniform fertilizer dose and to apply fertilizer close to roots. Robert insisted that Sadhana strictly controls chemicals including pesticides, using lower quantities and safer chemicals than in the past. He professed his love for the “natural” option of neem but noted its drawbacks; neem must be applied early and often, especially if it rains, demanding more labor than durable synthetic pesticides. Because neem does not instantly kill pests, farmers often question its efficacy. One speculated that neem’s vile smell drives off insects. If technicians see buds sprouting on farmers’ tobacco plants, they warn them that suckers curb their potential yield by fifteen kilograms per hectare per day. Technicians’ supervision extends into curing, with Sadhana telling farmers which curing methods to use and which fuels are acceptable for flue-curing. Sadhana’s contract farmers near Malang initially built expensive flue-curing barns, only to be told a few years later to switch to sun-curing, which made them more weather dependent and, some found, yielded lower quality tobacco. When a technician saw tobacco falling through one farmer’s bamboo trays, which had clearly seen better days, he clucked over the “lost production.” Sadhana’s specifications also encompass proper baling methods and materials. In Malang, growers had to stuff tobacco into collapsible wooden boxes (pressbal), then sew it with cotton thread into jute burlap rather than using plastic sacks. The natural materials were meant to reduce NTRM, moisture retention, mold, and chemical contamination. Sadhana issued farmers bar-coded tags to affix to each bale so they could be traced back to farmers. This, too, increases Sadhana’s ability to control farmers; when, for example, the central warehouse finds NTRM contamination— including the grisly find of a human finger that Aidan dryly remarked was “rather special”—they return the offending material to technicians so they can show it to farmers. The company schedules when farmers are allowed to deliver harvests to buying stations. 40 Kretek Agriculture Hierarchical relations are underscored by the grading system technicians use to rate farmers by loyalty and skill. Robert explained Sadhana’s detailed metrics for quantifying farmers’ worth: An A farmer is very loyal, a D farmer is seen as not so loyal. They get different packets, as determined by the PL’s assessment. Some just get a seedbed packet, others are eligible for much more, including loans. Each also has a skill rating: 1, 2, 3, 4. 1 is a very skillful farmer and an early technology adopter.15 The farmers build a history with the company. We also maintain records and scores for the tobacco on each visit. A score of 9 means we anticipate 2,500 kg of tobacco for fourteen thousand plants. Farmers should plant about fourteen thousand plants per hectare.... These estimates are important because they determine how much the farmer is expected to sell to Sadhana. Farmers are expected to sell their entire crops. We don’t want a farmer coming up with more, passing off his brother’s tobacco as his own. We need to ensure the integrity of the product. To discourage “illicit side-selling” and to reward display of skills, farmers’ prior performance and grade influence their quotas and the level of inputs extended to them on credit (Cockburn and Eaton 2013, 173). In Lombok, naughty farmers who “cheated” on their PL and sold to traders for a higher price were struck from the company’s list. Field technicians and their managers are in turn evaluated and compensated based on the performance of their contract growers. Technicians produce a constant stream of data documenting their activities, mentoring, troubleshooting, and yield projections, and they enjoy bonuses when the final quality and quantity of their assigned farmers’ harvests is high. There is always room for improvement. “We will never achieve our targets,” one regional manager noted, “and they will always be set higher.” Even more so than technicians, tobacco graders loom large for farmers as figures of extraordinary power mediating between them and the leaf-buying company. Graders judge the quality of tobacco and sometimes reject entire bales or truckloads, but they are constrained by the need to justify their decisions in relation to criteria set by the company and have no say over prices. Interactions between farmers and graders at Adi Sampoerna’s imposing warehouse complex in Jember in 2015 were tense and somber after crops were compromised by months of ashfall from Gunung Raung, a nearby volcano.16 Agus, an Adi Sampoerna grader who preferred visiting farmers in their fields outside of harvest time, likened the walled warehouse environment to a prison. Once their turn arrived to back up their trucks to the unloading entrance, farmers palmed cash or cigarettes to men who unloaded their bales onto the conveyor belt to ensure they were handled with care. Workers opened bales and pulled bundles of leaves from the bales’ midsection or other random spots for the grader to inspect. The grader eyed the tobacco, ran his hands over it, and inhaled its scent. Agus claimed he could smell forbidden pesticides and non-kasturi leaf varieties. Sadhana schools farmers on the range of Hierarchy and Subjugation 41 reasons why their tobacco might be rejected as “off-grade”: NTRM, mold, color (e.g., green or blackish-brown as opposed to the desired yellow-brown). If the appropriate grade was unclear, the grader halted the conveyor belt, rolled a cigarette from the leaf, and smoked it by a window (workers are otherwise forbidden from smoking in the dusty, dry, tinderbox-like warehouse atmosphere). To sustain their concentration, graders evaluate tobacco in two-hour shifts. The farmer’s technician would often stand beside the grader, knowing that the farmer’s harvest volume and quality would be incorporated into his own performance evaluation. A worker thrust black flags into rejected bales and green flags into those deemed “dirty” due to volcanic ash, which suffered a 10 percent price cut. In some cases, farmers could take rejected tobacco home and clean it for reevaluation. The grader rejected an entire lot belonging to one distraught farmer who had his young barefoot son in tow, perhaps to display poverty and elicit sympathy.17 Agus said farmers rarely disputed his grading evaluations in 2015 “because they feel they have no other choice. They are happy simply to have a buyer.” Even under ordinary circumstances, sellers might be reluctant to question graders’ judgements, fearing they might be struck from future rosters, although some had been known to threaten graders with violence.18 Leaf buyers emphasized the transparency of their grading process as an advantage of working with large contract suppliers rather than independent traders. Managers pointed to their use of digital scales with visible numbers, paper receipts, and instant cash or bank transfer payments. Imron said that farmers who sold outside their contracts for a seemingly higher price risked losing 5,000 rupiah here and there due to faulty weight measures, rounding, and estimation errors that were unlikely to favor them. Various transparency measures notwithstanding, there is a great deal of corruption talk and suspicion around the grading and buying process. Farmers complained that they had to pay to facilitate their transactions (biar licin). One Lombok farmer accused Alliance One graders of “treating contract farmers like stepchildren” and forcing them to “pay to get their bales in.” He cited one grader’s expanding irrigated land holdings as evidence of his ill-gotten gains. A Sadhana warehouse manager acknowledged that they had had to fire a security guard who was shaking down farmers the previous season. Various buyers’ tricks have their corollary in sellers’ tricks. Buyers complained that some farmers and traders added sugar, sand, soil, pebbles, and rocks to increase the weight of their tobacco.19 Similar tricks and dynamics obtain between clove farmers and traders, but the industry has sought to convert independent traders into company agents rather than contracting directly with farmers. Before they reach cigarette manufacturers’ warehouses, cloves are often transacted through a range of traders, beginning with upland traders who buy various forest commodities (e.g., coffee, cacao) and often run small retail shops and stalls out of their homes. Wayan, a shop owner in Bali who was also a member of the Sampoerna Retail Community program 48 Kretek Agriculture Jember region. Contract farmers fared somewhat better, since leaf buyers still purchased their leaf, if at a significant discount due to its purportedly compromised quality. Independent farmers like Achmad, whose wife had lost her job at a Sampoerna hand-rolling plant that closed in 2014, were especially hard hit. He invoked the Chinese racial scapegoating stereotypes that periodically appear in times of economic turmoil and license anti-Chinese violence and spoke with naked envy of contract farming peers (Kusno 2003; Sai 2006; Siegel 1998; Strassler 2010, 2019): They have it good because they still have their daddies [contract companies] to turn to. Farmers like me are hard up. We’re suffering from a conspiracy. Those who buy are Chinese, those who plant are black.24 A group of us rented fifteen trucks to take our harvest to a warehouse. We were turned away, and then had to pay for the truck rental! If we could just find a willing buyer, we wouldn’t care how little we were paid, how unfair and exploitative the price. Under these economic conditions, married couples are getting separated. Motorbikes and chickens are being stolen. There’s unrest and insecurity. Farmers widely complained about being manipulated by leaf buyers, but many were also angry at politicians who they felt should have offered assistance. They protested by burning tobacco. Jember is renowned for its fine cigar leaf (na oogst), which is mostly destined for export, and the Jember regency government promotes and celebrates tobacco, which is incorporated into the regional government symbol, batik textiles, regional costume, and dance. Feeling that this show of cultural support proved to be a sham in farmers’ time of need, some farmers demanded that the leaf be removed from the region’s flag. La Niña unleashed a wet dry season (kemarau basah) in 2016 that had many tobacco farmers reliving the nightmarish 2010 season. Indonesia’s tobacco yield fell by over a third from 2015 to 2016 as tobacco plants had no stress period and rampant weeds sprang up in the moist soil and absorbed fertilizers intended for tobacco plants.25 Farmers hired extra workers to weed and hoe even as the potential quantity and quality of their crop deteriorated. In Lombok and Java, some could hardly face fields inundated by river water that also deposited sand and trash. Haji Ramli’s crop in Lombok was additionally threatened by the tobacco mosaic virus, and he was trying to grow more seedlings to replace afflicted plants.26 A loyal Sadhana contract farmer for twenty years, he had experienced a personal calamity the previous year when his barn caught fire in the midst of flue-curing, incinerating forty-five million rupiah’s worth of tobacco within a half hour. “My kids cried, but I didn’t. Profit or loss, you have to laugh,” he stoically insisted. While farmers might withstand a calamitous season or two, many saw an unacceptable trend of increasing costs and declining prices that prompted them, like Fauzi, to reduce growing tobacco or even to cease doing so altogether. Even a regional leader of the Indonesian Tobacco Farmers Association reduced his crop to eight hundred plants in 2015 and made the fortuitous decision to not plant in Hierarchy and Subjugation 49 2016. He also told us delicately that he was currently not smoking, because of a strange sensation on his tongue. In Lombok, abandoned and repurposed fluecuring barns bear striking testimony to farmers’ quitting the crop. Some left the structures standing after they stopped growing or rented them to neighbors, while others used them for storage (gudang), converted them into shops, or, in a few cases, destroyed them after incurring large debts and left the rubble in a heap to remind themselves to never again plant the crop. Indonesia’s tobacco farmers face numerous challenges: debt, climate change, limited land, a lack of political bargaining power, and an aging workforce. These challenges will not be resolved by simply planting other crops, but farmers’ ability to do so is an advantage from a tobacco control perspective. Most Indonesian tobacco farmers do not need to be introduced to “alternative” crops, because they are already skilled at cultivating them. The term tobacco farmer (petani tembakau) is in fact misleading, insofar as it implies that tobacco is the sole or main crop that farmers cultivate. Those who own their own land (or rent annually rather than seasonally) typically also produce paddy, Indonesia’s staple crop. The tropical climate allows farmers to double or triple crop, often planting paddy during the wet season (roughly November through March) and tobacco during the dry season (roughly April through October) on a single plot of land. In regions with higher rainfall and on irrigated land, they may grow two crops of paddy followed by tobacco in a single year, while on dryer land, farmers may grow three different crops, such as paddy, tobacco, and corn. In more arid regions, farmers plant and harvest tobacco earlier and are typically limited to producing two crops a year. In fertile (subur) areas such as Lumajang or Blitar, farmers have multiple crop options, and leaf buyers must compete with alternative crops (e.g., sweet potatoes, chili, beans, tomatoes), whereas in dryer regions such as Madura or Jember, farmers identify as more tobacco dependent, “living and dying” (hidup mati) on the crop’s fortunes. Even in the latter regions, however, farmers have found alternatives and have begun to reject tobacco farming as a mainstay. Recognizing tobacco’s labor-intensive and high-risk characteristics, many farmers are abandoning the crop, while those who remain are often hesitant and ambivalent about continuing to plant it. Facing such challenging conditions, Sadhana manager Robert complained that he couldn’t exploit Lombok’s real potential for tobacco agriculture, which he compared favorably to North Carolina’s: Now it’s getting more and more difficult to find farmers. It used to be I could go outside and ring a bell to find tobacco farmers and they would all line up. Now I could ring the bell all day and wouldn’t find one. Where there’s good water, they tend to grow other crops. They probably don’t feel they make enough of a profit.... In the south and east farmers are growing it because they can’t grow anything else. Yet despite the palpable sense of despair and decline in 2016, tobacco production across Indonesia subsequently rebounded and rose to new heights, reaching 50 Kretek Agriculture nearly 270,000 tons in 2019.27 This turnaround reflects the industry’s persistent ability—despite Robert’s pessimism—to recruit new farmers and to recapture hesitant tobacco farmers and renouncers. Sampoerna has also sought to extend clove farming into new regions to manage widespread hesitancy among clove farmers who regard cloves as an unreliable plant and commodity. The trees cycle through bumper, ordinary, and small harvest years (panen raya, panen sedang, panen kecil), and small harvest years yield only about 20 percent of larger harvests. To produce a good crop, clove trees must be healthy from their roots up, but they are susceptible to protracted dry spells, worms that bore through trunks, and a virus that causes leaves to yellow and wither from the top down. Some farmers apply pesticides against worm infestations, while Sampoerna urges farmers to coat the lower trunks with dolomite lime. Protracted rain and humid conditions can lead to mold that lays waste to harvests during the three-to-five-day period when cloves are supposed to dry in the sun. Cloves are vulnerable to theft at multiple stages of production. An absentee plantation owner in Jombang, East Java, remarked that stealing was common in the region, with thieves picking clean the lower tree branches. When cloves are drying on roadside tarps, thieves can pull over with a car, snatch up the tarp with its contents, and throw it in their vehicle. Stored cloves can also be stolen by thieves who are stealthy or adept at using magic to paralyze people in their homes and steal from right under their noses. Cloves are also subject to dramatic price fluctuations. In the 1920s, Indonesia went from being a net clove exporter to importer, with the kretek industry making it the largest consumer of the aromatic spice. An Indonesian government clove intensification program in the 1960s encouraged uplanders across the archipelago to cultivate clove trees. Clove prices peaked in 1979 in real terms, then precipitously declined as supplies rose and the government sought to maintain a floor price (Bulbeck et al. 1998, 21). In 1991, the Indonesian government authorized the creation of the Clove Support and Marketing Agency (Badan Penyangga Pemasaran Cengkeh, BPPC) ostensibly to raise prices for smallholders and stabilize supply. In practice, the agency served as a middleman monopoly, conferring exclusive rights to buy and sell cloves on an agency chaired by the president’s son, Tommy Suharto (Hutomo Mandala Putra). President Suharto forced the central bank to finance the BPPC to the tune of $350 million, which appalled the Indonesian technocrats and international agencies attempting to set the country on a deregulatory course. The usually politically quiescent Association of Indonesian Cigarette Companies (GAPPRI, Gabungan Perserikatan Pabrik Rokok Indonesia) vociferously opposed the clove monopoly, arguing that it would result in higher cigarette prices, reduced sales, job losses, and decreased government revenues. As the BPPC indeed raised clove prices for buyers, cigarette manufacturers experimented with reducing clove content in cigarettes and used up existing stocks rather than buying Hierarchy and Subjugation 51 from the agency, which became notorious for high prices and low quality. As clove supplies rose and prices fell, upset farmers, unable to find willing buyers, chopped down their trees and planted alternative crops (Hanusz 2000, 54–70; Schwarz 2000, 153–57). In 1998, as Suharto’s hold over power was eroding, the International Monetary Fund forced his administration to disband the BPPC as part of a suite of deregulatory reform measures (Linebaugh 1998). Today, Indonesia is the world’s largest clove producer, harvesting roughly one hundred thousand tons of cloves annually, 90 percent of which go into kretek (World Bank 2017, 11). Indonesia also imports cloves from Zanzibar and Madagascar, where agricultural life is punctuated by boom-and-bust commodity cycles tied to the distant fortunes of the kretek industry (Sodikoff 2012; Tilghman 2019). Clove farmer hesitancy manifests in decisions to gradually reduce their investment by felling trees and not replacing dead ones. Uplanders typically grow clove trees alongside other cash crops including commercial wood (e.g., sengon), bananas, coffee, cacao, palm trees, durian, and non-tree crops such as sugar cane, shallots, chilis, paddy, and sweet potatoes. Even APCI leaders, who are among the most vocal and stalwart industry supporters, do not necessarily treat cloves as a mainstay. The organization’s treasurer, for example, cultivated various crops on two mountainous hectares in East Java she inherited from her father, a former APCI leader who planted 418 trees in the 1980s, of which only about a hundred remained. Many of the remaining trees were afflicted by a virus. The provincial leader of APCI in Bali admitted that his family could not live on clove trees alone. He was down to 150 trees on 1.5 hectares. His family had chopped down two hundred trees after the BPPC precipitated a clove price plummet in the early 1990s. He planned to maintain the clove trees his parents had planted but did not envision adding any more, animatedly hyping bananas as a more lucrative investment that promised quicker returns. Whereas clove trees require seven years or more to begin flowering and can remain productive for seven decades or more, banana trees fruit six months after planting, can be harvested every two weeks, and produce well for about ten years. Tobacco and cloves only partially constitute farmer identities and livelihoods, easing their partial or wholesale exit. Tobacco farming is temporally demarcated as a primarily dry-season activity on land where rice and other crops are grown outside of the tobacco season. Farmers may decide to not plant tobacco this year or to plant less than last year. Because years elapse between clove tree planting and harvesting, decisions to plant, maintain, fell, or replace trees entail longerterm investments and consequences. At the same time, clove farming is typically partial in terms of land use since clove farmers tend to plant other tree and nontree crops. Kretek nationalists tend to misrepresent the activities and identities of tobacco and clove farmers as totalizing attachments rather than in their actuality as temporally and spatially partial, and often ambivalent, commitments. 52 Kretek Agriculture WAGE LABOR A profound ambivalence also runs through the discourse of tobacco growers, manufacturers, and promoters around the agricultural labor required to produce tobacco. On the one hand, they point to the creation of rural employment opportunities as an important industry virtue in Indonesia, a “labor surplus nation” with a long-standing pattern of jobless growth and urban migration (Li 2014, 2–3). Pro-tobacco groups, one Sampoerna executive conceded, even resort to wildly exaggerating the number of farmers and laborers involved in the industry. On the other hand, boasts about tobacco’s employment-generating capacity sit in tension with the seasonal and low-paid nature of tobacco work, the unappealing working conditions and difficulty sourcing workers, and an industry drive to decrease production prices and increase the use of timeand labor-saving chemicals and machines. Tobacco, one of the plantation crops most indelibly associated with slavery, continues to garner attention for the harmful and exploitative conditions of its production. NGOs have focused their attention on child labor, motivating leaf buyers and cigarette manufacturers to implement education programs and defend themselves against accusations of child labor in their supply chains. Yet the focus on child labor conveniently obscures the unfair pay and often hazardous conditions under which the mostly feminized and aging adult workforce labors. Child labor in commercial tobacco cultivation provides a contemporary lightning rod for global NGO critique of the industry. Human Rights Watch published a lengthy report on child labor in US tobacco agriculture in 2014 and a similarly damning report on child labor in Indonesia two years later. Many of the underaged laborers the NGO interviewed in the United States were children of immigrants, and few worked on family farms (Human Rights Watch 2014). In Indonesia, by contrast, the organization found that children typically worked on family or neighbors’ farms (Human Rights Watch 2016). While the social dynamics of child labor diverged, Human Rights Watch pronounced effects of tobacco labor on child health and development similarly harmful (see also International Labor Organization 2007a, 2007b). The claim that children should not engage in such forms of labor turns on understandings of the child as a special biological and social category of person. Biologically, they “are uniquely vulnerable to the adverse effects of toxic exposures as their brains and bodies are still developing, and they consume more water and food, and breathe more air, pound for pound, than adults” (Human Rights Watch 2014, 49). Socially, NGOs conventionally depict children’s sovereignty and agency as still limited and developing; they fall into the category of dependents rather than autonomous subjects. In her ethnographic study of child tobacco laborers in Lombok, Amigó argues that conventional NGO perspectives on child labor overlook local cultural perspectives and economic realities and universalize an idealized conception of Hierarchy and Subjugation 53 childhood as a separate stage of life devoted to education and play that originated among the middle and upper classes in industrializing Western Europe and the United States (Eberhardt 2006; Nieuwenhuys 1996; Stephens 1995; Zelizer 1985). Children, Amigó asserts, “must be researched as active economic agents and the extent to which they are autonomous must be the subject of research rather than simply assumed” (2010, 45). She found that Sasak child tobacco laborers made decisions about when, for whom, and on which tasks they worked and how they allocated their earnings (similarly, see Li 2014, 64–65). They typically contribute the bulk of their wages to the household but also reserve money for themselves for snacks and larger consumption items (e.g., bicycles, stereos, schoolbooks, and clothes). They engaged in borrowing, lending, and even formed rotating credit associations (arisan). Like other sectors of the Indonesian rural economy, Amigó observes, tobacco cultivation is organized into subtasks with age and gender associations that naturalize relations of power as inherent skills. Women and children occupy subordinate positions in labor hierarchies and perform lower-paid tasks associated with patience and carefulness, while men’s work is