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Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park or IWIP is an area rife with political conflict. For instance, in March 2026, Lelilef villagers organized mass mobilizations to hinder IWIP’s operations – a protest supported by the local youth group, or karang taruna. Political conflict is also evident in the existence of Save Sagea, a political front composed of several communities formed to protect Sagea from mining companies. Save Sagea and the karang taruna also utilized a politically strategic day – specifically May Day – and strategic issues pertaining to the working class – wages and occupational safety – to seize political momentum, even though both are civil and environmental movements. Nevertheless, this May Day is seized without unions and both organizations harbor a skeptical view toward unions, mainly due (but not limited) to differing interests regarding the question of land/labor nexus. Labor unions occupy a difficult position; facing intimidation by companies, fragmented relations of production, suspicion among workers, and spatial differentiation within the park, alongside antagonism from civil-based political movements. Drawing from preliminary fieldwork among IWIP workers, civil-based movements, and union members, this article asks: how do the working class and labor unions practice their politics when labor politics are “denied” by other movements that share the same “political enemy”? Inspired by Sian Lazar’s concept of labor agency, this article argues that workers and unions paradoxically reproduce their politics by undermining them – through limited cooperation with management or the rejection of NGOs that are often in a much better position. While these activities are often seen as “selling out” or “utopian,” I contend they are a form of (re)producing labor politics within the context of extractive industries. This occurrence is by no means unique to IWIP, but the difficult relationship between labor and citizen-based movements, common within extractive zones, warrants anthropological analysis of this phenomenon.