valorized, and higher pay is justified, for involving greater strength and risk. Tying tobacco leaves to bamboo poles (gelanting), for example, is a dull, piece-rate task that involves hours of squatting and is performed almost exclusively by children. Unlike harvesting leaves, which workers typically start early in the morning, leaf tying is also a task that can be performed after school, in the shade, by groups of children. Syamsul told us that most farmers use child labor and that light work like tying leaves was especially appropriate for children. Consistent with Amigó’s claim about children exercising agency, he described kids appearing unbidden in his yard, commencing tasks, and attempting to trick him by tying fewer leaves onto a pole than expected and stretching them out. PMI pledged to eliminate all child labor from the tobacco supply chain since creating its Agricultural Labor Practices (ALP) code in 2011. The code’s fine print is more complicated, disallowing “hazardous” work for anyone under the age of eighteen but allowing—in developing countries where permitted, pursuant to ILO Convention 138—those as young as fourteen, or twelve in the case of family farms, to perform light agricultural labor. In Madura, Imron showed us that Alliance One collected data and conducted random checks to ensure that children were attending school. (The warehouse was not selling to PMI at the time, but Imron explained that being attentive to the ALP code made them ready to do so.) Sadhana field staff told me that they talked to farmers about keeping children out of tobacco or at least limiting their involvement to after-school hours and activities that minimized chemical exposure. But as a leaf-buying manager put it in an exasperated outburst, “Sadhana can’t watch the farmers twenty-four hours a day!” Human Rights Watch hammered home this point in its report, insisting that 54 Kretek Agriculture companies like PMI could not ensure that their tobacco supply chain was free of hazardous child labor. The NGO credited PMI, among the companies it examined, for appearing “to have taken the greatest number of steps to be transparent about its human rights policies and monitoring procedures, including by publishing on its website its own progress reports as well as several detailed reports by third party monitors” but went on to castigate the company for failing to impose meaningful penalties and sanctions on those who continued to use child labor (Human Rights Watch 2016, 18, 96). Sampoerna’s corporate social responsibility education initiatives are strategically designed to discourage child labor with programs “heavily concentrated in the areas where the company sources tobacco and cloves” (Sampoerna 2015, 22). Beginning in 2013, Sampoerna has devoted space each year in its annual reports to chronicling these initiatives and enumerating the dozens of schools and thousands of teachers, headmasters, children, and parents the company’s pedagogy has touched while expanding from the tobacco-growing regions of East Java, Madura, and Lombok to the clove-growing regions of Sulawesi. Sampoerna has also altered and refined the nature and content of these programs, sponsoring capacity-building training sessions for educators and more targeted women’s “empowerment” groups, enrolling mothers and charging them with preventing child labor, and bankrolling scholarships for “financially disadvantaged” children in tobacco growing regions and after-school programs in Lombok that are “carried out during tobacco harvest season to keep children busy with fun and creative learning activities ... aimed at discouraging them from partaking in the tobacco harvest and curing” (Sampoerna 2018, 149). I did not witness firsthand any cases of child labor in tobacco cultivation and processing, but I did see one case in clove picking. Child labor in tobacco agriculture (and Indonesian agriculture in general) appears to be a waning rather than an expanding phenomenon and more concentrated in certain regions and tasks, such as leaf tying in Lombok, rather than being a major scourge wherever tobacco is grown. Government agriculture officials in Madura told us that in the 1980s and 1990s, schools used to empty out during the tobacco harvest but that this was no longer the case. Robert offered an initially dismissive response to “all these child labor issues,” exclaiming, “That’s how you become a farmer!” He then reflected, “My farmers’ biggest wish and deepest dream is that their kids don’t become tobacco farmers. They want them in school. Of course you [i.e., activists, NGOs, anthropologists] can always get photographs [of children working].” When I spoke to a father and son as they picked cloves in Bali, the father said he hoped his child, who was still in high school, had a brighter future ahead of him than farm labor. NGOs showed less interest in the kinds of workers I encountered in tobacco fields, who were typically in their late twenties or older, landless or land poor, with women far outnumbering men. Most workers were married, widowed, or divorced with school-aged or older children. Many were middle aged; some were Hierarchy and Subjugation 55 elderly. Young adults, farmers told me, found agricultural work too hot, too dirty, unappealing, and embarrassing, preferring factory jobs. Sun-bleached posters and calendars affixed to walls showed that PMI’s anti–child labor efforts had reached farmers in Malang, where they paid lip service to addressing a problem that appeared insignificant given the workforce’s composition. Landless workers were “free” in the Marxist sense; bereft of ties to productive property, they had to sell their labor as a commodity or risk starvation. The land-poor condition of workers was in some cases connected to the relatively land-rich status of the farmers who hired them. Wati, for example, was one of forty workers hired to tend Ibrahim’s 7.5 hectares, and the same history that had helped Ibrahim secure his property had made it harder for people like Wati to hold onto or attain their own land. The Sukarno administration attempted to reduce stark inequalities in landholding with the 1960 Basic Agrarian Law. Large landowners and religious institutions opposed implementation of the law and ensured that it moved at a sluggish pace, while the Communist Party (PKI) and Indonesian Peasant Front’s (Barisan Tani Indonesia) efforts to accelerate land redistribution and go beyond the law’s provisions provoked conflicts (Utrecht 1969). Peasants and land reform activists were among those murdered and suppressed in the wake of the alleged PKI coup attempt in 1965. In the 1970s, the Suharto administration embraced the Green Revolution’s promise of increasing agricultural production through seeds, chemicals, and technologies. Along with higher taxes, this allowed wealthier rural households to grow and consolidate their landholdings while pushing marginal landholders off the Figure 6. A father and son (above) pick cloves in Bali. Photo by author. 56 Kretek Agriculture land (Hart, Turton, and White 1989; Scott 1985). While Wati spoke positively of Ibrahim, landless workers for another farmer with three hectares complained bitterly of their low wages but did not dare look for work elsewhere, fearing they would lose badly needed employment. Women workers are routinely exposed to the tobacco risks that children are supposed to be sheltered from. While I was talking to a group of women as they brushed the suckercide Tamex onto topped plants, three described attending a training where they were informed that their children, whom they love so dearly, should not be involved in tobacco work since it could be dangerous to them. Wati pulled off her bamboo peasant hat to reveal a training souvenir: a red and black baseball cap with an image of an idealized nuclear family, mother and father embracing their two children. With no husband and five children, her own family structure bore little resemblance to this ideal. Wati wore black cotton gloves to protect her hands from the sun, but she had cut the gloves to expose her fingers and allow her to work swiftly and dexterously. The smell was fine, she said, as long as it did not become too strong in the heat. A male supervisor, whose fingers were stained yellow from the substance, had measured and mixed the chemical with five liters of water before pouring it into workers’ makeshift containers, some of it sloshing over and spilling into the irrigation ditch he straddled. Tamex is considered highly toxic to fish and aquatic invertebrates. Users are supposed to wear protective eyewear, long-sleeved shirts and pants, shoes and socks, and chemical-resistant gloves. A corrosive agent capable of causing irreversible eye damage, Tamex is also harmful to skin, potentially fatal if it enters airways or is ingested, and suspected of causing cancer and genetic defects.28 Wati held the Tamex solution in a used bottle in her left hand and the brush in her right hand. Other workers tied cut-open plastic bottles filled with suckercide around their waists or dangled them from their necks. While Wati’s hat advocated protecting beloved and valued children, Tamex dribbled onto her bare fingers. Farmers and workers had various idiosyncratic ideas about the hazards that inhered in tobacco cultivation and how to protect themselves (Markus 2015). Some risks to workers, such as heat stroke, dehydration, pesticide exposure, and excessive working hours, potentially pertain to any agricultural labor in Indonesia. NGOs single out tobacco for special attention due to its nicotine content and intricate, labor-intensive processing requirements. When workers interact with wet tobacco leaves, they absorb nicotine through their skin, which can lead to acute nicotine poisoning, known as green tobacco sickness (GTS). GTS symptoms include dizziness, headaches, nausea, vomiting, and insomnia. In fluecuring regions like Lombok, stokers who handle fuel and tend ovens work around the clock and risk serious burns, while workers hanging and unloading bamboo poles of tobacco leaves in curing barns risk dangerous falls (Amigó 2010, 135–37, 179). Lombok farmers told us that they had used more dangerous furnaces in the past, occasioning accidents and turning one stoker’s body all white from extensive third-degree burns. Hierarchy and Subjugation 57 Methods of mitigating these kinds of risks can be haphazard. As a reward for turning in empty pesticide cannisters that might otherwise be discarded in irrigation ditches, Sadhana issued farmers a personal safety-gear set including protective glasses, mask, plastic gloves, and a shirt with a plastic apron sewn inside.29 While farmers occasionally wore some of these items and distributed others to workers, the supply was highly limited. When, where, and how workers used protective gear was furthermore often ad hoc and arbitrary. One farmer had workers wear disposable face masks when they lay cut tobacco onto trays to dry, although their primary risk was likely absorbing nicotine through dermal contact with soaking wet tobacco. Workers never wore gloves for this task, although they said it made their hands bitter (pahit); I myself became dizzy after several hours of performing it. After long stretches of picking tobacco, some workers described suffering from dizziness, nausea, and vomiting, which are symptoms of GTS. When picking tobacco, as with other forms of agricultural labor, workers generally wear multiple layers of clothing to protect their skin from the sun. They said the difference with tobacco is that it destroyed clothes, making them useless for other purposes or demanding special cleaning methods (e.g., warm water) and copious detergent. When workers began picking lower leaves early in the morning, their shirts were apt to become soaked over the course of several hours from sweat and contact with wet leaves. Some wore gloves to keep their hands from getting dirty, while others did not, because gloves slowed them down; when I tried wearing gloves while picking, I soon found that they tended to snag and to grow sticky. Some drank green coconut milk to alleviate dizziness and nausea; others drank herbal tonics (jamu) or sweet and sour concoctions that they felt dissipated any poisoning effect from the tobacco. Workers often attributed vomiting to pesticide residue and harsh chemicals rather than to nicotine. One told us it was specifically the first leaf picking that made her sick due to the Tamex. Workers also joked that instances of encountering an ancestor or a ghost in the field might in fact be chemically induced. If Amigó is correct that Indonesian child workers possess a degree of autonomy and agency that NGOs presume they are lacking, adult tobacco workers’ autonomy is constrained by gender ideology, land access, social norms, and knowledge. Tobacco labor furnishes workers with some income but not a livelihood. Such seasonal labor is always stitched together with additional low-wage work and small enterprise. Even when female workers performed physically demanding tasks such as hoeing, farmers consistently paid them significantly less for a day’s work than their male counterparts, who are often additionally compensated with cigarettes. Women workers might have more wage labor opportunities in part because they are cheaper to hire, with men reserved for supervisory tasks and jobs like transporting picked tobacco via motorbike from the fields to the farmer’s home for ripening. Wati and her fellow workers were organized into work groups with leaders. According to a third-party assessment that PMI commissioned, Sadhana staff, 64 Hand-Rolling Kretek often suffering) female kretek heroes and to mask the high-pressure and tightly controlled work in the rhetoric of protective care. Exploring these themes, this chapter draws heavily on a month I spent working in Sampoerna’s hand-rolling cigarette plant in Malang.2 Sampoerna executives’ willingness to grant me factory access should be seen in light of their conviction that workers were intensely loyal to Sampoerna despite the difficult nature of their work, the company’s public exposure of the conventionally “hidden abode of production” through the living factory exhibit, and the privilege that academic researchers associated with prestigious institutions can enjoy in Indonesia (see also Saptari 1995, 15; Weix 1990). When a factory administrator first escorted me, a white woman dressed in a roller’s uniform, to my place behind a rolling machine, a loud wave of noise spread across the shop floor as workers’ curiosity was aroused.3 Over the course of the month, I interacted most closely with my immediate neighbors, but I had frequent exchanges with other workers before 6:00 a.m. when they would stop by to chat or take a selfie, over meal breaks in the canteen, and at the trough sinks where we crowded at the end of the day to rinse glue out of our tools. FEMINIZED PIECEWORKERS AND THE AGE FACTOR While female labor has historically predominated in the kretek industry, it was characterized by a more flexible gender division of labor until the mid-1960s. As discussed in the introduction, army general Suharto used the alleged communist coup attempt of 1965 to rationalize the massacre of trade union leaders and, after gaining presidential powers, the abolition of communist party–affiliated unions Jakarta Surabaya Sampoerna machine-rolled cigarette factories Sampoerna hand-rolled cigarette factories TPO (Third Party Operator) hand-rolled cigarette factories 0 0 100 150 km50 50 100 mi N Yogyakarta JAVA Kraksaan Malang Karawang Sukorejo Map 2. Sampoerna’s cigarette factories and third-party operators. Map by Bill Nelson. Class and Gender Paternalism 65 and the creation of conservative government-controlled unions. Managers justified workforce feminization in this period by claiming that male pieceworkers protested too much and consumed too many cigarettes (Saptari 1995, 95–96; Weix 1990, 21–22, 126). After facing labor militancy in the 1950s, Sampoerna sought to depoliticize its workforce as workers and as women in ways that aligned with New Order gender dogma. Although factory workers might spend more time with their rolling machines than with their husbands, through its radio show, the company still espouses the primacy of a conservative “state ibuism” (motherhood) housewife (ibu rumah tangga) identity that ideally defines women “as appendages and companions to their husbands, as procreators of the nation, as mothers and educators of children, as housekeepers, and as members of Indonesian society—in that order” (Suryakusuma 1996, 101). The good housewife props up her husband’s heteronormative masculinity and is the antithesis of the evil and emasculating Gerwani (women’s and workers’) activists whom the New Order depicted in fabricated and sensationalized accounts as killing and mutilating the genitalia of senior army officials (Larasati 2013). Whereas kretek consumption legitimizes masculine escape from familial obligations, then, kretek production is yoked to feminine fulfillment of familial obligations. In contrast to more short-term patterns of youthful female labor recruitment for export commodity production (Lindquist 2009; Mills 2003; Ong 1987; Wolf 1992), the sector’s workforce has historically been grayer in addition to feminized, populated by older married women who often hold only an elementary-school education, commute from home, and remain in the same factory for long periods that often extend to lifetime employment (Saptari 1995, 87, 97–102, 224–25). The average worker age at the Malang plant was forty-four in 2016. At Sampoerna’s newest plant in Kraksaan, it was thirty-five—more youthful, but still a far cry from Meriam Bellina, who was a seventeen-year-old high school student when her sexualized performance as Roro Mendut appeared in Indonesian cinemas. I experienced an increasingly common ritual one day when a supervisor who had reached the retirement age of fifty-five walked down our line of rollers, shaking hands, saying farewell (pamitan), and blinking back tears. Another supervisor delicately confided that the “A factor” (Faktor U, usia or umur)—that is, age—presented the biggest challenge on the shop floor; workers inevitably slow down over time. Retirements enabled the Malang plant to reduce its staff from 5,400 in 2010 to 3,922 in 2016. The workforce consisted of an all-female cohort of 3,631 pieceworkers (borongan, subdivided into 2,271 rollers, 765 cutters, 499 packers, and 96 labelers); 259 mixed but predominantly female daily wage workers (harian), including supervisors, tool maintenance workers, and box packers; and 32 managers and administrative staff on monthly salaries (bulanan), among whom were more men. Sampoerna contracted out to vendors support functions such as health care, janitorial services, and maintenance and construction. 66 Hand-Rolling Kretek Quotas subject pieceworkers to intense time pressure. “We’re not chasing time, time chases us” (Kami tidak mengejar waktu, waktu yang mengejar kami), a former roller who was laid off when Sampoerna closed its Jember factory in 2014 told me. Only some apprentices succeed in meeting quotas and achieve permanent worker status. Some quick workers in their prime get higher quotas, which means more pay but also more pressure. As pieceworkers age and slow, they once again experience difficulty meeting minimal hourly quotas, as they did as apprentices. I found quota pressure to be most intense among packers. My neighbor Bu Arti uttered a quick prayer at the start of each day of packing cigarettes, asking that she should be swift (supaya lancar). And whereas rollers often asked me how many cigarettes I had made (“Dapat berapa?”), packers frequently asked one another about their lack, how far short of their quotas they were currently falling (“Kurang berapa? Kurang pira?” Jv). Packers taught me the concept of kepor (not to be confused with kempor, exhausted), a state of falling behind in a task accompanied by a sense of urgency and anxiety. Toward the end of her menstrual cycle, Bu Rukmini was prone to fainting and falling off her stool. When this occurred, polyclinic staff instructed her not to think about anything, including her unfinished work and kepor state. Although packers occasionally paused to get a drink of water, they eschewed meal breaks. A shortage of tobacco tubs for rollers at the start of one day precipitated a subsequent shortage of cigarettes that left packers extraordinarily agitated and impatient, the possibility of achieving their quotas slipping away with each second of forced idleness. The tremulous head movements that House of Sampoerna visitors find so disturbing are part of the quota speed complex. Workers claim that these movements help them work and that they are not involuntary. Bu Fitri, a speedy roller, deliberately engaged her head bob whenever she realized she was moving only her hand and arms and needed to pick up the pace. Supervisors sought to suppress workers’ bobs, which Sampoerna’s time-motion studies of workers classified as extraneous movements that could create a sensation of speed at odds with workers’ actual productivity. Cognizant of such disapproval, Arti said she wasn’t allowed to shake (gak boleh goyang) and should instead sit erect and move only her hands and arms as I did (seharusnya seperti Mbak Marina). She briefly imitated me, pronounced it uncomfortable (tidak enak), and resumed her bob. These bobs may be a byproduct of harmful, repetitive, high-speed labor, but workers experience them as an assertion of agency and idiosyncrasy over managerial efforts to keep their movements minimal, uniform, and efficient. Pieceworkers’ bodies accumulate deleterious effects from factory labor. My short-term experience included finger cuts, aching arms at night, and pain when I sat on a regular chair at home after eight hours perched on a red plastic stool (supervisors called this pantat panas or hot bottom).4 Over time, the hands of cutters who trim cigarettes permanently reshape and bend around their scissors. Their right index fingers become crooked and warped (bengkok), and some develop Class and Gender Paternalism 67 great blisters and calluses on the base of their right thumbs. They frequently slice open and split their left index finger, thumb, and nails, which are often bandaged because of a recent wound. After many years of accidentally shaving off their own flesh, the left thumbs of some are visibly shorter than their right. Workers complained of sore hands and arms (pegel, linu) in the morning, and one packer frequently shook out her hands, seeking elusive relief from the pins-and-needles sensation (kesemutan, literally a sensation of ants crawling, or paresthesia in medical parlance) that was likely a symptom of nerve damage due to repetitive strain. I heard a small commotion behind me one day and turned to see an older roller collapsed on the floor in the throes of intense muscle spasms. She resumed work after a neighbor massaged her back with her feet. Long sedentary days, minimal hydration, and delayed bathroom breaks also lead to potential kidney damage and severe hemorrhoids for some workers; I met one who had had hemorrhoid surgery three weeks earlier and was still unable to resume her regular duties. Dr. Yasin, who had served in the factory’s polyclinic for six years, characterized workers as unhealthy and initially blamed their own bad consumption habits. Observing that four had suffered strokes in the previous week, Yasin condemned their long-term use of hormonal contraceptives and their consumption of fried food. (I raised the role of smoke exposure in strokes with multiple Sampoerna factory doctors, but it always proved a nonstarter, and one even expressed uncertainty about whether kretek helped or harmed health, citing kretek nationalist misinformation.) He attributed workers’ sleepiness and difficulty concentrating to their carbohydrate-rich, high-glycemic-index breakfasts. He worked with the plant manager to encourage canteen vendors to offer healthier options but generally despaired of having much impact on workers’ dietary practices, saying that they relied on Sampoerna’s health plan and were not motivated to change their lifestyles. Yasin estimated that 60 to 70 percent of workers were obese, a condition he linked to diabetes, hypertension, stroke, cardiovascular disease risk, and lowback pain. He claimed that workers would also “dope,” taking supplements and steroids sold in front of the plant when they are tired or sick. As we conversed, Yasin slowly shifted from blaming workers’ poor health on their negligent and ignorant behavior as consumers to acknowledging them as producers whose working conditions played some role in their health. The sedentary nature of their jobs, he conceded, leads to obesity and hemorrhoids, while putting off drinking and urinating to chase quotas contributes to kidney stones. Yasin confessed that his ability to elicit a complete picture of workers’ health was limited by their reluctance to disclose conditions that might lead to job loss. He always inspected workers’ hands and frequently found that the pads at the base of their thumbs, which should be a little plump, were thin and worn from nerve damage, suggesting carpal tunnel syndrome. He wanted to detect and treat such conditions early, but workers lied when he asked if they suffered from pain. Were they more candid, Yasin believed, he could collect better data for management. 68 Hand-Rolling Kretek But it was not clear what management would do with such data beyond the ineffectual morning exercise routines it instituted. As long as Sampoerna maintained piecework quotas and fired workers who could not meet them, workers would continue to suffer to work as fast as they could. Yasin also saw evidence of workers’ contracting sexually transmitted infections, which he attributed to their husbands, who relied on their wives for cash and, with lots of time on their hands, had affairs. Some workers expressed concerns that reflected the doctor’s clinical view. Although some were widowed and others had husbands employed in fields like construction or agriculture, workers were often the household’s primary earners or “spine” (tulang punggung). One roller complained that her husband was engaged in many enterprises, all of which lost money. Some workers found gendered expectations that they attend to their husbands’ sexual desires after their draining work oppressive. A plant manager in Kraksaan joked that workers’ already long shifts do not account for the “overtime” (lembur) they must pull with their husbands. A supervisor told me that their work is so exhausting that husbands must understand that sex can be scheduled only for Saturday or Sunday, since on other nights, they are simply too tired. My neighbor, teasing a roller about supposedly having sex three times a night, scoffed at the supervisor’s “old” perspective. On a more serious note, she expressed concern that her husband would get angry if she did not have sex with him (marah kalau nggak dikasih) and that he would buy it elsewhere. A packer, siding with the supervisor, said that her husband can just look at her and tell she’s exhausted (kecapaian) and that he’s not allowed to touch her (gak boleh dipegang). In this way, she added, sex twice a week turns to just once. Saptari (1995, 172) found that female factory workers’ economic contributions won them household authority, enabling them to confront unfaithful husbands. At the same time, some husbands find opportunities—and justifications—for cheating during their wives’ long work hours. If kretek hand-rolling jobs are exhausting, grueling, and injurious and some workers described themselves as always suffering (buruh yang selalu sengsara), what makes these jobs desirable in the first place, and what keeps workers attached to them for decades? Even when they started work very young before child labor laws were enforced, workers tended to frame their entry into cigarette factories as their own decision, in some cases citing straitened family circumstances, such as having many siblings or their father’s death (similarly, see Saptari 1995). A driver insisted that Sampoerna was the first place a woman (including his wife) seeking a factory job in Surabaya would apply and that among working-class circles in his youth, a Sampoerna uniform made a woman more appealing as a potential girlfriend or wife. When women applied for Sampoerna jobs or sought to reach quotas and pass their probationary period, they used various tricks to achieve dry hands that would allow them to work more rapidly. One who began as a roller in 1989 ate raw tofu each morning before work to make her hands less sweaty, while others poured gasoline on their hands to dry them out. Positive dimensions of Sampoerna Class and Gender Paternalism 69 factory jobs include perks like scholarships for children, comprehensive and wellmaintained amenities (canteen, toilets, drinking fountains, motorbike parking, lockers, prayer room [mushollah], lactation room, polyclinic, library, consumer cooperatives, and banks that provide low-interest loans), close friendships and social ties, and, until the 2014 factory closures, job stability. These factors make piecework jobs more tolerable and appealing, but overtime is the real key. Sampoerna’s hand-rolled kretek workers were historically accustomed to copious overtime, which entailed its own habit-forming dynamics; more work meant better pay but also less time spent at home and more exhaustion. Piecework rates are tied to regional minimum wages, and paychecks are larded with small bonuses rewarding strong team performance, consistent attendance, and forgoing menstrual leave.5 A normal workweek is Monday through Saturday, with shorter hours on Friday and Saturday. Workers receive 1.5 times their normal pay for their first hour of overtime and double for subsequent hours. On Sundays and vacation days, they earn double pay for the first seven hours, triple pay for an eighth hour, and quadruple pay for additional hours, meaning that nine hours of work on a Sunday would be compensated as twenty-one regular hours. Sampoerna adjusted to fluctuating market demand by increasing overtime. Managers found that workers welcomed fifty-hour workweeks but began complaining when they hit sixty hours. Before it closed for the New Year vacation in December 2015, the Malang factory ramped up production and operated nine-hour days, seven days a week, to manufacture kretek before the higher 2016 excise tax rate kicked in. Some workers who normally earned less than one million rupiah a week saw two-million-rupiah paychecks. They were grateful after having had barely any overtime in the three years since the hand-rolled market downturn began in 2013. The long-standing normalization of overtime made its absence feel like withdrawal, leading to sudden financial hardship and frugality (ngirit). Prapto, the hand-rolled manufacturing director, deployed the charismatic potential of hand-rolling workers’ class and gender identity—and their need for overtime and financial precarity in its absence—to craft a paternalistic appeal to masculinized marketing representatives and senior executives to invest in the flagging sector. To fulfill his job of “taking care of the ladies,” he commissioned multiple internal videos for Sampoerna’s sales and marketing representatives and senior leadership team in which workers tearfully describe the profound hardship of working “only” seven-hour days. Having already lost her overtime, one cutter sold off a cherished necklace—a gift from her husband—after the auto repair shop where he worked closed. The videos conclude on a cheerful note as workers celebrate the return of overtime and thank the men (bapak-bapak) working to increase sales. Heru, a senior marketing executive, spoke impassionedly about this: The rollers [ibu-ibu pelinting] are our family. It’s heartbreaking to know they don’t get overtime. When you hear them say, “I want overtime.” There was a strong push 70 Hand-Rolling Kretek internally: don’t think about brand or profit, think about the rollers. Talking to Paul [Janelle, Sampoerna president], he has been very clear. He does not want to close another factory. It was the worst thing he has done. Maybe very few people take it personally, maybe they think more about volume, but I do, I take it personally. Paul has said over and over that he doesn’t want to close another factory, not an MPS [contractor]. Prapto mobilized “the ladies” to write letters to Sampoerna’s board of directors and board of commissioners begging them to invest in and maintain hand-rolled brands. After they regained overtime, he solicited workers’ thank-you letters, although he confessed that the overtime resulted more from factory closures and contractor cuts than from market rejuvenation. Such letters maintain the narrative that board members deserve credit for the positive aspects of hand-rolling work even when they do not but are not responsible for the negative aspects of their work (such as high quotas or low base pay) even when they are. “Don’t give up!” Prapto implored management. “If they [senior executives] believe it’s over, it’s over. It’s okay if SKT [hand-rolled kretek] are finished in another ten years. Just give workers enough time so that their children can graduate. At least do this for those who have given their lives to Sampoerna.” Managers also used workers’ charisma to dissuade the government from imposing excise tax hikes on the hand-rolled sector by recruiting workers to write letters supplicating government officials to protect worker livelihoods. Executives’ paternalistic sentiment reassured them of their own humanity and investment in tobacco industry benefits for classand gender-marginalized workers. Yet it did little to protect workers from exploitation or job loss amid the changing landscape of kretek capitalism. THE PRODUCTION PROCESS The hand-rolling factory work that is masked under the rhetoric of paternalistic care is high pressure, physically demanding, and draining. Workers often rise for the dawn call to prayer a little after 4:00 a.m. and cook for their families before departing for work on minibuses or motorbikes, arriving around 5:30 a.m. to a chaos of other workers, vehicles, and vendors who set up a makeshift market around workers’ arrival and departure times. To access the production units, persons of all ranks must submit to a pat-down by a same-sex security guard. One told me that the motion of thousands of workers passing by her eyes and through her hands initially made her dizzy and nauseous. Tools Although hand-rolled kretek embody the “traditional” side of the Indonesian cigarette industry, the tools and process used to make them are hardly static. Production today is a far cry from the old black-and-white photos reproduced in cigarette museums and coffee-table books of kebaya-and-sarong-clad workers rolling while seated on the ground. Sampoerna tasks engineers in its Hand-Rolled Class and Gender Paternalism 71 Research Center with producing tool and process innovations to “continuously improve” hand-rolling quality and efficiency.6 Sampoerna is ambivalent about implementing the center’s innovations, rolling out new technologies unevenly across its companyand contractor-run plants when they are deemed likely to provoke resistance, displace workers, or lead to overproduction. For example, after the Research Center created a modified rolling machine that eliminated certain steps and substituted stainless steel for wood, the company limited its rollout to new factories, although it could have substantially increased productivity to 410 cigarettes an hour on the new machines rather than 325 (in Sampoerna factories) or 370 (in contractor factories) on the old machines. For workers, even seemingly minor changes demand workflow adjustments. Whereas they used to draw their tobacco out of red plastic buckets adjacent to their stools, over the prior decade Sampoerna replaced buckets with rectangular stainless-steel bins that stand on their workstations. My neighbor Bu Nia told me that after these tobacco dispensers or “mini silos” were introduced, she had raked her knuckles against the opening until they bled. In some factories, workers apply glue by holding a stack of papers between their fingers and twisting them to and fro until a thin and even line across the tip of each was revealed, allowing rollers to apply glue to dozens of papers simultaneously with a single spatula swipe. In the Malang factory, rollers used glue applicators, which proved to be the bane of my own rolling efforts. Witnessing my travails, Nia absorbed some of the burden of my errors, using papers that were slightly torn or to which I had applied too much or too little glue and ironing out rumpled papers by placing them under her cigarette tub for later reuse. Nia’s help reflected the general ethos of mutual concern and assistance among workers, as well as an ingrained sense that all supplies were rationed, doled out in limited quantities, and used with care. Although the applicator sped up their work once they grew accustomed to it, Nia claimed that when they were first introduced, rollers cried over how they tore the papers, and some found the change so demoralizing that they quit their jobs. Rolling machines have metal identification numbers and are rollers’ most important tool. Workers typically use the same machine for their entire career and liken them to a second husband (suami kedua) to which they grow attached (similarly, see Cross 2012). When their machines require maintenance, rollers always feel awkward and wrong (kurang pas) on the substitute. Elaborating on the husband analogy, a manager observed that workers spend a lot of time with their machines, often more than with their human husbands, and that workers and machines are obliged to take care of one another. Each morning, workers adjust their machines’ canvas belts using a plastic rod contoured to ideal cigarette dimensions. Bu Nurul helped me adjust mine at the start of the day (a supervisor rolled cigarettes on hers as she did so so that she would not fall too far behind quota), and at the end of the day, Nurul swiftly massaged conditioning oil on my canvas belt so it would operate smoothly and not get sticky and dirty. Sampoerna often retires machines alongside workers, preserving some used by famously productive 72 Hand-Rolling Kretek workers at its Surabaya headquarters. Deep grooves have been worn into their wooden handles where workers’ hands grasped them over multiple decades while they made millions of cigarettes. Much as workers are sensitive to tools, they are also attuned to changes in their supplies and environment. In the rainy season, tobacco is more pliable and easier to work with than in the dry season when it becomes friable. The downside of humid conditions is heavier cigarettes that are vulnerable to supervisors’ rejection for falling outside of tolerable weight parameters due to using too much tobacco filler; the Malang plant temporarily raised the maximum weight for fifty cigarettes from 105 to 107 grams during the rainy month when I worked there. Glue, made daily in an air-conditioned room with cassava powder sourced from Thailand, also varies in viscosity and consistency from day to day. Supervisors complained that “yesterday the glue was nice, but today it’s not” or that “watery glue has been causing problems all day.” Workers and supervisors also note variations in the cigarette paper, observing that some batches are thin and hard to work with, making it difficult to produce a flawless (mulus) cigarette. I learned from a research and development manager in Surabaya that the differences workers perceived in papers were not accidental. Because hand-rolled cigarettes lack synthetic filters, Sampoerna relies on changing burn additives and paper thickness and porosity to help maintain consistent machine nicotine and tar readings in response to tobacco blend variability. Rolling Supervisors, begging my pardon as they wrapped their arms around me to demonstrate how to roll cigarettes, instructed me to pick up the tobacco as if I were gathering rice in my fingers to eat. They reprimanded me when I shook off loose tobacco since this motion was unnecessary and would leave me with tobacco too fine to roll into cigarettes at the end of the day. I learned to periodically massage my tobacco to distribute fine (halus) or broken (rusak) tobacco. If I spotted larger stems or NTRM (non-tobacco related material) such as a piece of plastic in the tobacco, I placed the offending substance in a small plastic receptacle attached to the tobacco dispenser. I learned to press finer tobacco into the middle of each cigarette while stuffing a pinch of the longer strands into both ends with my index fingers. I pressed the tobacco in sideways with my right hand, then with both hands pulled the machine down, up, and down again, halting at the pen lines supervisors or workers inked onto my canvas belt when they set it that morning. I then brushed off loose tobacco with my left hand, plucked a paper out of the glue applicator with my right-hand fingers, transferred the paper to my left hand while rotating it so that the glue end faced downward, then rolled the tobacco into the paper with my right hand, moving my left thumb to the top of the roller and catching it against my left index finger. I rotated the cigarette around with my right thumb and index finger while moving my left fingers to the bottom of the cigarette. After tracing my Class and Gender Paternalism 73 right thumb down and back up the seam where the glue holds the paper together, I tossed the finished cigarette into a white plastic tub. At first, I struggled to achieve the correct conical shape and dimensions (eight millimeters in diameter at the inhalation end, ten at the burn end). Workers can check cigarette proportions by inserting them in sample holders attached to the tobacco dispenser; too small and they fall through, too stout and they sit high. When I stuffed a good amount of longer tobacco into the cigarette ends, they would be packed and sturdy enough that the shaggy ends could be cut nicely; with too little tobacco, the ends had holes and felt loose when trimmed. Initially, I also struggled with wrapping the paper such that the seam met precisely at each end and around the yellow band; in quality control parlance, many of my early cigarettes were rejects because they were “out of alignment” (mencelek Jv, miring). Cigarettes with insufficient glue embarrassingly sprang open. Supervisors corrected my posture and movements and tucked stray hair into my cap. When I forgot to tuck my apron into my workstation, a supervisor chided me that tobacco would fall to the floor and become “waste” (she used the English word). When my shoulders tensed and I leaned inward while angling my left hand to catch the cigarette as I rolled it off the machine, supervisors reminded me to keep my body loose and relaxed (lemas) rather than closely following my hands’ motions. Supervisors also identified and eliminated superfluous hand movements. My sense of touch improved alongside my rolling ability, and I soon appreciated how relying on haptic rather than visual cues freed me to raise my head upright, relieving neck tension. With time and experience, my ability to pinch the correct quantity of tobacco and distribute finer and longer pieces improved. I could gauge the proper level of resistance when I rolled tobacco—too much made it tough to pull; too little and it would fly along too fast and freely. I gradually stopped making crooked-seamed rejects and enjoyed a sense of satisfaction when rolling went well—when the glue applicator produced a thin and even shadow of glue along the entire strip of each paper, when my cigarettes emerged firm and well formed—seams meeting perfectly, free of tobacco, and not sticky or wet with glue when I ran my thumb up and down them, ends shaggy with longer tobacco. By the end of my second week of rolling, I was making ninety-five cigarettes an hour. While I was taught to follow a conventional sequence of “correct” steps, workers typically evolved their own styles and incorporated shortcuts. For example, Nurul minimized her movements by taking extra time to scoop the correct amount of tobacco, whereas Dina used a swift initial scoop then rapidly added or subtracted tobacco. Dina could roll as many as five hundred cigarettes an hour. Nurul, who could roll six hundred an hour, rolled the tobacco down just once, not multiple times. Rather than brushing stray tobacco off the canvas belt with her left hand, she blew it away with an exhalation, intertwining her breathing and rolling rhythms. Like other rollers, she also omitted the step of holding the cigarette in a standing position and running her thumb up and down the seam. 80 Hand-Rolling Kretek turnover rates reach 5–7 percent, as workers frequently quit to care for children or try other factories. Turnover typically peaks after workers collect their holiday bonus at the end of Ramadhan. Factories with high turnover may have dozens of non-uniformed, closely supervised apprentice workers (magang) who earn a pocket-money (uang saku) pittance and can remain in apprentice status for up to one year.9 Sampoerna managers are supposed to ensure that TPO managers aren’t “naughty” (nakal) in taking advantage of this extremely low-wage class of workers. TPO workers face tougher quotas than Sampoerna’s factory workers. Rollers, for example, must produce at least 370 as opposed to 325 cigarettes an hour. Although a Sampoerna executive framed these higher targets as autonomously set by admirably ambitious and high-achieving TPOs, extracting more from workers who are paid less could instead be interpreted as a result of TPO subordination to Sampoerna that produces greater worker exploitation. In response to changing corporate strategies and fluctuating consumer demand, Sampoerna also demanded more production-line flexibility from TPOs than Sampoerna-operated factories. Whereas Sampoerna-operated factories exclusively produce Dji Sam Soe twelve-packs, TPOs produce Dji Sam Soe twelveand sixteen-packs, Dji Sam Soe Premium, Panamas Kuning, Sampoerna Hijau, and “Marlboro Crafted,” a hand-rolled white cigarette twelve-pack that Sampoerna launched in November 2020 in Sumatra. Sampoerna’s president claimed that Sampoerna-run factories produce only Dji Sam Soe twelve-packs because they represent the company’s core product and historical pride, leaving TPOs to cover the company’s hand-rolled brand spectrum and experiments. Prapto offered a competing rationale: “It’s easy to introduce changes in TPOs because their unions aren’t very strong.” A quality assurance manager similarly observed with an indulgent smile that Sampoerna workers would yell in protest if asked to switch product lines, whereas vulnerable and less entitled TPO workers were in no position to resist. TPOs found it could take six months for workers to achieve target rates when brand changeovers required different skills and tools. Dji Sam Soe premium also requires a devoted air-conditioned “conditioning room” where cigarettes are dried, which alters the taste and drops their average weight from 2 to 1.97 grams. A TPO manager assured me that they were proud to be entrusted with this premium product but then admitted that it was mandatory for TPOs to show that they are loyal Sampoerna partners who stand ready to serve, whatever task they are given (sebagai mitra harus sikapnya siap, setiap tugas diberi oleh Sampoerna). The language of partnership that frames the relationship between Sampoerna and its TPOs, which are known as mitra produksi sigaret (MPS, cigarette production partners) in Indonesian, obscures the hierarchical relationship between the two in which Sampoerna surveils, ranks, and disciplines TPOs. A Sampoerna supervisor and four or more additional Sampoerna employees conduct administrative and quality control work on TPO shopfloors and undertake special projects. Disclosing a crack in the façade of benign mutualism, one Sampoerna supervisor Class and Gender Paternalism 81 confided in a low voice that overseeing a TPO was immensely burdensome (paling berat) and had earned him enemies. Sampoerna rates TPOs as bronze, silver, gold, or platinum and distributes rewards and punishments accordingly. Ratings reflect product quality, cost, safety, lost-time injury, security, industrial relations, and other “observable factors” such as corporate social responsibility (CSR) and worker satisfaction. Platinum winners should be outstanding in all parameters. Sampoerna issues performance scores at an annual meeting. Platinum and gold awardees are celebrated, while silver and bronze awardees go unmentioned; a TPO manager observed that the six bronzerated TPOs were probably ashamed. Gold and platinum winners were eligible for various awards that were supposed to motivate workers such as a drinking water tap system, a fifty-two-inch TV, LCD projector, laptop, uniforms, and panaboard (electronic whiteboard). More importantly, Sampoerna favored platinum and gold winners for larger contracts. Observing that they had enjoyed some overtime that week, one TPO director turned to his Sampoerna supervisor and obsequiously thanked him for the favor. He coldly responded, “Achieve gold status, and you’ll get even more.” In Yogyakarta, a manager preened that his TPO was Sampoerna’s favorite because they liked to be relaxed but also pursue their targets (santai tapi mengejar target). TPOs feed Sampoerna data on their production and quality indicators on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. In competing for most-favored factory status, TPOs often reproduce or mimic the programs and amenities of Sampoerna factories, replicating the lean managerial ideology, hiring professional DJs or music programming complete with jingles, and hosting special celebrations and events for workers (Kartini Day and Earth Day, traditional dress competitions and aerobics competitions), and sponsoring CSR activities.10 Accompanied by cheerful music, TPO videos showcase these activities and awards and incorporate images of food stalls and of signs labeling rental units as full to illustrate the local economic stimulus or multiplier effect created by their factories. TPO managers have also developed programs tied to “key performance indicators”; some workers are rewarded with basic household goods (e.g., rice, cooking oil) for weeding out non-conforming cigarettes or foreign matter from tobacco, for example, while others receive safe-driving lessons to reduce accident rates. TPOs compete for Sampoerna recognition of their videos, hygiene, quality, and productivity and for recognition of their industrial and environment, health, and safety innovations, which are showcased at Sampoerna’s annual convention. They even incorporate Sampoerna’s auspicious number via acts like scheduling a factory opening for the ninth day of the month. However elaborate their social responsibility programs or outstanding their quality indicators, TPOs in areas with higher minimum wage rates complained that they were uncompetitive because production costs factored so heavily into performance evaluation. “Labor made up 80 percent of our factory’s production costs,” a Jombang manager complained. “Yogyakarta factories can produce 82 Hand-Rolling Kretek 2.5 packs for the same cost as a single pack in Mojokerto!” Sampoerna pressured TPOs to keep minimum wages low by, for example, joining the Indonesian Business Association (Asosiasi Pengusaha Indonesia or APINDO) and exercising their influence as members. The Jombang TPO vigorously pursued this avenue of influence, while a Ngantang manager admitted that they belonged to the organization but exercised no meaningful influence over it. Pitting the TPOs against each other not only emphasizes their subordination to Sampoerna but also adds downward pressure on workers’ wages. Besides helping suppress regional minimum wage levels, Sampoerna mobilizes TPOs to lobby the government against tobacco control policies such as raising excise taxes, protecting nonsmokers, and restricting advertising. Prapto explained that cooperatives, which are supposed to distribute their earnings, made for particularly appealing lobbyists: “If Sampoerna complains about the excise tax, the government can dismiss us, saying ‘You’re just a big company.’ But if you get a bunch of cooperatives that go to the government and talk about the impact that a rise in excise tax will have on them, the government must listen.” Some TPOs derived appeal from their religious or aristocratic associations. One of the Jombang and Ploso factory owners served as a teacher (kyai) at a local religious school from which the plant recruited fresh graduates as workers, and he projected the authority of a pious and successful Muslim businessman (Hoesterey 2015; Rudnyckyj 2010). The last TPO that Sampoerna established in 2012 was tied to Yogyakarta’s popular Sultan Hamengkubuwono. His first daughter, Gusti Kanjeng Ratu Condrokirono, became a director, and two of her sisters held senior positions in the company.11 Despite the advantages they offer, from low labor costs and production-line flexibility to political capital in lobbying efforts, Sampoerna turned to its contractors to absorb the ongoing reduction in market demand after initially closing two company-operated factories in 2014. Rather than closing any TPOs, Sampoerna shrank their “packets” or order sizes by 27.5 percent. The Ploso factory, which used to manufacture over fifteen million cigarettes a week and sometimes subjected workers to brutal sixty-one-hour workweeks, was reduced to nine million sticks a week. My assumption that massive layoffs must have ensued was confounded by large signs in front of Yogyakarta factories announcing hundreds of open positions. Managers explained that high turnover could take care of shrinking their workforce when order reductions hit. Managers and union representatives in factories with high wages and low turnover offered divergent accounts of how they reduced their workforce. In Ngantang, union representatives claimed that the early retirement offer (pensiun dini sukarela) was so appealing that workers clamored to take it, so the union determined which workers economically needed to keep their jobs.12 In other higher-wage TPOs, union representatives admitted that as they pursued a 10 percent workforce reduction they sought to oust workers who produced below quotas and attracted peer resentment. Class and Gender Paternalism 83 In some TPOs, workers responded to the loss of overtime by displaying their attachment to the commodity. At the Jombang TPO, workers took home a pack of Sampoerna Hijau kretek each week for their spouses, sons, or brothers, with the cost automatically deducted from their weekly wage. A union representative in Ngantang told us that her husband, a middle school physical education teacher, smoked Sampoerna Hijau at her request. Some TPO consumer cooperatives also sold cheap cartons of Sampoerna cigarettes and ran programs that allowed workers to earn points on purchases of the brand they manufactured (with product coded from other factories to avoid accusations of factory theft) that they could redeem for branded T-shirts, thermoses, ashtrays, and lighters. Amid the hand-rolled market decline and the increasing precarity of TPO jobs, Sampoerna continues to extract value from rollers and their families, as both producers and consumers. SUPERVISING QUALITY, QUANTITY, AND SOLIDARITY As those immediately above workers in the factory hierarchy, supervisors constitute the human frontline of speed and quality control and can inspire fondness and loyalty or apprehension and dislike. Most workers interact minimally with the unit coordinator and factory manager, by whom they would prefer to go unnoticed. Workers pointed out a camera affixed to the unit wall that afforded the factory manager a 360-degree view of the shop floor and surveillance powers akin to those depicted in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Quality control lab technicians have a distanced relationship with workers since they primarily judge their anonymized products based on company standards. Sampoerna assesses everyone in this chain, from workers to team leaders, lab technicians, radio DJs, and factory managers, whom Sampoerna evaluates by comparing the quality, speed, and unit cost across factories. Ideally, no one should escape the dragnet of performance evaluation and continuous improvement. Historically, Sampoerna recruited supervisors (mandor) from the ranks of ordinary workers, so many had low levels of formal education. One supervisor began working full time in a cigarette factory when she was ten, joined Sampoerna at thirteen, and was already promoted to supervisor at the age of sixteen. Another began at kretek manufacturer Grèndèl when she was twelve, later moved on to Bentoel, and joined Sampoerna at the age of twenty. In the past, she acknowledged, supervisors were selected by their friends in a “family system” (sistem keluarga). Classified as daily workers, supervisors use badges to check in and out of each workday and track their one-hour breaks with punch cards, often splitting the allotted hour into two shorter breaks: one to eat a meal and one to perform midday prayers that quota-chasing pieceworkers forgo. After acquiring Sampoerna, PMI sought to dismantle the informal system for supervisor selection, which was vulnerable to charges of nepotism, by introducing new criteria (including a high school degree), openly advertising positions, 84 Hand-Rolling Kretek allowing anyone who met the criteria to apply, and subjecting applicants to standard testing procedures. PMI also instituted annual or biannual rotations of supervisors to different units and teams, whereas previously supervisors had remained with the same workers for five years or longer. A rolling supervisor told me the rotations gave them a fresh perspective, although it was always sad to leave behind workers whom they knew down to their strengths and weaknesses. Workers are organized into teams—with supervisors acting as team leaders—in a structure that facilitates oversight, assignment of praise and blame, and a sense of collective rather than solely individual responsibility and competition. This would sometimes motivate individuals to work hard on days when they otherwise felt sluggish, although it could also make those who fell short an undesirable drag on team performance. In my unit, sets of forty-eight rollers and sixteen cutters formed teams with two supervisors assigned to each, while thirty-three packers formed a team with one supervisor, as did twelve labelers. Team leaders halted work to hold short pep (semangat) sessions every Thursday morning before Radio Sampoerna began broadcasting. Encircled by workers, the supervisor discussed their performance goals, achievements, and challenges and led cheers on themes having to do with product quality. One week, Bu Mainu praised her rolling and cutting team for achieving the second-best quality index, adding that if they reached number one, they would receive an extra 20,000 rupiah in their weekly pay. I later asked if her team often performed so well. Mainu shrugged, responding that workers were humans, not machines, so their work was sometimes good, sometimes bad. Workers judged supervisors on how they used their position and authority. Some earned appreciation by contributing to workers’ output. When a labeler left her workstation, Narti often occupied the vacant stool and labeled packs until she returned, and labelers praised her as kind (baik) and familial (seperti saudara). When Titin observed a packer struggling to make her quota, she sometimes stood beside her for a while and prepared sets of twelve cigarettes, correctly arranged. Packers contrasted Titin with an earlier, evil (jahat) supervisor who had sapped their enthusiasm and desire to work. Rollers contrasted a modest, hard-working, and diligent (sregep Jv) supervisor who was approaching retirement with another whom they accused of being engrossed in her phone and ignoring workers. If she had nothing better to do, they said, she should help cutters by bundling cigarettes and performing quality control. Workers speculated that supervisors who wore makeup and youthful, tight-fitting attire were morally suspect, enjoyed karaoke, and might be unfaithful to their husbands. The relationship between workers and team leaders—often familiar and friendly but fundamentally unequal— manifested memorably in an interaction between a cutter and a supervisor who were playfully smacking each other’s bottoms until the cutter jokingly yelled “Assault!” (Pelecehan!). Workers also judged supervisors on their approach to tracking and rationing material supplies like tobacco, glue, cigarette papers, packing paper and cardboard, Class and Gender Paternalism 85 and particularly excise stamps. Workers disliked it when supervisors were stingy (pelit), forcing them to scrounge around for supplies. Fearing a shortage, Nurul told me she used to hoard cigarette papers and hide them in her tobacco, which landed her in trouble. As Titin was stocking our glue at the start of one day, Arti loudly observed that everything is targeted and rationed, including glue, and that she would never be allowed to use glue in the wasteful and extravagant (boros) fashion that I did. Hearing Arti’s words, Titin gave her a generous second squirt of glue. Sampoerna urges pieceworkers to internalize responsibility for quality with red aprons emblazoned with “my best quality” (kwalitasku terbaik), but it also institutes multiple layers of external oversight and control. Some supervisors made examples of workers’ shortcomings with loud comments. During my day as a cutter, a supervisor materialized at my side while I was working through a batch that included one cigarette with a visible chunk of plastic and another with a tobacco stem so large it stuck out at both ends. Appalled, she marched over to the responsible roller, offending cigarettes held aloft for all to see, and roared at her, ensuring that her remarks would be widely heard. On another occasion, she loudly, albeit less sharply, reprimanded my neighbor for producing tiny cigarettes (rokok sampean cilik-cilik! Jv). Quality supervisors performed initial inspections on finished tubs containing six hundred cigarettes that cutters brought to their inspection station. They claimed that rollers used to make cigarettes however they liked, with minimal attention Figure 10. A supervisor inspects a roller’s kretek. Photo by author. 86 Hand-Rolling Kretek given to matters like weight. After PMI acquired Sampoerna, the company forced rollers to produce more standard cigarettes. From each tub, supervisors inspected two bundles of fifty, weighing them to ensure that they fell within the acceptable range (98–105 grams), examining burn ends for loose or insufficient tobacco (tipis), pulling off the wrapper and fanning out the cigarettes, and yanking those with oil spots, tobacco in seams, too little filling (gembos), tobacco sticking out (njebul, muncul), too little glue, or wrinkles (berkerut, lungset). They also checked individual cigarette circumferences. A supervisor showed me how a worker had accidentally wrapped a cigarette with two papers. If they found twenty rejects in a single bundle, they rejected the entire batch of six hundred. “We had one of those today,” a supervisor informed me, casually adding that it was no big deal for a fast roller, although even the fastest would face an hour setback. To track problems, supervisors tossed rejects in boxes labeled with rejection rationales. After tabulating them, supervisors ripped rejects open to recycle the tobacco. Workers feared being reprimanded (dipanggil, “called”) by a quality supervisor or, worse yet, the unit supervisor. Quality control also had a backstage lab dimension. Bu Sari intermittently appeared to pick up cigarette samples, which she placed in a plastic tub with a pink lid. Sari, along with five other jilbab-clad women, worked in an air-conditioned quality-control room. Their male supervisor occasionally ran shop-floor quiz competitions on quality-control themes, presenting winners with rewards like umbrellas and tote bags. I spent a morning observing inspections in the lab where technicians weighed and visually examined the burn and inhalation ends of the cigarette (ujung bakar, ujung hisap), rotated the cigarette in their fingers to check for wrinkles (guidelines illustrate low, acceptable, and high levels), and checked the seam for tears, insufficient glue, tobacco particles (guidelines specify the acceptable number and size of tobacco particles) and tobacco and clove oil spots (guidelines specify acceptable size and darkness of such spots). They enter numbers for all these variables into tables, generating a final cigarette score. Finally, they measure moisture content in a machine manufactured by German company TEWS. Sari insisted that quality-control ranking is directed at units rather than individuals, but critical scrutiny nevertheless fell on the latter. After Sari returned inspected cigarettes to the unit, the supervisor instantly called a packer to show her problems with the cigarettes she had packed, asking her to exercise more caution in the future. I felt that the worker was being upbraided, but Sari commented that the supervisor was providing motivation (memberi motivasi). Social interactions among workers help make repetitive high-speed factory work tolerable, and mutual help and reciprocity buoy those struggling to meet daily quotas. Rollers, for example, might make an extra fifty or one hundred cigarettes for a peer who falls behind. Similarly, while we were washing our tools, Ana, who typically achieved her quota with ease, told me she had labeled an extra hundred packs for her neighbors that day. On an occasion when speedy Arti had Class and Gender Paternalism 87 been assigned a reduced packing target because she had attended an environmental, health, and safety meeting as a worker representative (where she also won a prize glassware set), she gave multiple packs to her neighbors, dispelling potential envy. Because I was not subject to quotas, the modest quantity of cigarettes, packs, and cartons I produced were also subject to redistribution. Supervisors replaced rejected cigarettes with my output when it was fit for sale (layak dijual) and occasionally slipped some to workers who were behind. In packing and labeling, my supervisors distributed my finished packs and cartons among workers in their group or had me hand them out directly. Workers also showed generosity toward one another in the canteen, where I typically joined rollers’ 9:00 a.m. “lunch” breaks. Workers often bought tea and coffee for one another and stretched drinks by pouring a little for themselves into the saucer and handing the cup to a friend. (Although coffee is often seen as stronger and more appropriate for men, pieceworkers drank it to stay alert and chase quotas.) Workers spooned tasty food onto friends’ plates or dipped their spoons into a neighbor’s plate to sample meat, tofu, or vegetables. I was often on the receiving end of insistent hospitality, and Nia discouraged me from buying the cheap, tasty canteen food, bringing a full extra ration of her home-cooked food for me, especially the local tempeh specialty mendol that I was fond of. The polyclinic doctor cautioned workers, to no apparent avail, that such food sharing was unsanitary and transmitted contagious diseases. Workers’ lives intertwined beyond the factory walls. Some lived close to one another and commuted to work together, while those who lived further apart also entered one another’s home lives, particularly around family weddings, births, illnesses, and deaths. Group excursions and home visits (main ke rumah) were common after the shorter Saturday work shift. I joined one of these excursions, cramming into the rear of a battered SUV to go to Batu along with rollers and cutters in a small caravan of cars and motorbikes. We caught only brief glimpses of the ostensible object of our journey, a roller’s three-week-old granddaughter, who was nestled on her mother’s chest in a sarong sling. While workers’ husbands, who chauffeured us, sat on sofas and smoked in the front room, we sat on mats on the floor of the modest home, chatting and joking as workers took turns praying, ate a generous meal prepared by our hosts, and left with additional food packed into boxes. Managers looked to the workers’ union to ensure that solidarity among workers would not boil over into organized resistance. Workers in Sampoerna’s hand-rolled factories and their TPO counterparts belong to the Cigarette, Tobacco, Food, and Drink (Rokok, Tembakau, Makanan dan Minuman) sector of the umbrella All Indonesia Workers’ Union (Serikat Pekerja Seluruh Indonesia, or SPSI), which is a legacy of Suharto’s rule (1967–98).13 After violently suppressing more radical and militant unions in the wake of the Communist Party’s alleged 1965 coup attempt, the Suharto administration created the state-backed union that became SPSI to 88 Hand-Rolling Kretek depoliticize and demobilize labor. Throughout the Suharto era, the government invoked the specter of communism to discredit labor disputes and unrest and threatened labor organizers by branding them as communist (Hadiz 1998). SPSI union representatives in Sampoerna factories largely embraced managerial goals, negotiated modest changes in a professional and unthreatening fashion, shared information with managers, and opposed both labor radicalism and tobacco control as existential threats to factory livelihoods. The union leadership is dominated by daily-wage workers who often have different interests from, and supervisory authority over, the pieceworkers that constitute the majority the union is meant to represent. Union representatives insisted that pieceworkers are reluctant to assume leadership positions because the interruptions that accompany union service would make it hard to meet quotas. For daily workers, SPSI union positions can serve as a stepping stone to further promotion in the factory hierarchy. Projecting the union’s hallmark conservative, conciliatory, and nonconfrontational approach toward management, hand-rolled SPSI leaders in Kraksaan assured me that industry was safe there (kondisi industri aman) because workers never demonstrated (nggak pernah aksi) and knew to think twice before causing any trouble. They characterized their union as quiet (nggak terlalu ramai-ramai) and adherent to the religious precept of discussing matters thrice before taking action. They invoked the state ideology of Pancasila to legitimate discussing and conferring (berunding) with managers rather than making demands (bukan tuntutan). Similarly, Malang leaders depicted the union as a bridge between workers and managers and explained that they adhered to the SPSI path, emphasizing mediation and consensus (musyawarah) and avoiding street demonstrations (tidak pakai cara turun jalan). SPSI leaders framed more independent and radical unions and approaches as existential threats, pointing to cases of “failed demonstrations” in which workers lost their jobs, suffered injuries, and had no one to cover their health care. “If Sampoerna were destroyed,” one asked, “where would we work? Our livelihoods [sawah ladang] are at Sampoerna, and we need to look after the company.” Based on surveys of other hand-rolling factories, Malang’s SPSI representatives were confident that they enjoyed pay and benefit packages that compared favorably to other factory workers. An SPSI representative at the Jombang contract factory even asserted that they had it too good, with a high regional minimum wage that was deterring other companies from setting up shop in industrial parks. SPSI trained union leaders in approved verbal communication techniques. At their annual wage and benefit negotiations with managers, which were held in moderately upscale hotels with Sampoerna covering food and lodging, union leaders showcased their research and professional skills with PowerPoint slideshows. The union gave management feedback (e.g., when new uniforms were too hot or uncomfortable) and requested improvements and greater recognition (e.g., for annual medical checkups, health benefits for spouses and children, cooperative Class and Gender Paternalism 89 shopping vouchers marking each five-year anniversary of a worker’s tenure, and batik uniforms for workers to wear once a week). In the Malang hand-rolling plant, I attended an inauguration ceremony for the new SPSI leadership that framed the kretek as a national commodity and positioned workers and managers in a mutually supporting rather than oppositional relationship. The seating arrangements, order of food distribution, speeches, and entertainment reflected the factory hierarchy by prioritizing managers over supervisors and supervisors over workers. Drawing on nationalist aesthetics in her speech, the new SPSI head underscored that the union leaders’ uniforms were made of batik, which, like kretek, is part of Indonesia’s cultural heritage. Another representative urged everyone’s participation in safeguarding quality to ensure that Sampoerna survived for their grandchildren. Clutching a bag emblazoned with “SAVE TOBACCO,” the elderly head of the Indonesian Tobacco Alliance AMTI gave a rousing speech. “Kretek have been smoked for hundreds of years,” he falsely proclaimed, “so if [the mandatory warning that] ‘smoking kills’ [rokok membunuhmu] were true, then Indonesia would have been finished off long ago.” Before managers, workers sang songs and performed traditional Javanese dances in elaborate makeup and dress. The event concluded with a lengthy photo session during which union representatives and managers pressed close for poses that reflected their harmonious and cozy relationship. With the hand-rolled commodity in decline, Sampoerna managers invoke the importance of labor-management solidarity against common external threats like public health regulations. SPSI leaders considered government lobbying as one of the union’s functions, and they had created banners, written letters to oppose excise tax hikes and tobacco import limits, and demonstrated against the health minister. A Kraksaan union leader said they also opposed regional laws requiring smoke-free areas and advertising restrictions, citing Bandung’s and Surabaya’s restrictions as examples to be avoided. A male union representative reminisced about the time when anyone could freely smoke anywhere and when people suffering a cough or sniffles smoked Dji Sam Soe to regain their health. Managers also enrolled unions to remind workers of rules against “gossip.” Managers regarded workers as emotionally volatile but also manipulable, credulous, and highly susceptible to gossip. The unit supervisor told me that agitators could easily lead on (memancing) workers. When the industrial relations director from Jakarta visited, he occupied my neighbor’s stool and told me that as someone in charge of many workers, he had seen how trivial issues could balloon into huge problems. In 2008, he claimed, workers and supervisors went on strike over the rumor that Putera Sampoerna was going to pay them each thirty-five million rupiah. Sampoerna found a worker-whisperer in Pak Salim who had a background in economics, worked for Sampoerna for thirty-two years, and continued to consult after retirement at the request of senior executives. He boasted about his knack for quelling demonstrations, which he had deployed in both Sampoernaand contractor-run factories: 96 Hand-Rolling Kretek patently at odds with Sampoerna’s hand-rolled factory closures and reduced production amid hand-rolled market declines that could not be attributed to, or forestalled by improvements in, cigarette quality. The end of Titin’s own relationship with Sampoerna loomed, too, as she neared the retirement age of fifty-five. Although managers professed to me their deep and abiding concern for the welfare of hand-rolling ladies and tended to grow somber and even tear up when recalling the 2014 plant closures, the Sampoerna ads that festooned the streets and buildings outside the factory exclusively and unabashedly promoted the company’s machine-rolled brands. When I asked a marketing manager if he thought Sampoerna was doing enough to support the hand-rolled brands, he gave me a hard look and asked, “Pardon me, but when was the last time you saw a young person smoke a hand-rolled kretek?” Marketing experts insisted that any attempt to turn the venerable Dji Sam Soe into a youthful brand (diremajakan) would be folly. When I asked union leaders about diminishing marketing of their brands, they explained that managers told them Sampoerna must protect all its segments and cannot jeopardize one to promote another. The union left it to managers to determine what was best (kita serahkan), since they knew better (mereka yang lebih tahu, berkompeten). From managers’ perspective, it was best if hand-rolled workers attributed job threats to a common external enemy (public health policies like higher taxes and smoke free areas) rather than to company decisions to invest in the profitable machine-rolling sector. Managers might slow the rollout of labor-displacing technologies like the new rolling machines or push cutters in some of its factories, but the rule of brand marketing budgets proportional to market volume would not be violated for the hand-rolled brands.18 This created a selfreinforcing cycle of increasing marketing and sales for machine-rolled cigarettes. As it scaled back hand-rolled marketing budgets, Sampoerna broke off prior relationships. Stall and restaurant owners complained that Sampoerna Hijau had reduced or terminated sponsorship fees.19 Mask makers, dancers, and traditional snack makers stopped getting Dji Sam Soe contracts. I asked Tina, a marketing manager in Jakarta, what kinds of Dji Sam Soe marketing events remained. In Jakarta, she explained, Sampoerna had installed lounges in rest areas around bus terminals, train stations, and busy roadsides during Lebaran, the festive period at the end of Ramadhan when four to five million residents exited the city to visit relatives (mudik). Taking advantage of massive traffic jams that could turn an eighthour journey into a two-day odyssey, Sampoerna provided free coffee, massage chairs, mobile phone charging, tents for resting, and “engagement” (approaches and offers from sales promotion girls). Rather than pursuing market growth, Tina explained, Sampoerna was focusing on consumer retention and loyalty with programs like Maha Karya (masterpiece), which invited smokers to describe their smoking experience and recalled the testimonials used in Sampoerna’s initial print ads. Such competitions extract information for customer databases and potential brand promotion ideas. Around one hundred winning smokers toured the Class and Gender Paternalism 97 House of Sampoerna in Surabaya and went to Borobudur one year and Mount Bromo another to celebrate “the greatness of Indonesia.” By embracing nostalgic themes of tradition and the past, Sampoerna quietly acknowledges Dji Sam Soe’s limited future. Most pieceworkers’ husbands smoked, but given its expense, they rarely used the Dji Sam Soe brand their wives made. Many smoked machine-rolled brands with synthetic filters that impart the false impression of being safer. When I visited Bu Nurul’s home, she surprised me by pulling a pack of Dji Sam Soe off the top of her refrigerator. She had bought them to try to get rid of her husband’s stubborn cough, reflecting the specious claim that once appeared on the back of packs: Dji Sam Soe contain an “anti-cough sauce” that clears air passages and are a good alternative if other cigarettes lead to coughing (Kartajaya 2005, 354–55). Workers were also influenced by the graphic warnings about diseases, death, and bystander harm on cigarette “wrapping paper.” When I responded “no” to queries about whether my husband smoked, workers remarked that this was smart because smoking was a waste of money and bad for your health. The Sampoerna Hijau mung bean drink advertisement discussed at the outset of this chapter ends with a scene in which the male smokers are accosted by their wives who are furious with their absentee, nonproductive husbands. Beneath its humor, the commercial reflects an uncomfortable truth about the lives of female pieceworkers like Bu Nurul and her colleagues: while ongoing masculine kretek addiction provides—at least for now—the source of their employment, it also poses an economic and existential threat in their homes. 98 3 Machine-Rolling Kretek Gamification and Individualization What cultural ideals and social relations prevail in the mechanized factories that are the source of over three quarters of the clove cigarettes produced today? Yusuf, a production technician, claimed that culture was absent from rule-governed mechanized factories, lamenting, “What was great about Sampoerna in the past was Dji Sam Soe. Now it’s practically disappeared.... If we’re talking about culture, what built Sampoerna’s culture, it came from SKT [hand-rolled kretek]. In SKM [machine-rolled kretek] there’s just tight regulations.” Yusuf’s view of Sampoerna’s mechanized kretek factories as cultural voids was understandable. Humans are strikingly sparse in these cavernous buildings without natural light, dominated by imported machines that dwarf workers and drown out regular speech. Imported managerial techniques accompany imported machinery. Governing values and technocratic regulations are referred to in English, underscoring their foreign status: standard operating procedures (SOPs), safety, quality, volume, continuous improvement, best practices, lean manufacturing, key performance indicators (KPIs). Managerial orthodoxies often clash with practical realities; Sampoerna promotes “work-life balance” while imposing grueling shift schedules, for example, and emphasizes “safety” procedures while making a commodity that kills its consumers. There is little sense of the indigenous cultural and artisanal value that provokes kretek nationalist rhapsodizing in the hand-rolled context. From an anthropological perspective, however, imported managerial ideologies—as well as managerial techniques rooted in Indonesia’s domestic history—are also cultural artifacts, and understanding their attraction and uptake requires explanation, as do the social bonds and divisions among workers, managers, and machines. Among Sampoerna’s methods of securing worker consent to difficult and deleterious working conditions, foremost on employees’ minds are the relatively Gamification and Individualization 99 high pay and generous benefit packages the company offers in a tough labor market. Beyond these obvious material benefits, however, mechanized factories employ a range of other strategies for enrolling and controlling labor. Managerial techniques seek to capture increased value by gamifying labor—in doing so, transferring responsibility for factors like workplace safety on to individual employees. Workers’ collective power is further undermined not only via the factories’ use of machines but also by the unions that represent workers across Sampoerna’s facilities. And both inside and outside of the wage relation, Sampoerna extracts value from their employees not only as producers but also as consumers of cigarettes. Since acquiring Sampoerna, PMI has greatly expanded the company’s investment in imported technologies and managerial practices, building on Putera Sampoerna’s modernization efforts and construction of the Sukorejo facility in East Java in stages in the late 1980s and 1990s (as recounted in the introduction). PMI’s 2008 investment of $250 million in the new Karawang facility near Jakarta in West Java meant doubling down on kretek mechanization and conventional combustibles. It also mitigated disaster risk after supply and distribution lines to the company’s Sukorejo plant were significantly disrupted by a fossil fuel industry–provoked mud volcano that erupted in Sidoarjo in May 2006 and proceeded to spew for over a decade.1 In 2013, PMI consolidated its operations when it built a white cigarette factory adjacent to the Karawang kretek plant and transplanted machinery and workers from the PMI factory in Bekasi (on Jakarta’s eastern outskirts). Whereas the Sampoerna plant in Karawang produces only three kretek brands—A-Mild, Magnum Blue, and Magnum Black—by 2015, the Philip Morris Indonesia (PMID) plant was producing 387 distinct products (stock keeping units or SKUs) under brands like Marlboro, Alpine, Chesterfield, Basic, L&M, Next, Peter Jackson, and Richmond. PMID sold 78 percent of its product domestically in 2015 and exported 22 percent, producing for thirty-one markets altogether, each of which had its own rules.2 A quality assurance (QA) supervisor declared, “With PMID white cigarettes we have many more customers and they have higher standards. We have to uphold higher quality standards, expend extra effort.” Similarities in layout and operations across the Sampoerna and PMID factories, which are internally divided into primary factories for tobacco processing and mechanizing blending and secondary factories for making and packing cigarettes, illustrate how mechanized kretek production is closely modeled on white cigarette manufacturing. As part of its effort to expand the market for “smokefree” tobacco and nicotine products, in late 2022 PMI opened a new US$186 million manufacturing facility in Karawang to produce HEETS brand tobacco sticks (used with its IQOS device) for domestic and Asia Pacific distribution. This chapter draws on tours of Sampoerna and PMI’s Sukorejo and Karawang factory facilities and interviews, many of which were conducted by Shahnaz and Fatma, who assisted me with this research. 100 Machine-Rolling Kretek THE FORTUNE AND MISERY OF KRETEK CAPITALIST EXPLOITATION Economist Joan Robinson’s (2021, 41) observation that “the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all” is salient for millions of Indonesians who live in a cash-based capitalist economy with growing unemployment and underemployment. In Sampoerna’s mechanized factories, worker expressions of appreciation and gratitude for their jobs—and broader public sentiment about the economic importance of Indonesia’s tobacco industry—must be understood against a national and global backdrop of jobless growth, economic precarity, underemployment, stymied middle-class aspirations, and swelling ranks of the educated unemployed (Ferguson 1999, 2015; Li 2017; Millar 2014; Muehlebach 2012; Standing 2011). Being exploited by kretek capitalism, and Sampoerna/PMI in particular, entails both specific fortunes and specific miseries. Factory hierarchies are rigid and gendered, grueling shift schedules lead to poor health and social isolation, and some workers are ambivalent about the moral status of their work. Despite their many understandable misgivings, for most workers, being exploited by a large, stable, and prestigious cigarette manufacturer remains preferable both to unemployment and to lower-paid employment elsewhere and enables them to meet moral obligations to family members, experience a rising standard of living, and plan for the future. Sampoerna recruits and hires employees into a labor hierarchy that broadly distinguishes between outsourced labor, permanent daily workers, monthly workers, and managers. It outsources many support functions, such as security, cleaning, food services, and health-care services, while limiting its employees to core production functions as required by the government (Ford 2013, 237). Sampoerna uses headhunting agencies to recruit managers and fills its lower ranks by advertising openings on the popular website Jobstreet, setting up stands at general public and college job fairs, and recruiting recent graduates from nearby vocational high schools (Sekolah Teknik Menengah, Sekolah Menengah Kejuruan). Candidates must pass Sampoerna’s written test, interviews, and health test. The worker hierarchy turns those at the apex into a labor aristocracy and helps preclude the emergence of a common identity and solidarity that would put organizational pressure on management. The tantalizing possibility of individual advancement across grades and categories (e.g., from contract to permanent worker) also dissuades workers from challenging management. “Daily workers” receive lower pay and enjoy fewer privileges than monthly workers and are identified as “general workers” or under more specific titles, such as forklift operator, that require technical training and testing. In tobacco warehouses, forklift operators are accompanied by lower tier “checkers” who ensure safety and crosscheck that items being loaded or unloaded bear the correct barcode labels. On the shop floor, daily workers assist monthly workers with tasks like stocking, cleaning, neatening supplies, and manual feeds. Monthly workers are in turn organized into Gamification and Individualization 101 a technical-skills hierarchy that rises from operators to production technician or “prodtech,” maintenance mechanics and electricians, up to those with supervisory responsibilities such as team leaders and managers. Whereas monthly workers enjoyed access to cafeterias with extensive buffets and foosball tables to encourage interactive play, daily workers either brought food from home or purchased it from a limited canteen. This had the effect of reinforcing hierarchies; one daily worker, who described eating as a basic matter of refueling, was teased by colleagues for his monotonous diet of canteen meatball soup (bakso). Uniforms further underscored distinctions between workers, with Sampoerna hiring tailors to customize beige and batik uniforms for monthly workers and issuing daily workers polo shirts and black slacks in standard sizes. Gender influences the experience of kretek capitalist exploitation in mechanized factory jobs that are gender polarized and favor men overall. Daily workers conducting quality checks in the print pack factory were all women, whereas warehouses were overwhelmingly staffed by men. Quality assurance was more gender balanced, while machine operation and maintenance was masculinized. Ani, a female production technician who had operated packing machines for five years, reflected, “Women aren’t as strong as men but must try to be equal.” In her experience, gender differences in strength were insignificant, since most tasks on heavily automated machines could either be performed solo or necessitated two workers, regardless of strength. She was very nervous initially about handling machine keys (pegang kunci), breaking out in a cold sweat and working slowly. “Women Figure 11. Filter machine production technician and daily worker. Photo by author. 102 Machine-Rolling Kretek tend to be more detail oriented. Thankfully there was another trainee who took even longer than me although he was a man.” She reflected on her longer-term experience: “There’s a tendency to underestimate women and treat them as inferior [suka minder]. [Male] colleagues will say, ‘Just let me do it!’ [biar saya aja] I let them sometimes!” A primary-team leader insisted that the company did not discriminate based on gender, but he naturalized the dominance of male workers by claiming that they were better suited to the enormous (gede-gede) leaf and clove processing and blending machines in primary with their tanks and pipes, where monitoring often required scaling tall ladders and the odor was powerful. Appealing to gender stereotypes, he claimed that smaller machines in the kitchen amid flavorant sacks or the rolling and packing machines in secondary were more appropriate for female workers. In particular, gender could shape interactions that crossed departmental lines. Ika, a female QA technician, was often in the uncomfortable position of instructing more senior male employees to halt their machines. Whereas production workers regarded maintenance workers as partners in keeping machines running, QA always threatened to slow things down. Quality might trump volume as an official company value, but QA structurally favored the former and production the latter. As a QA technician working in the print pack factory, Ika was responsible for inspecting products on the floor and making appropriate and timely determinations about whether they were fit for market release. During afternoon and night shifts, she often had to decide without consulting a QA engineer or supervisor, since they typically went home by 5:30 p.m. Sampoerna tried to set a narrow tolerance zone for defects and to offer clear guidance, but there were always gray areas and multiple factors to weigh. Implementing technical knowledge about defects necessitated her social skills, and she worked to be nice yet authoritative with production employees so they would take her concerns seriously. She performed random inspections on pallets once every two hours, initiated investigations if she discovered defects, and worked with production technicians to devise corrective actions to ensure that they would not recur. She had to cross-check to ensure that the number of reported and actual defects matched. On the floor, she was known as “Miss Hold” because she often put products “on hold” with a yellow stamp (red stamps indicated rejects). Indra, a male QA supervisor, acknowledged that a tough aspect of the QA technician’s work was that they “need to face lots of production workers alone. There are lots of different characters and attitudes among production workers. Some readily accept feedback, others prefer not to hear it or actively oppose it.” He claimed that he had developed a successful approach by making “an effort to interact with them, befriend them, hang out with them, join them when they’re eating a meal together even though we’re not in the same department. People are more willing to accept suggestions from someone close who they already know, rather than having a stranger suddenly make suggestions or blame them because their product is substandard.” Making these social overtures among men would be easier for Indra than for Ika, who Gamification and Individualization 103 would have to cross gender lines and whose motives for approaching male workers might be subject to speculation. In contrast to Sampoerna’s flexible requisitioning of overtime labor in handrolled factories to meet high market demand or take advantage of lower excise tax rates, shift work is a steady feature of certain shop floors in mechanized kretek factories. Prolonging the working day, according to Marx (1992, 367), was but a palliative to quench capitalism’s “vampire thirst for the living blood of labour”; to overcome individual physical limits to being exploited night and day, capitalists developed shift systems that enabled the appropriation of labor twenty-four hours a day and ensured that expensive machinery would not sit idle. Sampoerna’s shift demands were tied to mechanized processes and capacities, which meant that a higher position in the labor hierarchy would not necessarily protect workers from shift demands just as a lower position would not necessarily expose them. Logistics and the tobacco and clove warehouses operate a single day shift from Monday through Saturday and close on Sundays, with workers expected to complete tasks within normal hours and, barring special circumstances, to avoid overtime. Other departments operate double shifts or around-the-clock triple shifts to continuously produce cigarettes, demanding the presence and labor of daily workers, production technicians, maintenance engineers, QA technicians, and contracted cafeteria and medical support staff. The primary tobacco leaf–processing side of the Sampoerna and PMID factories runs a morning and an afternoon shift, only occasionally adding a third to cope with a problem or high demand. In the print pack and secondary factories, four groups of workers rotate through three shifts. After five days on the morning shift (6:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.), workers get one day off, followed by five days on the night shift (10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m.) and two days off, five days of afternoon shift (2:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.) and two days off, then back to the morning shift. The single day off after the morning shift, as well as the various holidays, mean that which days workers have off keep changing and only occasionally correspond to weekends when friends, spouses, and children are also off from work or school. For their grueling schedules, these “4G” (group) workers receive an extra allowance. Researchers have found that shift work increases occupational injury risks, leads to sleep deprivation, impairs mental health, disrupts social and family life, may lead to preterm births and low birth weight outcomes for pregnant workers, is associated with gastrointestinal and cardiovascular disorders, and is a probable carcinogen.3 “The antidote for sleepiness should be sleep,” Iqbal lamented, “but instead we drink coffee to stay awake.” In addition to chugging caffeinated drinks, workers counteracted sleepiness with vitamins and by washing their faces with cold water. Night-shift meals were accompanied by small milk cartons that were supposed to nourish workers. “We are encouraged to maintain work-life balance,” Wahid, an EHS manager, insisted. In reality, Sampoerna’s schedules and demands often precluded any healthy balance and placed responsibility on workers to regularize their eating and opportunistically rest and sleep. 104 Machine-Rolling Kretek In addition to shift work, the factory location distanced many workers from social connections and from their families, whose economic well-being often justifies their sacrifices. As a QA technician hired fresh out of his undergraduate degree program, Indra said he soon stopped hanging out with college friends due to his shift schedule. Many employees bought homes or rented in bedroom communities where neighbors interacted little and were not bothered by irregular comings and goings. Although Sampoerna made a shuttle available to take employees from the industrial park to residential areas, those who could avoided it because it was inconvenient for reaching their ultimate destinations and/or because they did not want to prolong an already long day. One claimed that the shuttle was typically populated by workers who lacked their own vehicle and by women, suggesting that the factory’s location and work hours could also deter female jobseekers and impose extra time costs on them. On motorbikes, workers risked daytime traffic jams and nighttime accidents. After dark, some coordinated with coworkers headed in the same direction to travel as a group for safety. Workers’ wives sometimes opted to live in houses elsewhere or with their natal families, especially after having children. These workers often stayed in simple rentals and visited their spouse and children every few months when their schedules permitted travel, which could be draining and expensive. Locally recruited workers were more likely to live with their families, but the bustle and inescapable demands of family life could also make rest and recuperation from shift work challenging. Other downsides of Sampoerna factory jobs were more specific to different arenas and tasks and exacted different mental and physical tolls on workers. As I detail further below, key performance indicators tailored to different jobs imposed a permeating stress on workers. Some tasks exposed workers to cumulative or catastrophic risk. In the clove warehouse, Julmansyah, a daily general worker who helped assemble production order loads, described lifting and hauling fiftyto fiftyfive-kilogram sacks as “hot, exhausting, painful, hard work. There is nothing good about it.”4 Tears streamed down his face when he started in the hot and fiercely pungent warehouse; masks had little effect on the clove scent that would fill his nose and throat. He had grown more accustomed to it over time but still found it overpowering each morning when they opened the warehouse, crying, “Ahhh, it really smarts!” (Aduh! Pedih bangat!). A warehouse assistant unkindly joked that these workers got their exercise at work and didn’t need to go to the gym. Sampoerna’s print pack factory is also hot and filled with a vile and choking chemical stench. The plant manager assured us that EHS had determined that the air quality was fine and cheerfully boasted that the heat had helped him shed five kilograms. Fire risk in print pack was exacerbated by pictorial health warning labels. Whereas the company-branded portion of the label thickly applied a limited number of colors, machines used electrostatic assistance to create these thin and delicate multicolored warnings. The primary and especially secondary and print pack shop floors are also marked by high noise volume. Earplugs are mandatory, albeit not Gamification and Individualization 105 consistently worn, in many of these spaces.5 In primary, the smell hovers between a deliciously sweet aroma and an overpowering synthetic stench. After inhaling this aroma day after day, one worker switched from smoking kretek to white cigarettes. Despite these specific and sometimes severe miseries, workers often felt fortunate to have escaped the threat of unemployment and to be exploited by Sampoerna with its relatively high wages, benefits, and possibilities for advancement. Daily general workers in secondary described their pay as “decent,” with one adding that it was an improvement over his previous job at Yamaha. Hasan, a filter prodtech who used to work at a bank and pursued a bachelor’s degree in informatics through night classes, doubled his wages when he joined Sampoerna. Fajar, a maker prodtech whose pay “sometimes fell short of the minimum wage” in previous factories, was elated “to secure a job that paid 50 percent more than the regional minimum!” Tomas, a daily general worker in primary, enthused, “There are opportunities [peluang] at Sampoerna. It’s not easy to land a job here. My parents are proud. It’s much better than me becoming a thug [preman]!” Jarod, a daily forklift operator in secondary, said that between his and his wife’s wages, his family could “live well and afford everything we need, but it’s human to always feel dissatisfied and want more. As the Karawang saying goes: small and insufficient, large but still not enough [kecil kurang, besar belum cukup].” Some workers experience moral ambivalence around the product they make and their working for a cigarette company, although others confidently pronounce their work as “good and halal.” After Yusuf completed a two-year contract in Batam working for an electronics firm in laptop assembly, he was interested in getting hired by a company like Nestle. “I didn’t want to work for a cigarette company,” said the maker prodtech. “Then a friend explained Sampoerna’s compensation structure, and I realized it was the most competitive job. Some colleagues at Sampoerna say it’s haram, but they still work here. They want to leave, but it’s hard because of their wages.” Like many male workers, Yusuf was himself a smoker with firsthand experience of the downsides of smoking. These and other drawbacks of the work, though, are for many workers weighed against the covetable material advantages of a Sampoerna job in the context of Indonesia’s difficult labor economy. Beyond the obvious draw of relatively high wages, mechanized factories employ a range of other strategies for enrolling labor and for controlling workers once they have first been enrolled. WORKER GAMES AND CORPORATE GAINS Sampoerna gamifies the workplace to more effectively extract value from workers and align their activities with company goals such as making cigarettes faster and more cheaply. In Hon’s (2022) critical appraisal, workplace gamification is often introduced under the pretext of making work more fun and fulfilling, but entails uncreatively layering “points, badges, rewards, and leaderboards on top of 112 Machine-Rolling Kretek forensic accounts of incidents and injuries that blame workers (Did someone bypass a sensor? Fail to store solvents in the flammable materials cabinet? Leave a veil dangling or long hair loose? Disregard prescribed work postures and lifting procedures? Neglect to wear or properly fasten their personal protective equipment?). This directs attention away from the intense time pressure and exhausting shift schedules under which they labor to continuously produce cigarettes. MACHINE RELATIONS If managerial strategies focused on gamification and safety procedures have the effect of inculcating a sense of individual responsibility on the part of each worker, a related series of strategies bring about a complementary outcome: undermining any sense of collective power among workers. This manifests perhaps most obviously in the factories’ compromised and compliant labor union, as discussed below, but also in the role that machines have come to play in these facilities. Rizal recalled that when the machines arrived at the Karawang plant in 2008, they were “exactly as the Creator made them,” evoking God (Mesin masih full murni dari Sang Pencipta). “We modified machines a lot so they’d meet our needs,” the primary factory team leader explained. “For example, if a machine was supposed to process ten tons an hour, could we enlarge it and raise it to fifteen tons? If we found something unsafe, could we add extra protection?” Maintenance performed some modifications in house, while Sampoerna contracted others out to vendors. Cloves undergo cleaning, conditioning, cutting, and drying on retrofitted tobacco machinery from Italy. Workers occasionally underscored how fully automated the machines were (serba otomatis), rendering humans marginal, mere accessories to the machines that performed the actual labor. Fajar, a cigarette maker prodtech, said the machines “appear complicated, but it’s all computerized, so you control it at the screen.” “Everything is standardized, all aspects of the product,” his colleague Yusuf affirmed, “so the machine runs its own quality checks. If it’s not up to spec, it will immediately shut down. It checks itself. Rejections are rare.” Eko concurred: “We program the machines to produce a certain quantity of cigarettes or packs, and they shut down once they reach that number.” But despite the promise of simple, error-free production that these technologies held out, a hierarchy of experts and a raft of protocols were involved in monitoring, cleaning, and repairing the complex and temperamental machines. If a cigarette maker broke down five or fewer times per week, according to a maintenance technician, they were doing their jobs well. Maintenance scheduled regular parts replacement and conducted both “predictive maintenance,” anticipating parts that were likely to break down (e.g., bearings that would need to be changed within a week), and “reactive maintenance,” in which service team members were called to respond to indicator lights or larger issues. Workers’ views of machines as Gamification and Individualization 113 largely self-operating and self-checking are troubled by the procedures, problems, and layered human oversight actually involved in keeping machines running, but this perspective is nevertheless suggestive of how such mechanized factory atmospheres can deemphasize the collective human labor involved. Before workers interact with the machines for which they are responsible, they spend a week or longer acquiring general and machine-specific training in the Technical Training Department. The department’s manager explained that Sampoerna’s machines, like a domestic refrigerator, might arrive with a manual, but it wouldn’t cover all the knowledge needed to run it. In training, they used simple, universal language (bahasa global) and a discussion-based approach to discover what workers understand. Questions are posed and then answered in short, concrete words: “What does a motor do? It converts electrical into mechanical energy.” Technical Training modules covered general knowledge, safety, troubleshooting, cleaning, and maintenance. After they leave the classroom, workers are typically assigned to work “in tandem” with experienced operators, gradually working more independently. Under the oversight of a more senior employee, Fajar recalled being allowed to work until he made a mistake or showed he didn’t understand what to do. Fajar was initially trained on filter machines, which he described as not only more dangerous than cigarette makers and packers but also more fraught: “Filters are very expensive so you get in trouble when you waste them. Once something went wrong with mine and there was a huge amount of waste. Fortunately, the investigation found that I wasn’t at fault.” Due to the speed Figure 12. Cigarette maker. Photo by author. 114 Machine-Rolling Kretek and scale of the machines, a primary supervisor observed, it was easy to spew out a “bus-sized” reject batch before workers detected any problem. After three months of “on the job training,” Sampoerna evaluates new hires and decides whether to make them permanent. Technical training issues certificates to workers who pass their training and evaluation as operators of specific machine types. In addition to new hires, the division also trains workers who switch functions or are seeking more advanced skills. Machine operators often described machines in warm, mutualistic, and intimate terms. Adib, a primary prodtech, explained that direct experience over time builds machinic awareness, using the English word aware. “It’s like knowing the voice of your child,” he elaborated, “when something is unusual, off, and the reason why. If it’s a new model, then you don’t yet know its voice, so you have to run it and get to know its voice first.” Ani also used a domestic analogy: “Packing machines are all the same, yet each feels different. Each has its own distinctive characteristics, its own tendencies towards problems. It’s like your own house, you want to keep it clean and orderly.” After spending five years with filter machines, Hasan knew the “small sounds” they made “where there’s trouble, like in the roller. And you know when they’re running well. Like a human, they need to be cared for, cleaned. I try to do my best for the machine. Before starting it, I do all my checks and cleaning.” Rizal explained that machines signal and communicate if one knows what to look for and listen to: “We know the flow of the machine. The longer we work with a machine, the easier it is to diagnose what’s normal and abnormal. The air pressure, the motor running. Maybe something’s going out, dak-dak-dak, dacit-dacit. We get the feeling, ‘This is going to have trouble.’ It’s nice. When machines change or act differently, we’ll feel it. Maybe it’s a dirty screen or the ventilator.” Some workers used the idiom of friendship to describe their relations with machines. Yusuf regarded them as animate “partners” with souls (nyawa): “At first the machines are confusing, but after a while we know what they’re like. ‘You’re acting like this, I need to adjust that.’ Like with a friend. ‘Oh, you’re doing this, so that’s what you want.’” He nevertheless kept machines’ instrumental purpose in sight: “They have to be respected and handled with care so that we will walk in sync together. They have to keep running so that we will achieve our target volume.” When one worker first encountered the machines, he felt clumsy and tense (kikuk, tegang). As his knowledge and confidence grew, he developed a more alert and mindfully vigilant (waspada) disposition: “We know which areas are dangerous.” While some workers compared machines to human companions, others appreciated their nonhuman qualities and found upsides to collaborating with machines rather than humans. A maintenance technician said, “Machines are easier to work with than people. They are inanimate objects [benda mati], so we can just decide what needs to be done. People have to be evaluated. ‘What’s this person like? How are they going to respond?’” Rizal was nostalgic for the machine-centered tasks he had engaged in before being promoted to team leader. “The keys, the oil, it’s a Gamification and Individualization 115 pleasure for me. I enjoy managing machines. They don’t get angry or feel offended. Managing people is different. Overseeing the performance of a machine is different to overseeing the performance of a person.” He fondly evoked his motorbike: “I care for it, routinely change the oil, wipe it down after it rains.” Such warm feelings toward machines, and the spatial and sonic dominance of machinery on the shop floor, do little to foster solidarity among workers. And neither, perhaps unexpectedly, does the labor union that workers belong to. THE ANTI-UNION UNION Daily workers in Sampoerna’s mechanized factories, like daily workers and pieceworkers in Sampoerna’s hand-rolled factories, belong to the cigarette, tobacco, food, and drink sector of the umbrella All Indonesia Workers’ Union (Serikat Pekerja Seluruh Indonesia or SPSI) introduced in chapter 2. They share the same pro-management attitude, aspirations for individual worker promotion, and staunch opposition to labor radicalism and tobacco control. The mechanized factory unions reinforced managerial efforts to make workers see themselves as agents of, and assume responsibility for, company productivity, quality, safety, and continuous improvement. The union examined worker performance, one leader explained, and asked, “What did we do wrong in 2015? For example, absenteeism. How do we adhere to disciplinary rules and prevent workers from reaching the stage where management sends them a warning letter?” The union advocated for workers accused of wrongdoing when charges seemed misplaced but supported management decisions if follow-up investigations found them guilty. Taufik, a Sampoerna union leader, cautioned workers to avoid the temptation to steal. “This is where we make our living. Don’t even try taking something small; it might become an addiction, and you’ll be tempted to take more, larger things.” For Idham, the leader of the Philip Morris Indonesia union, informing workers about procedures was a priority—for example, how small violations (pelanggaran kecil) could be recorded, lead to warning letters, and get raised in annual reviews as disciplinary problems. “If you’re absent, it will affect your work team’s performance. The team leader will want someone different.” Managers contributed resources to SPSI, and representatives reciprocated by routinely informing them about workers. Management funded events, such as their annual meeting and invited speakers, and furnished Idham with a laptop that he used to document and record meetings. Taufik claimed that the union successfully lobbied management for better facilities like coffeemakers and a tripling of transport and meal subsidies. The union also requested representation and involvement in factory planning as part of a bid to be more valued and given an active role rather than being seen “solely as the helpers of operators and prodtechs.” The unions submitted weekly reports to managers and met with them monthly, where, Idham explained, “mostly we discuss small issues [kasus ringan]. We tell 116 Machine-Rolling Kretek them what the problems are, and they send this information on to IR [Internal Relations] and HR [Human Resources] in Surabaya. We are the managers’ eyes and ears on the floor. If anything inappropriate is going on, we let them know. We are their spies.” The union leader declared, “I’m anti-demonstration. Let’s take actions that will benefit us and the company.” Union leaders pursued internal hiring and promotions for members and recommended promising candidates to managers for monthly positions. Workers promoted to monthly status were not unionized but automatically became members of the internal Bipartite Cooperation Institution (Lembaga Kerja Sama Bipartit or LKSB), which heard complaints and suggestions at monthly meetings attended by managers and monthly workers representing various departments. LKSB dealt mostly with uncontroversial matters like parking, safety, projects, rules, and department-specific issues, but a maintenance electrician noted it could be used to circumvent hierarchies, “If you raise an issue with your boss, they might not bring it up to their boss, but if it is brought to LKSB then it comes up at the meeting.” Union leaders framed their approach as the antithesis of that taken by contract workers for the Swiss firm ISS who demonstrated for several months in 2013 for higher wages and better positions. Sampoerna’s permanent workers had negative recollections of this period— long overtime shifts, sleeping at the factory, eating what was left at the canteen, getting stuck at work when they were sick, and being escorted by mobile brigade police after demonstrators beat up a manager. They blamed demonstrators for using violent tactics and making irrational demands for permanent workforce inclusion without submitting to Sampoerna’s testing process. ISS demonstrators were fired, but Sampoerna kept working with the firm. Sampoerna added several hundred new trainee positions for daily workers in August 2013, but only a minority of ISS workers successfully passed Sampoerna’s tests. Sampoerna sought to depoliticize permanent daily workers by encouraging them to form a local chapter of SPSI-RTMM under the guidance of a worker seconded from Sukorejo to the Karawang plant. Taufik explicitly contrasted their approach to that of the ISS union, which he claimed took advantage of the “hot culture” in Karawang: They were very reactive. They blew up small problems. They only regarded demonstrations and actions [aksi] as real and didn’t appreciate what can be accomplished by negotiating. We take a more familial approach and seek win-win solutions. Others call us the most aristocratic [priyayi] organization. The 2013 clashes made workers mistrust unions. We’re trying to build a positive union image. We engage in positive rather than negative activities, team sports not demonstrations and anarchy. Our product is positive. We want to create industrial peace and harmony.8 Managers appreciate our good intentions. Taufik seemed unperturbed by his union’s aristocratic reputation, and he embraced marketing language and goals (positive image and product) and the union’s success in pleasing managers. Gamification and Individualization 117 Most daily workers readily identified as SPSI members (anggota) but were circumspect about their knowledge of or investment in union activities, maintaining a scrupulously neutral and distanced stance. Tobacco warehouse workers said they were uninterested in union positions since this required being articulate (pintar omong) and dealing with lots of people (ngurusin banyak orang). Rudi, a daily worker in secondary, said he was traumatized after witnessing layoffs in the wake of demonstrations at his prior job at Yamaha. He felt that workers were doing well enough and appreciated a consensus-building approach (musyawarah). Tomas described himself as “passive” vis-à-vis the union. He put the division of labor in simple terms that emphasized the union’s managerial function: “I’m here, earning money, they coordinate us.” Philip Morris daily workers ascribed neither positive nor negative impact to the union, remarking that the leaders were the active ones who held meetings, and ordinary workers didn’t know what union leaders did. While they are reluctant to use street demonstrations or the idiom of struggle (berjuang) against the company, union representatives readily oppose government attempts to institute tobacco control measures aimed at protecting public health. Idham joined a group organized by Sampoerna’s public relations department that went to Sukabumi to express opposition to regional laws (peraturan daerah) introducing smoke-free zones. “If smokers start getting the impression that they’re not allowed to smoke over here and over there, they’ll be intimidated! It will also have an impact on cigarette sellers.” They left satisfied that the local (regency) government understood that if they created smoke-free areas in places like hospitals, they would need to invest in creating spaces where smoking was allowed. In his view, “The company has to prosper along with employees. It would be unfortunate if a clash occurred, or a production slowdown or other problems. We want stability for the company.” The union’s prioritization of company interests thus undermines both public health goals externally and effective collective action internally. SMOKING WORK Kretek capitalism exploits human labor in the classic Marxist sense and also exploits populations as consumers. And in certain circumstances, exploitation via wage labor is coterminous with exploitation via consumption: cigarette consumption is part of the work that unfolds at Sampoerna’s Sukorejo Science and Development Center. Machines perform a portion of the consumption work in the center’s ISOcertified (International Organization for Standardization) lab. The lab’s ISO certification and imported machines enabled Sampoerna to produce “export-quality” cigarettes that met international regulations, which also affect the additives and flavorants in Sampoerna products.9 Whereas Indonesia required only tar and nicotine testing, Brazil set limits on sugar content, Malaysia and Singapore on testable tar. A lab technician showed us how twenty cigarettes turned a dry white filter 118 Machine-Rolling Kretek pad dark brown and moist with the tar that coats smokers’ lungs. The Borgwaldt machine smoked twenty cigarettes in a rotating carousel, inhaling thirty-five milliliters per puff with a two-second puff duration and one-minute intervals between puffs (a Marlboro Red stick yielded seven or eight machine puffs). The lab also offered free testing services to various small domestic kretek companies. Helping these small competitors was a strategic move for two reasons. First, it encouraged companies to sell their product legally with excise tax and the required tar and nicotine labels rather than produce cheap black-market cigarettes that threaten to erode the market share of legal producers. (Sampoerna is a staunch and devoted ally in the state crusade against black market cigarettes.) Second, it fostered good relations and paved the way for Sampoerna to call on appealingly diminutive domestic companies to lobby the government on behalf of the industry. The center also requires humans and their lung capital (modal paru-paru) for product testing. In the center’s blender room, we encountered one young woman and eight men sitting around a table smoking, coffee pots in the background. The setting’s resemblance to a break room belied the fact that the lead blender, two junior blenders, and trainees were engrossed in professional smoking work. The trainees were undergoing a compressed one-year training during which they would learn from seasoned blenders, make field observations in tobacco cultivation from planting to harvesting, and then assume responsibility for unspecified “special projects.” Many of the cigarettes in the ashtrays were only partially smoked because, as with wine tasting, the purpose was to judge the product without getting intoxicated and dulling their senses. Didit, the lead blender, explained that mornings were the best time to taste. After lunch, their ability declined, although they kept working. He liked to inhale along the length of cigarettes before lighting up. Packs from different countries lay about; a manager joked that the fifty-pack from Australia adorned with an image of gangrenous flesh was a “family pack.” In contrast to the convivial scene of collective sensory work in the blending room, a second lead blender, whom the manager had to coax out to meet us, labored alone in his office behind closed doors. He looked unhealthy, and his body was misshapen. He carried out his blending duties without actually smoking anymore, having stopped in 2012 after a severe but unspecified illness, which he said had made it easy to quit. It was hard not to speculate that he had experienced a lifethreatening tobacco-related disease, but he nevertheless returned to his work, where his semi-sequestered presence served as a chilling reminder of smoking’s potential consequences. Sampoerna invited Sukorejo employees to volunteer for internal smoking panels at the center to help compare products and ensure taste consistency. Volunteers were rewarded with vouchers after serving for six months.10 When we visited the smoking panel room, one of the (lucky number) nine smoking booths was occupied by a worker. He typed his identity number into a keyboard and then received Figure 13. Smoking panel volunteer. Photo by author. 120 Machine-Rolling Kretek trial cigarettes, lighter, ashtray, crackers, and a small water container for stubbing out cigarettes. On the other side of the wall, two employees monitored the switchboard that lit up when it was time to dispense trial cigarettes or collect waste. The company once had a roster of over a hundred internal test smokers, but by 2015, it attracted fewer volunteers. Those who remained were increasingly drawn from lower employee ranks, reflecting class stratification in who smoked.11 Outside of formal testing, Sampoerna had ways of coercing and cajoling workers to smoke. A marketing consultant recalled that when Putera Sampoerna headed Sampoerna, he insisted that senior employees smoke Sampoerna products and that he tossed cigarettes at those who abstained during meetings. Taking a less bullying approach, company media like Sampoerna TV, which plays continuously in places like the spacious air-conditioned lobby of Sampoerna’s Surabaya Rungkut headquarters and the open-air workers’ canteen behind the building, screen Sampoerna/PMI-brand ads in addition to program updates, company news, and comical didactic segments on themes such as how to hold a good mentoring meeting. Sampoerna TV also featured a company campaign to drum up pride in—and consumption of—Sampoerna products. Mottoes included “I’m proud of Sampoerna” (Saya bangga Sampoerna) and “I’m proud of Sampoerna’s products” (Saya bangga produk Sampoerna). Employees paraded around offices in Sampoerna pride T-shirts (including Sampoerna president Paul Janelle, his T-shirt worn over his black uniform) and held signs aloft with declarations like “I’m not ashamed to smoke” (gak malu merokok). Sampoerna pride stickers adorned food vendors’ glass display cases in the canteen, too. The campaign thus countered the general public health shaming of smoking and disciplined workers who smoked nonSampoerna products to fall into line with their employer. A Sampoerna factory production technician reluctantly admitted that he smoked Djarum’s LA Lights, but he tried to make light of his disloyalty by saying that he switched around and was not a very active smoker, consuming only one pack every two days. Some workers who were happy to have their labor power exploited were tormented by their inability to withhold their consumer power. A Sampoerna factory worker whom we met at a café in Malang smoked ten Marlboros a day and pleaded for effective advice on quitting. He had tried hypnotherapy, which involved accessing memories of cigarettes that were not delicious, but he had failed to quit. He appreciated his job and its advancement opportunities for workers like him with low education levels, but he was desperate to quit the product he helped make. A supervisor at Sampoerna’s factory power plant was deeply disappointed when he discovered that his son, a first-year high school student, was spending his allowance (uang saku) on cigarettes. The adolescent met his parents’ scolding with silence. Hamzah, who chaperoned us around Sampoerna’s factory grounds, revealed that he had been a heavy smoker for years, consuming as many as three or four packs a day. He stopped after his third child, who had only recently begun talking, asked, “Why does father always smoke?” (Kenapa ayah selalu merokok?) Gamification and Individualization 121 In machine-rolled factories, Sampoerna has secured worker consent not only by offering relatively high pay in a tough labor market but also, just as importantly, via managerial techniques that magnify personal responsibility on the part of each worker and render collective organizing unappealing and ineffective. Sampoerna gamifies smoking and production-line work in ways that classify participation as voluntary fun or forms of self-improvement rather than labor. In the chapters that follow, we will see how Sampoerna adopts contests and games outside of its factory settings to recruit and exploit paid and unpaid branding, distribution, and consumption work. 128 Branding Kretek hallmark of elite political discourse under Suharto (Reynolds 1999, 87). Sampoerna went on to anoint itself the trendsetter and to accuse its competitors of being imitators (ikut-ikutan) in an “Others Can Only Follow” campaign that featured an assortment of adorable animated crustaceans, rabbits, and cows. A senior executive told me with false chagrin that Sampoerna’s use of animation had unfortunately led some to accuse the company of deliberately marketing to children. After retiring its crew of animated animals, Sampoerna attached A-Mild to the cause of political and social reform, or reformasi, which was catalyzed by antiSuharto protests in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Youth, especially middle-class college students who rapidly adopted activist practices and styles, saw themselves as central protagonists of the movement that toppled Suharto in 1998 after thirty-two years of authoritarian rule (Strassler 2010). Despite Sampoerna’s long-standing deference to and complicity with state authority, its new ads constructed the A-Mild brand as anti-authoritarian. An “If Things Could Talk” (Kalau Barang Omong) campaign gave voice to everyday and informal objects of student life with handwritten demonstration-style placards offering veiled political commentary on themes like protest purpose (a wok that demands not to be heated up for no reason), state violence against demonstrators (an alarm clock complaining about being beaten when it politely signals the time), sycophancy (a lollipop promising rewards to whoever licks the best), and the evergreen topic of corruption (boxer shorts weary of covering shame, a chocolate cake on which all will feast, and an armchair that requires cleaning to get rid of the bedbugs).7 A-Mild’s newfound penchant for political and social critique next spawned the “Ask Why” (Tanya Kenapa) campaign, which urged viewers to question authority. One ad features a young man approaching a vending machine with a great sack of coins, which he feeds into the machine until it coughs up a mortarboard graduation cap. A young woman lugging her own sack of coins queues up behind him. The ad goads, “Why is becoming smart so expensive?” (Mau pintar kok mahal?). Another ad critiques the old guard for its mistrust of youth, showing a classic senior male figure (bapak) in an office forcing a young man to adopt his short stature, paunch, bald head and mustache (Yang lebih muda yang gak dipercaya).8 Others take aim at the state. In one, two young men speedily cart furniture to the second story of their home, don flippers and mask, and dive from the upstairs window into the dun-colored river coursing through their street. Uniformed police bob along in a motorboat, waving cheerfully and advising residents to remain calm through a crackling megaphone, underscoring the perennially late and ineffectual government response to the floods that routinely devastate and displace Jakarta residents. “Banjir kok jadi tradisi?,” the ad quips. “Why have floods become a tradition?” Another criticizes state bureaucrats with their tiresome red tape and stamps for making simple tasks difficult (Harusnya gampang dibikin susah) and seizing ordinary citizens’ time (Verdery 1996). If satirical ads seemingly align Sampoerna with citizens against the state, they obscure the ways in which the Influence and Creativity in the Gig Economy 129 cigarette industry and the Indonesian state are deeply, if ambivalently, intertwined with one another in relations of “predatory reciprocity” (George 2010, 82). By constructing A-Mild as the cigarette of choice for “progressive Indonesia,” Sampoerna offers brand identification and positions the act of smoking as a means to resolve the ambivalent political feelings its ads stir up (Sampoerna 2016). The term progressive strategically leaves room for interpretation concerning the kind of progress implied: individual or collective, material or social, modernizing or redistributive. The “Ask Why” ads embrace reformasi as a middle-class enterprise with a conservative rather than revolutionary critique of the present. They furnish a limited script for social action and leave nebulous whether political agency is located in individual or collective subjects. They provoke and prod but do not advise or resolve. They invite youth to reflect on their social position and lack of power but leave it unclear if they should do anything about this or just “relax and have a cigarette” and “wait until they come into their own” (Nichter et al. 2009, 105). The ads’ ambivalence vis-à-vis reformasi is reminiscent of how early advertisers in the United States served as “missionaries of modernity” through their tendency to “emphasize that which is new and changing and, at the same time, acknowledge, manage and alleviate signs of discontent with modernity” (Marchand 1985; Tinkler 2006, 83). Early cigarette ads framed women smoking as modern but unthreatening by subtly reasserting conventional gender relations (Tinkler 2006, 84). A-Mild ads work at multiple levels, offering slapstick humor that appeals to all ages—down to very young TV viewers—and the pleasure of political critique delivered with a wink that demands interpretive work on the part of a more discerning audience. They are crafted to appeal to key Javanese tropes and rhetorical strategies valorizing indirect speech and word slippages that require an insightful and clever audience to decipher their meaning (Nichter et al. 2009, 104).9 Sampoerna marketing staff, in fact, admitted that even they often found A-Mild ads puzzling. The appeal is, in part, exclusionary, asking viewers whether they are among the initiated. One ad explicitly suggests that the viewer lacks in-group status but might someday acquire it: “In the future you’ll understand” (Nanti juga lo paham). In addition to wordplay and punning, A-Mild copywriters and marketers rely heavily on English and informal sociable speech (bahasa gaul) to interpellate cosmopolitan Indonesian youth. Many ads connote informality in the way they present text, evoking the materiality of chalk, graffiti-style spray-painted and stenciled writing, and paint applied to media such as bricks or paper that is crudely sewn, crinkled, or lined as if ripped from a schoolbook. A range of lexical items connote sociable (gaul) speech: alternative spelling, acronyms, shortening of words (e.g., gak or nggak rather than tidak for “not”), insertion of particles (kan, sih, nya), and the pronouns gue (I) and lo/lu/loe (you), which derive from Hokkien Chinese and are commonly used in Jakarta but can sound marked and somewhat crass to non-Jakartans (Djenar, Ewing, and Manns 2018; Sneddon 2003). Gaul 130 Branding Kretek emphasizes solidarity and shared social identity as opposed to status differentials, formality, and hierarchy, but it entails its own coercive appeal, status signals, and valorizations that distinguish those who are cool, modern, urban, and youthful from those who are old-fashioned, traditional, awkward, and rural (Smith‐ Hefner 2007). Although its roots are in “the world of social marginals,” gaul style has come to incorporate middle-class concerns as well as English words and phrases, becoming more strongly associated with “an increasingly cosmopolitan, Indonesian youth culture”—precisely the demographic that A-Mild’s marketing targets (Smith‐Hefner 2007, 184, 197). Sampoerna has freely deployed English in A-Mild slogans, ad copy, and marketing materials since the brand’s inception. Sampoerna’s “Go Ahead People” campaign marketing props invite youth to “Find Your Path,” “Follow Your Heart,” “Change Status Quo,” “Change the Ordinary,” “Take Risk,” “Deliver the Unexpected,” and “Don’t Think Twice.” A-Mild English often sounded grammatically off or peculiar to me, but I was not its intended target. It matched how young Indonesians use English in ways that signal their membership in a global youth community familiar with transnational flows of ideas without subordinating their expression to the rules and constraints of “proper” English grammar and spelling. In speech and social media, youth often code-switch or combine Indonesian, regional languages, and English. In so doing, they liberate themselves from the stultifying baggage of both the government-policed and -standardized “good and correct” (baik dan benar) national language and ethno-local languages, which are unappealing insofar as they are framed as “traditional” and frozen in time (Djenar, Ewing, and Manns 2018; Keane 2003). Such linguistic experimentation, and the more pronounced flouting of conventional linguistic rules in the post-Suharto era, is flourishing within a broader array of youth practices that appropriate codes, style, and signifiers as found cultural objects (Luvaas 2012). Writing of similar language mixing in the Philippines, Rafael (1995, 113) suggests that Taglish furnished “the means for evading the pressures of the linguistic hierarchy, an action that at certain points broached the possibility of reconfiguring the social order.” A language that summons and mobilizes a mass audience can be turned to the purposes of mass political action, but it can also be harnessed in the service of mass consumption. A-Mild’s signature linguistic mixing suggests the voice of the commodity masquerading as the voice of political action (Rafael 1995, 117–18). A-Mild advertisements have played a critical role in attracting consumers and setting key brand themes. The rest of this chapter is devoted to understanding how brand production labor—which takes place outside the sphere of traditional advertising—builds on the themes established across the prior decades’ commercials and explores how Sampoerna recruits, choreographs, and monitors this work. I build on Foster’s (2008) ethnography of the global soda industry, which goes beyond the relationship between ad agencies and client firms to bring together productionand consumption-centered accounts of brands and show Influence and Creativity in the Gig Economy 131 how brand managers seek to capture the value produced by consumers. Banks (2022) has similarly shown that US corporations use Black cultural patronage to accrue diversity capital and enlist ordinary people as “prosumers” who both consume and produce brand meaning. The examples that follow illustrate Sampoerna’s approach to identifying, recruiting, incentivizing, coordinating, and monitoring brand producers. SALES PROMOTION GIRLS While Sampoerna markets A-Mild as a brand associated with self-expression, creativity, independence, and spontaneity, the company aims to tightly control and regiment the speech, dress, makeup, and bodies of A-Mild’s sales promotion girls, or SPGs. As a professional title, “sales promotion girl” has negative connotations; it underscores the gendered nature of the labor, infantilizes women, and evokes the sexual objectification and age discrimination the work entails. When we met in a café, Dia and Ayu, two SPGs who had concluded an eight-month contract with Sampoerna and moved on to work for Sampoerna’s largest competitors, Djarum and Gudang Garam, told us that some firms were beginning to refer to them as brand presenters, or BPs. They found the new title to sound better, but they referred to themselves and peers by the more familiar SPG as we talked. Defending their work against detractors, they noted that they earned six million rupiah a month working four days a week, which was double what they would make as bank tellers working significantly longer hours (and still facing considerable scrutiny over their appearance and dress). Ayu was saving for a college degree. Cigarette companies contract female SPGs and male “team leaders” through vendors rather than hiring them directly. This enables them to associate brands with a rotating crop of new, fresh, and youthful—rather than familiar and aging—faces without directly carrying out the sexist, ageist, colorist, and weight-discriminatory work of hiring and firing these workers and directly enforcing normative ideals of attractive femininity and masculinity. A social media post advertising SPG recruitment included age and physical requirements: twenty-five years old or younger, at least 163 centimeters in height, good looking, and with a “proportional” body. Most are light skinned, suggesting that pale skin color is an unstated requirement of the SPG selection process. Four SPGs typically work with one team leader who also has to be tall, slender, young, attractive, and, as one acknowledged, “maybe a bit of a playboy” (sedikit playboy). Akin to a sanitized pimp, the team leader benefits from the sexual attractiveness of multiple women, monitoring and controlling their interactions with men, and also potentially serves as their protector, ready to heroically insert himself into and rescue her from encounters with rude, inebriated, or ignorant customers who violate the implicit boundaries governing their interactions. The team leader plans their weekly routes, inputs data, and records SPG-customer interactions on an iPad. 132 Branding Kretek Cigarette companies dictate the clothing, hairstyle, and makeup that constitute the SPGs’ brand identity. Compared to its competitors, Sampoerna applied more elaborate and stringent rules to the visual spectacle of SPGs’ bodies. Sampoerna insisted on natural black rather than dyed hair, disallowed jewelry and accessories, styled them with identical hair and makeup for events, and provided their uniform down to handbags and shoes (Keds, wedges, or heels). Each brand had a dress uniform, typically reserved for night events, and a pants uniform that they mostly wore for daytime rounds. Sometimes, Dia was forced to cram her size-40 feet into painfully small and tight shoes. Male team leaders are allowed to smoke, but SPGs in uniform must not be seen smoking and are supposed to cover their uniform with jackets when eating. Their beautiful bodies were not supposed to be caught in acts of consumption (or excretion, for that matter). At events, we caught glimpses of SPGs furtively eating in cars and smoking while queuing up for public toilets, where we overheard one ask a colleague if she feared the impact of her smoking on her children. Dia and Ayu expressed a preference for day over night shifts. Daytime venues include government offices, markets, cafés, and “hangout places” with company sponsorship, whereas night shifts often involved dark, noisy clubs. The team leader typically schedules seven daily site visits, with each workday officially starting at 9:00 a.m. and ending at 5:00 p.m., although in fact, they meet at 7:00 a.m. at the vendor’s office to don uniforms and apply makeup. Except for special events, they apply their own makeup, which video tutorials instruct them should be “minimal” but sufficient to ensure a “fresh” appearance. At 8:00 a.m., they go to Sampoerna’s Figure 14. A sales promotion girl closes a sale. Photo by author. Influence and Creativity in the Gig Economy 133 office, where marketing officials take attendance and brief them, and they pray together. Over a weekly recap, they relay feedback on consumer reactions to products and on which venues were bustling or quiet. Sampoerna specifies how many packs SPGs must sell, who is a potential customer, and how interactions should unfold. SPG sales targets were typically fortyfive packs a day, although at nighttime events, they may be set higher (fifty-five packs, for example). They are not supposed to sell to existing Sampoerna customers and are supposed to limit sales to two packs per customer. According to these rules, SPGs should confine themselves to recruiting new customers from the population of existing legal-aged smokers of non-Sampoerna products. This shores up cigarette executives’ refrain that they are only trying to gain market share from competitors rather than recruit new smokers to replace or exceed the number who quit or die. SPGs are supposed to request identification from the “baby-faced.” They practiced their scripted customer interactions via roleplaying, aiming to radiate warmth and enthusiasm (Hochschild 2012). Dia and Ayu modeled approaching a young man with a polite yet familiar “Excuse me, do you smoke?” (Permisi, masnya merokok?). They follow a positive response with “Which brand?” (Merokok apa?). If the answer is no, or if he already smokes a Sampoerna brand, they’re supposed to “close” the interaction and move on. If he smokes a competitor’s brand, they try to lure him into purchasing a compatible Sampoerna brand, using a special offer like a pack and lighter. If he tries and dislikes the cigarette, they sweetly respond, “Maybe you’re just not used to it yet” (Mungkin belum terbiasa Mas). The worst customers, Dia complained, were the chatty ones who asked lots of questions then bought nothing (diajak ngobrol, nanya-nanya aja, banyak omong tapi nggak beli). SPGs had to memorize three important points for each brand, referred to as the key brand message. A Marlboro SPG shared that the brand was “the number one cigarette in the world; the international market leader, modern and masculine; made from choice tobacco for the smoker’s enjoyment.” A-Mild “is number one in Indonesia; invites you to have positive thoughts, go ahead; and if you’d like to learn more please visit goaheadpeople.com.” SPGs are not allowed to take photos with customers, offer personal information (identitas), or upload selfies of themselves in uniform. Not surprisingly, SPGs found ways to bend the rules governing their behavior. To achieve sales targets, SPGs might violate rules restricting to whom and how much they were allowed to sell by approaching non-smokers and selling to existing Sampoerna customers or even retailers in a pinch. Although team leaders are officially in charge of SPGs, veteran SPGs taught naïve new team leaders taking a by-the-book approach to adopt alternative strategies to meet their quotas and produce the right data. These script departures and small acts of subterfuge did not undermine Sampoerna’s goal of selling cigarettes. In addition to their contractual wages, Sampoerna used discretionary gifts and prizes to motivate SPGs and team leaders to work hard, assimilate brand knowledge, and compete with one another. Sampoerna officials quizzed them on new promotions and rewarded correct answers with prizes like T-shirts. When a 134 Branding Kretek promotional program concluded, the highest performing SPG and team leader won public praise and prizes. The SPG’s prize might be a bag or makeup, either of which would enhance the key value—attractiveness—she held for Sampoerna. The brand producers described in the following sections enjoy greater apparent agency and latitude in their relations with Sampoerna than SPGs. Yet they, too, are often subject to company tracking and targets, asked to parrot key brand messages, made to compete for recognition and rewards, and gifted strategic prizes that enhance their value to Sampoerna. As influencers, many face targets and popularity indicators over which they have incomplete control, such as social media metrics (followers, visits, likes) and audience size at events they create and promote. Whereas SPGs work long hours with misleading start times, influencers are always potentially working, being active on social media, monetizing social relationships, and rendering their lives Instagrammable. SPGs do not choose the brand identity and markers they wear, but they can detach them at the end of each shift (Goffman 1959). The identity of the influencer becomes implicated in that of the cigarette brand, and Sampoerna constantly probes and assesses this identity for how it contributes to or detracts from the brand. The depersonalized and scripted nature of SPGs’ work interactions also distances them from their professional speech acts, whereas influencers must try to maintain personal appeal and authenticity while also promoting company products and events. The lowervisibility forms of control to which influencers are subject, then, arguably exert more insidious effects on them and their social relations, which they are urged to constantly expand, exploit, and commodify. THE ROCK STAR: MUSIC BANDS, SELF-BRANDING, AND MERCHANDISE Arian Arifin, lead singer in the Jakarta-based heavy metal rock band Seringai and national key opinion leader in the eyes of Sampoerna, served as an Averland workshop leader. At his popular workshop, participants squeezed tightly onto low benches under a large army-green tent and listened attentively as Arifin dispensed lessons on how to conform to an aesthetic of dissent and appear creative, countercultural, and rebellious while being shamelessly capitalist. Arifin skillfully worked the crowd with his jokes and informal manner. While staff worked on starting his PowerPoint presentation, he comfortably began dispensing advice, telling his rapt audience to follow the Rolling Stones’ example: “You need to be photographed smoking and drinking whisky, even if maybe you don’t actually smoke.” “Don’t think you can live off your music earnings alone if you’re in indie, rock, or pop genres,” he cautioned. “Get a real job! And, even if your fan base is limited to five hundred people, you need to maintain them.” Launching into his presentation, titled “Band’s Image and Merchandising,” he explained, “Bands have various images. Duran-Duran: fashion. The Cure: goth, Influence and Creativity in the Gig Economy 135 alternative. The Sex Pistols: punk rock, anti-establishment. Morrissey: a dandy.” As he listed these musicians, Arifin refrained from passing judgement on them, opting instead to present their distinct identities as equal and neutral insertion points for capitalism (similarly, see Banks 2022 on corporate sponsorship of Black musical genres). “Logos,” he continued. “Choose something that works with your music, like Kiss did.” “Fashion! Black shirts are safe for heavy metal.” Joking about their ubiquity, he pretended to search for a friend at a concert, yelling into an imaginary mobile phone, “I’m by the stage, black T-shirt!” (Gue di panggung, baju hitam!). “Consider your look carefully. If you’re handsome, you’re already safe” (Kalau ganteng, sudah aman). Later, when an audience member raised his hand to ask a question, Arifin told the young man, to his surprise, that he was handsome (lu ganteng). “Keep your image consistent, but it can change and evolve. Pearl Jam looked better when they were younger, like a garage band; now they’re more like uncles” (lebih Om-Om). Turning to merchandise, Arifin explained who the Grateful Dead were and how they sold T-shirts. The Misfits? Super capitalists (kapitalisme banget). “With declines in sales of music in physical format,” he counseled, “merchandise has become more important.” He did the math on potential profits from T-shirt sales, then described how his band had come up with patches, denim vests, jackets, and Figure 15. A rock star dispensing marketing advice to aspiring musicians. Photo by author. 136 Branding Kretek colorful bandanas. “One person will buy like five bandanas. Is this capitalism? YES!!!” he roared with an evil laugh. After describing a controversy over a Seringai T-shirt criticizing the police, he observed, “If your fans think a T-shirt is forbidden, they just want it more. The same goes for mistakes in the screening process.” These strategies had apparently worked for Seringai, which had had the good fortune of having one of their T-shirts feature in the magazine CosmoGirl. To ensure that the Q&A would get off to a lively start, Arifin announced that the first five people who asked questions would get a free T-shirt. After inspecting what he held in his hands—a mock tuxedo shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Change the Ordinary”—he irreverently rebuked Sampoerna for its ugly swag (“Maaf Sampoerna tapi kaos lu jelek sekali”). As he nourished young people’s musical dreams and advised them on how to style and market themselves, tend their fan base, sell merchandise, and make use of assets like good looks, Arifin obviated the tension between rebellion and capitalism by proposing that the former serve the latter. Smoking and drinking burnish a rebellious brand image. Pissing off police sells T-shirts. Selling T-shirts and bandanas is its own form of gleeful rebellion against (outmoded and puritanical) punk and death metal values of anticapitalism and authenticity.10 Even his small act of rebellion against his sponsor—telling Sampoerna its T-shirt sucked—was nicely consistent with the transgressive persona Sampoerna cultivates for A-Mild, and thus could be not only tolerated but valued by the company. Cigarette manufacturers take advantage of indie fleksibel musicians who identify as “independent” and embrace an anti-commercial DIY ethos while “flexibly” accepting cigarette brand sponsorship. Sponsored musicians defend the commodification of their cultural production and claim they maintain creative autonomy and authenticity because brands like A-Mild do not intervene into their output or decisions to air social and political views (Bagaskara 2017). Framing cigarette companies’ role as normal and positive, they insist that sponsorship helps build and promote the music scene, provides funding for tours, pays for album production, guarantees the quality of audience experience and music venues, and improves musical quality with better instruments and sound checks. Audiences, meanwhile, have grown accustomed to free or heavily sponsored and discounted music festivals (Banks 2022, 71–72). Arifin similarly reassured his youthful audience that cigarette sponsorship supported self-marketing and that neither was cause for shame or embarrassment. THE COMMERCIAL PHOTOGRAPHER AND THE SELFIE IMPERATIVE By encouraging youth to take photographs and post them through brand-affiliated and “independent” social media, Sampoerna worked around regulations restricting its own social media activity and associated A-Mild with a creative and informal aesthetic and attractive youth. Influence and Creativity in the Gig Economy 137 Yohan, a national key opinion leader with a more sedate personality than Arifin, facilitated these goals in the Averland afternoon photography workshop I attended. I hoped to pick up some useful pointers to improve my photography skills, but the workshop proved brief and geared toward controlled composition. Yohan went over lighting, styling, composition, point of interest, backdrops, cameras, and editing apps. After discussing genres and styles—minimalist, flat lay, mood, freestyle, artsy, high key, low key—Yohan announced that participants would have the opportunity to shoot photos with three models. They could post the results under the Averland hashtag on Instagram, and Yohan himself would review entries and select a winner who would receive an unspecified gift from Sampoerna. Behind the tent, the models’ handler brusquely roused them: “You can’t play with your mobile phones all day. Time to get up and work!” An MC attracted to the scene joked, “You’re not allowed to take the models home with you!” (Gak boleh dibawa pulang ya!). Shyly at first, the mostly male budding photographers began interacting with the models, asking them to engage in various activities or assume certain postures. The exquisitely awkward and uncomfortable scenes that ensued produced Sampoerna’s desired results. Averland participants posted Instagram photos with the requisite hashtags, connecting A-Mild with colorful images of attractive young people. For those not in the know, the models appear to be ordinary unpaid participants in the events. Participants also posted plenty of flat lay compositions that appeared to be inspired by Yohan’s work, often incorporating cigarettes and A-Mild paraphernalia. These photos attracted many likes as well as comments in the youthful social media prose style that slides between regionally inflected and familiar Javanese, Indonesian, Jakarta slang, and English. Encased in a spirit of learning, fun, and potential rewards, the competition concealed how Sampoerna was inducing participants to perform “aspirational labor” (Duffy 2017). They produced social media content benefiting Sampoerna in the hope that they might access more remunerative opportunities and potential acclaim via a competition win, a connection with Yohan, or a paying sponsor somewhere. The competition fostered the cruel optimism that feeds the gig economy and licenses the economic vulnerability of a large, young, and underemployed middle class who, with limited decent job prospects, get to be creative (Berlant 2011; McRobbie 2016). Averland participants’ aspirational labor produces the impression of grassroots, spontaneous support for A-Mild. The competition was consistent with Sampoerna’s broader practice of encouraging photography and social media use. At its regular promotional events, Sampoerna’s event organizers set up irresistible selfie walls with marketing objects and props including hashtags. Sampoerna also encourages selfie-taking by provisioning branded selfie sticks (tongsis, short for narcissism sticks [tongkat narsis]) as a promotion with the purchase of two packs of cigarettes or as part of the goody bag each participant received upon arrival in Averland. 241 index accountability, 175 addict identity, 219n12, 221n20. See also nicotine addiction addiction. See nicotine addiction additives, 22–23, 206n30 advertising. See kretek branding Agasam Stables, 13 age factor and production decline, 65–68 agent distribution system, 13 Agricultural Labor Practices (ALP) Code, 36, 53 agriculture. See kretek agriculture airport smoking areas, 186, 219n9 Alfamart, 165, 166, 167, 171, 218n12 Alliance of Indonesian Smoking Victims (Aliansi Masyarakat Korban Rokok Indonesia), 192 Alliance One, 37, 38, 41, 53 All Indonesia Workers’ Union (Serikat Pekerja Seluruh Indonesia; SPSI), 87–89, 115–17 Altria, 200–201 A-Mild brand, 4table, 24, 99, 110, 122–49, 215n2 ammonia, 22, 23 A-Motion brand, 123, 124, 159, 170, 215n3 AMTI (Aliansi Masyarakat Tembakau Indonesia), 59, 89 Anderson, Benedict, 197–98 anti-Chinese violence, 8, 48 anti-communism, 3, 11, 87–88 anti-union union, 115–17 APCI (Asosiasi Petani Cengkeh Indonesia), 29, 59–60 APTI (Asosiasi Petani Tembakau Indonesia), 29 arts philanthropy, 125 assimilation, 12 author’s positionality, 27 Averland, 122–24, 137, 141, 145–49, 178 Bal Tiga brand, 7 Banville, Théodore de, 219n11 Basic Agrarian Law (1960), 55 basil, 23, 206n31 Benson, Peter, 3. See also tobacco capitalism Bentoel, 12, 14, 15, 21, 22fig., 24, 204n11 betel chewing, 7 betel quids, 6 Big Pharma, 20 Bipartite Cooperation Institution (Lembaga Kerja Sama Bipartit; LKSB), 116 Biru International brand, 12, 21 bisa, 90 Black people, 211n24; cigarette marketing to, 5 black pepper, 23 Bloomberg, Michael, 20 Bloomberg Initiative, 16 Bourdieu, Pierre, 159, 219n7 branding. See kretek branding Brazil, 30 242 index British American Tobacco (BAT), 5, 10, 18, 25, 125, 172, 207n5 British machinery, 21 broccoli (brokoli) virus, 211n26. See also tobacco mosaic virus Buffett, Warren, 3 Buletin Sampoerna (publication), 169 bumiputra (also pribumi) communities, 8 burley tobacco, 31 burn accelerants, 23 buruh, 68, 213n13 buying stations, 13 cacao, 23 campus hobby groups, 144–45 capitalism, as term, 3. See also kretek capitalism; tobacco capitalism care work, 153, 156 casing, 22 cethe, 19 child labor, 52–55, 164, 211nn31,32 child smokers, 17, 123, 175–77, 200–201 China, 30, 221n19 Chinese Indonesian kretek businesses, 7, 8–9, 11–13 Chinese laborers, 7 cigarette classifications, 4table cigarette money (uang rokok), 177, 179 cigarette retail industry, 150–51; infrastructures and markets of, 151–54; knowledge work in, 159–61; minimarts, 164–67; object work in, 161–64; relationship work in, 156–59; SRC program, 167–72; toko tradisional, 150, 154–56. See also kretek branding; kretek capitalism Cigarettes Are Sublime (Klein), 220n15 Cina, as term, 12 Circle K stores, 165, 217n8 citizenship, 12 class differences, 7, 12, 16–17, 120, 182–87, 211n24, 218n7 “clean” smoking campaign, 219n8 clove farmers, 30, 41–42, 210n22. See also kretek agriculture clove oil, 23 cloves and clove cigarettes, 1, 6–7; cultivation of, 30, 32–33, 50–51, 58–59; government regulations on, 203n5; as term, 1, 204n8; trade industry of, 50–51. See also under kretek Clove Support and Marketing Agency (Badan Penyangga Pemasaran Cengkeh; BPPC), 50 cocoa, 23 Columbus, Christopher, 7 Comas, 21 commodity nationalism, 18–21. See also nationalist movements Communist Party (PKI), 10, 11, 55, 64, 87 community ambassador program, 143–44 competitions (lomba), 106, 122. See also Averland; gamification; prizes Condrokirono, Gusti Kanjeng Ratu, 82 consumer data harvesting, 53, 139, 160–61, 164–67, 168 consumer industry and behaviors, 2–3, 16–17. See also kretek branding consumer regulations on kretek sales, 4, 17, 19–20, 156, 158, 221n22. See also tobacco control consumption, defined, 174. See also kretek smoking consumption work, 117–21. See also kretek smoking contract farming, 31, 35–37 corporate gains, 105–12. See also kretek capitalism COVID-19 pandemic, 17, 200 crocodile clips, 209n13 cultural heritage rhetoric, 2, 18–19. See also nationalist movements cutting process, 74–75 dark market, 164–67. See also cigarette retail industry Declaration on Fundamental Principles (ILO), 36 denormalization of smoking, 185–86 diethylene glycol, 23 disease. See tobacco-related disease and death DIY scene, 124–25 Djarum brand, 12, 15, 24, 204n12 Dji Sam Soe brand, 4table, 9, 10, 12, 21, 31, 61–62, 80 Dutch colonialism in Indonesia, 6, 8, 10 Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie; VOC), 6, 8 duty, 12–13 education opportunities, 16 Egypt, 18 e-tobacco products, 18, 200–201 eugenol, 5 Euromonitor International, 218n13 event organizers, 142–44 exchange. See reciprocity excise tax. See taxation extrajudicial killings, 11 factory production. See kretek production Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (2009), 203n5 farmers, 30, 31, 43–51. See also kretek agriculture index 243 farming. See kretek agriculture fasting, 188 fatwa, 15–16 femininity, 127, 131, 181. See also women field technicians, 30, 31, 38–40, 46, 47 filters, 1, 21, 23, 36, 72, 97, 101, 107–8, 113, 180, 181, 190, 203n5 Firmenich company, 23 flavorants, 22–23 folktale, 62–63 Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), 17, 59–60, 164 France, 6, 7, 25, 174, 219n7 freon, 22 Freud, Sigmund, 219n11 Fuji cigarettes, 10 furaneol, 23 Gabungan Pengusaha Pabrik Rokok Indonesia (GAPPRI), 5, 50 Gabungan Produsen Rokok Putih Indonesia (GAPRINDO), 5 gamification, 105–12. See also competitions (lomba); prizes Garbuio, 21 gender: cigarette consumption and, 2, 3, 7, 19, 61, 177–80; kretek production and, 61–70; political power and, 10, 11; tobacco-related illnesses and, 16, 56–57. See also LGBTQ people and community; men; women geography of tobacco production, 30–35. See also kretek agriculture Gerakan Wanita Indonesia (Gerwani), 10, 11, 65 German machinery, 21, 24 gift-giving, 156–59, 173–75 gig economy. See kretek branding girls’ education, 16 Givaudan company, 23 glycerine, 22 Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) program, 36 government control, 3 grading system, 40–41 Green Revolution, 38, 55 Green Sampoerna. See Sampoerna Hijau brand green tobacco sickness (GTS), 56 Grèndèl, 83 Gudang Garam brand, 12, 14, 15, 20–21, 42, 62, 131, 139, 141, 204n12 haji, 8, 210n18 Halim, Rachman, 15 Hamenkubuwono, Sultan, 82 hand-rolled (tangan) cigarettes, 1, 12, 61–64; decline of, 96–97; by female pieceworkers, 64–70; production processes of, 70–79; supervision of, 83–90; by third-party operators, 79–83. See also kretek production Hand-Rolled Research Center, 70–71 Hanjaya Mandala Sampoerna, 10 harm industry, defined, 5 harm reduction. See tobacco control Hartono, 15 Hartono brothers, 20 hau, 174 Hauni brand, 21, 206n28 Health Ministry Regulation 28 (2013), 17 heat (panas), 1 heaviness (berat), 1 HEETS tobacco, 200 hierarchical systems, 38–40 Hirschman, Albert, 59 HM (Handel Maatshappij), 9 HM Sampoerna brand, 9 House of Sampoerna museum, 25fig., 25–26, 97, 207n36 housewife (ibu rumah tangga) identity, 11, 91. See also women Human Rights Watch, 52, 53–54 humectants, 22–23 Hwee Nio, 9, 10 Idego Takakarsa, 90–91 Imperial Brand, 125 imprisonment, 8, 10, 11, 26, 218nn4,5 independence, 10 independent shops. See toko tradisional India, 30 indie fleksibel musicians, 134–36 Indomaret, 165, 171 Indonesian Business Association (Asosiasi Pengusaha Indonesia; APINDO), 82 Indonesian Clove Farmers Association (Asosiasi Petani Cengkeh Indonesia; APCI), 29 Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), 10, 11, 55, 64, 87 Indonesian independence, 10 Indonesian Peasants Front (Barisan Tani Indonesia), 55 Indonesian Tobacco Farmers Association (Asosiasi Petani Tembakau Indonesia; APTI), 29, 48 Indonesian Women’s Movement (Gerwani), 10, 11 influencers, 125–26, 134–45, 149 infrastructures, 151–54 International Labor Organization (ILO), 36 244 index International Monetary Fund (IMF), 51, 164 IQOS, 18, 200, 201 IQOS Club Indonesia, 201 Islamic communities and organizations, 8, 15–16 ISO (International Organization for Standardization), 117 Italian machinery, 21 jackfruit, 23 Jakarta Stock Exchange, 14 Janelle, Paul, 120 Japanese 5S management ideology, 106–7 Japanese invasion of Indonesia, 10, 204n9 Japan Tobacco International (JTI), 6, 18, 125, 219n8 Jefferson, Thomas, 210n20 Jember administration, 25 Juul, 200–201 kasturi, 31, 35 kepor, 66 Kita Adalah Korban (publication), 192–94 klobot, 7 knowledge work, 159–61. See also cigarette retail industry Komunitas Kretek (Komtek), 16, 18–21, 59 kretek, defined, 1 kretek agriculture: farmers, 30, 43–51; geography and production process in, 30–35; leaf buyers and traders, 37–43; PMI and contract farming, 35–37; wage labor, 52–59 kretek branding: advertising businesses of, 14–15; Averland and, 122–24, 137, 141, 145–49, 178; expenditures in, 16; government regulations on, 17, 19–20, 123, 143, 164; identity and indifference in, 180–82; indifference to loyalty and, 180–82; misleading, 24; by rock stars, 134–36; by sale promoters, 131–34; by special brand ambassadors, 138–40. See also cigarette retail industry; names of specific brands and companies kretek capitalism, 2–7, 11–14, 27–28, 199–201. See also cigarette retail industry; kretek branding; kretek nationalism; kretek production; labor exploitation kretek museums, 24–27 kretek nationalism, 2, 4, 25–27, 59. See also kretek capitalism; nationalist movements kretek production: capitalist exploitation and, 100–105; decline of, 95–97; gamification of, 105–12; mechanization of, 11–14; processes of, 21–24, 70–79; quotas in, 76–77; supervision of, 83–90; third-party operators (TPOs) in, 79–83; working conditions of, 64–70, 110–12. See also hand-rolled (tangan) cigarettes; kretek capitalism; machine-rolled (mesin) cigarettes kretek smoking: addiction to, 2–3, 187–92, 200–202, 219n12; brand indifference and, 180–82; by children, 17, 123, 175–77; denormalization of, 185–86; government regulations on, 203n5; by men, 2, 3, 7, 177–79; quitting of, 188–89; victim narrative and, 192–95; by women, 2, 3, 7, 19, 179–80, 182. See also tobacco-related disease and death Kudus kretek industry, 7, 8 Kudus Kretek Museum, 25 labels. See pack labeling labor exploitation, 3, 6–7, 10, 52–53, 199. See also kretek capitalism; kretek production; wage labor LA Menthol brand, 180 landlessness, 55, 56 leaf buyers and traders, 37–43, 209n9, 209n16. See also kretek agriculture Lebaran, 96, 158 Lembaga Kerja Sama Bipartit (LKSB), 116 LGBTQ people and community, 17, 24, 177, 205n22. See also gender; sexuality licorice, 23 Liem Seeng Tee, 8–10, 35 Liem Swie Hwa, 9, 10, 35 Liem Swie Ling, 9, 10, 12 light, as descriptive term, 24, 181, 207n34 “local heroes,” 140–42. See also influencers Lombok Island, 31 LTLN (low-tar, low-nicotine) kretek, 4table, 18, 24, 124, 127 lung cancer, 24, 193, 194, 196 mace (spice), 6 machine relations, 112–15 machine-rolled (mesin) cigarettes, 1, 10, 12, 21–24, 98–99; anti-union unionization and, 115–17; gamification and corporate gains from, 105–12; kretek capitalist exploitation and, 100–105; machine relations in, 112–15; smoking work with, 117–21. See also kretek production Madagascar, 51 Madura Island, 31–32 Madura leaves, 31, 210n19 Magnum Black brand, 4table, 99, 181 Magnum Blue brand, 99 index 245 Majelis Ulama Indonesia, 15 Malawi, 35 Malaysia, 43, 205n13 Maluku, 7 Mane company, 23 Mangunwijaya, Y. B., 63 Māori, 174 marketing. See kretek branding Marlboro, 24, 80, 99 Marlboro Black Menthol brand, 4table, 144, 159 Marlboro Lights brand, 150, 182, 207n34 Marlboro Red brand, 4table, 24, 118, 127, 159, 180, 182 Marx, Karl, 103, 210n21 masculinity, 16, 47, 62, 65, 177–79, 181. See also men Master Settlement Agreement (1998), 152 mechanization, 11–14, 21–24. See also tools for production media, 3 memory projects, 26 men: masculinity and, 16, 47, 62, 65, 177–79; smoking by, 2, 3, 7, 177–79 menthol cigarettes, 5, 144, 159, 180, 189, 191, 203n5 merchandising, 134–36. See also kretek branding mesin. See machine-rolled (mesin) cigarettes mild, as descriptive term, 24, 181 minimarts, 164–67. See also toko tradisional Ministry of Education, 15 Ministry of Health, 16 Ministry of Youth and Sports, 15 Modern Times (film), 83 motherhood, 65, 176, 180, 212n7, 218n2, 218n6 Muhammadiyah, 16, 205n19 Muhammadiyah Tobacco Control Center, 16 Museum Bentoel, 25 museums, 24–27 music bands and brand promotion, 134–36, 216n10 Muslim communities and organizations, 8, 15–16, 96, 158, 188 Mustikasari, Fatma, 27, 99, 123, 146–47, 216n14 Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), 15 National Commission on Tobacco Control (Komisi Nasional Pengendalian Tembakau), 192 nationalist movements, 8–10, 18–21, 197. See also kretek nationalism natural resource extraction, 3 nepotism, 83–84 New Order administration, 11, 65, 106 nicotine addiction, 2–3, 187–92, 200–202, 219n12. See also tobacco-related disease and death nicotine poisoning, 56. See also tobacco-related disease and death Nienhuys, Jacobus, 7 “No Bull” campaign, 110, 216n6 no-business rule, 213n15 nutmeg, 6, 23, 206n31 object work, 161–64. See also cigarette retail industry Oei Wie Gwan, 204n12 Ong Hok Liong, 204n11 oriental tobacco, 31 ovens, 34, 45, 56, 207n6, 208n7 packaging, 1, 24. See also pack labeling packing process, 75–77 pack labeling: consumer restrictions on, 4, 156; of Dji Sam Soe, 9, 12; of excise tax, 76, 78fig.; health warnings on, 14, 17; during production processes, 77–79 paddy, 49 pandemic, 17, 200 papers, 23 paternalism, 28, 63–64, 69–70, 79, 95, 171 pekerja, 213n13 Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (film), 11 pesticides, 56–57, 211n29 pests, 107, 109–10, 214n4 Philip Morris International (PMI), 2; acquisition of Sampoerna by, 6, 17–18; on child labor, 53–54, 55; contract farming by, 35–37; market control by, 10, 99, 214n2; packs of, 24; retail industry of, 152; smoke-free initiative of, 18, 36, 200–201; studies by, 5; on tobaccorelated disease, 203n1. See also under kretek; Sampoerna piecework, 64–70 PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia), 10 pleasure principle, 219n11 plum extract, 23 PMI. See Philip Morris International (PMI) Polak and Schwarz, 23 political prisoners, 11 potassium citrate, 23 pribumi (also bumiputra) communities, 8 Priwingsatiningrum, Shahnaz, 27, 99, 126, 147 prizes, 7, 110, 124, 133–34, 139, 149, 170. See also competitions (lomba); gamification 246 index production processes of cigarettes, 21–24, 30–35, 70–79. See also kretek agriculture; mechanization propaganda film, 11 prune extract, 23 PT Panamas, 10 PT Sadhana Arifnusa. See Sadhana public health regulations, 5 public trading companies, 14 quality control, 21, 38, 73–74, 80, 83–84, 93, 101, 102, 109, 167. See also kretek production queer communities. See LGBTQ people and community Quest company, 23 quitting smoking, 188–89, 221n15. See also kretek smoking quotas in kretek production, 76–77, 213n16. See also kretek production; supervision of kretek production racialized marketing, 5, 211n24 Radio Sampoerna, 77, 90–95 Ramadan, 188 reciprocity, 15, 86, 129, 156–59, 173–75, 183. See also relationship work reconstituted tobacco (recon) process, 21, 24 Regulation 109 (2012), 17 relationship work, 156–59. See also cigarette retail industry; reciprocity retail. See cigarette retail industry “Return to the Village” initiative, 79 Robinson, Joan, 100 rock stars and brand promotion, 134–36 rolling process, 72–73. See also hand-rolled (tangan) cigarettes; machine-rolled (mesin) cigarettes Roro (or Rara) Mendut, 62–63, 65 rotating credit associations (arisan), 53 Sadhana, 31, 34–35, 37–38, 208n7, 209nn8,9 safety of workers, 110–12 sale promoters, 131–34. See also kretek branding Sampoerna, 2; Averland by, 122–24, 137, 141, 145–49, 178; brand ambassadors of, 138–40, 144–45; on child labor, 54; contract farming of, 35–37; establishment and early growth of, 8–10, 12; Leaf and Clove Department of, 59; PMI’s acquisition of, 6, 17–18; rock stars and brand promotion of, 134–36; Sadhana as main leaf supplier to, 35, 37–38; sales promotion girls for, 131–34; smoking work at, 117–21; SRC program of, 167–72; Sukorejo Science and Development Center, 117; supervising production in, 83–88; unions and, 88–90; visual artist as local hero for, 140–42. See also cigarette retail industry; kretek agriculture; kretek branding; kretek production; Philip Morris International (PMI); names of specific brands Sampoerna, Adi, 210n17 Sampoerna, Aga (Liem Swie Ling), 12 Sampoerna, Boedi, 13 Sampoerna, Katie, 13, 25 Sampoerna, Putera (Tien Pao), 13, 15, 79, 165, 205n14 Sampoerna Hijau brand, 4table, 12, 143, 144, 160, 213n19 Sampoerna Retail Community (SRC) program, 41–42, 151, 167–72 Sarekat Islam (Islamic Union), 8 Saudi Arabia, 43 saus tobacco mix, 9, 207n32 self-branding, 134–36. See also kretek branding selfies, 136–37. See also kretek branding Serikat Pekerja Seluruh Indonesia (SPSI), 87–89, 115–17 7-Eleven stores, 217n8 sexuality, 68, 131, 147, 179–80, 205n22, 216n9, 218n1. See also LGBTQ people and community shophouses (ruko), 154, 217n3 shrinking production, 95–97 Siem Tjiang Nio, 9, 10 Sien Nio, 9, 10 sigaret kretek. See under kretek sigaret putih. See white cigarettes (rokok putih) slavery, 25, 52 Smith, Adam, 151 smoke-free tobacco products, 18, 200–201 smoking. See kretek smoking smoking work, 117–21 social media. See kretek branding song, 95 South Africa, 37 Spanish colonialism, 7 special brand ambassadors, 138–40. See also kretek branding Spice Islands, 7 spice trade, 6–7 spicy (pedas), 1 SRC (Sampoerna Retail Community) program, 167–72 stres, 189, 220n13 Subono, Adrie, 193–94 Suharto, Tommy, 50 index 247 Suharto administration, 11–12, 14–15, 38, 50–51, 55, 87–88, 128, 216n10 Sukarno administration, 9, 10, 11–12, 14–15 Sukarnoputri administration, 17 Sukorejo Science and Development Center (Sampoerna), 117 sunscreens (advertising banners), 150, 153, 154, 158, 162, 164, 167, 172, 218n14 supervision of kretek production, 83–90. See also kretek production; quotas in kretek production Surya brand, 144, 146, 163fig., 182, 184, 204n12 Surya Pro Mild brand, 181 sweet (manis), 1 “Switch In” program, 144–45 Taíno, 7 Tali Jagat brand, 15 Taman Sampoerna, 9 Tamex, 56, 57 tangan. See hand-rolled (tangan) cigarettes Tanzania, 18 tar, 5, 22, 24 “Taste the Future” campaign, 127 taxation, 4, 12–13, 16–17, 29, 69, 70, 82, 217n7, 218n14 teen vaping, 200–201 teman, 187, 219n10 THC pods, 201 thickness (tebal), 1 third-party operators (TPOs), 79–83. See also kretek production three-hands rule, 213n17 Tionghoa, as term, 8, 12, 204n10. See also under Chinese tobacco activism, 15, 19, 29, 204n6, 221n22. See also tobacco control tobacco beetle, 107, 109–10, 214n4 tobacco capitalism, 3, 11–14, 200–201. See also kretek capitalism tobacco control, 4, 14–21, 156, 158 tobacco cultivation, 7, 31–35. See also kretek agriculture tobacco farmer groups, 204n7 tobacco industry patronage, 124–26 tobacco librarian, 31, 207n2 tobacco mosaic (brokoli) virus, 211n26 tobacco-related disease and death: campaigns against, 15; in China, 221n15; Dewi on, 146; of LGBTQ people, 205n22; from method of inhalation, 24; national costs of, 16; pack warnings on, 14, 17; PMI on, 203n1; of production workers, 56–57, 66–67; smoke-free products and, 200–201; statistics on, 2; studies on, 5; victim narrative on, 192–95. See also kretek smoking; working conditions tobacco trading companies, 13 Tobacco Transparency Index, 17 tokens of exchange. See reciprocity toko tradisional, 150, 154–56. See also minimarts tools for production, 70–72. See also mechanization toxic additives. See additives toxic exposure to farmworkers, 56–57 traditional shops (toko tradisional), 150, 154–56. See also cigarette retail industry trans women as advertising targets, 24 Tua Pek Kong, 8 U-Bold brand, 4table U-Mild brand, 4table uniforms, work, 68, 132, 212n3, 212n6 unionization, 10, 11, 88–90, 115–17 United Kingdom, 18 United States, 30, 35, 52–53, 125, 203n5 urea, 23 Uzbekistan, 18 vanillin, 23 veiled women, restrictions on, 216n11 Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), 6, 8 victim narratives, 192–95, 221n21 violence against women, 11, 147, 216n14 violent incidents (1965), 11 Virginia tobacco, 31 visual artists, 140–42. See also kretek branding volcanic eruption (2015), 47, 214n1 wage labor, 36, 52–59, 79, 81–82, 211n30, 211n33, 212n5. See also kretek agriculture; labor exploitation waiting, 185, 218n4 warmth (hangat), 1 #wearevictims, 192–95 white cigarettes (rokok putih), 1, 9–10 Wilde, Oscar, 219n11 women: femininity and, 127, 131, 181; housewife (ibu rumah tangga) identity, 11, 91; as kretek pieceworkers, 61–70; as kretek sales promoters, 131–34; motherhood, 65, 176, 180, 212n7, 218n2, 218n6; pay disparities of, 58; political power and oppression of, 10, 11; restrictions on veiled, 216n11; smoking by, 2, 3, 7, 19, 179–80, 182; target marketing to, 218n2; 248 index women (continued) toxic exposure of, 56–57; violence against, 11, 147, 216n14 Wonowidjoyo, Susilo, 20 worker alienation, 212n7 working conditions, 64–70, 110–12. See also kretek agriculture; kretek production; tobacco-related disease and death work uniforms, 68, 132, 212n3, 212n6 World Bank, 44–45, 197, 210n22 World Health Organization, 17, 59–60, 164 World No Tobacco Day, 60 Yayasan Jantung Indonesia, 15 Yayasan Lembaga Konsumen Indonesia, 15 Yayasan Lentera Anak, 15 Yudhoyono administration, 17 Zanzibar, 7, 51 Zimbabwe, 30, 37 Founded in 1893, University of California Press publishes bold, progressive books and journals on topics in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences—with a focus on social justice issues—that inspire thought and action among readers worldwide. The UC Press Foundation raises funds to uphold the press’s vital role as an independent, nonprofit publisher, and receives philanthropic support from a wide range of individuals and institutions—and from committed readers like you. To learn more, visit ucpress.edu/supportus.