Indonesia, explained.
A Gojek driver waits for a job in Jakarta, Indonesia (Dimas Ardian/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Indonesia’s app drivers are keeping cities moving but without basic labour protections.
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Life of an Indonesian app driver: All rides, no rightsLife of an Indonesian app driver: All rides, no rights
As Indonesia’s digital economy soars, platform workers are left grounded in precarity.
The platform-based gig economy, marked by short-term, on-demand employment, such as food delivery and ride-hailing, represents a profound shift within the labour landscape. The digital economy has significantly redefined the core characteristics of employment, bringing new opportunities and challenges to labour relations. But the nation’s accelerating digital economy has outpaced the legal and institutional frameworks required to protect platform workers.
Indonesia has established itself as the largest digital economy in Southeast Asia, reaching US$77 billion in 2022 and up to US$130 billion last year. Over the past decade, the platform economy has rapidly expanded, powered by strong internet penetration, a shift in preferences toward on-demand services, and the rapid uptake of mobile technology.
These conditions have created millions of flexible-income opportunities, with an estimated 4 million Indonesians working as app-based drivers. More than 54% of these drivers identify platform work as their primary source of income. The platform economy is driven by major players, Grab and Gojek, who introduced app-based transport services in Indonesia in 2014.
Digital labour platform firms often argue that they merely offer the technology, a means to connect drivers to consumers, rather than directly employing workers. Terms such as Mitra or Kemitraan (Partner or Partnership Agreement) are applied to define the relationship between platforms and their workers. This employment arrangement precludes them from the formal protections set out by Indonesia’s labour laws. This legal grey area has plunged millions of Indonesians into precarious working conditions, denying them fundamental labour rights and legal safeguards.
Labour rights are not merely employment standards but also fundamental human rights under both international conventions and Indonesian law. Sitting outside the protection of minimum wage laws, social security schemes, and labour regulations, platform workers face financial insecurity as well as limited or no access to leave entitlements, pensions, health insurance and injury compensation.
Denial of stable income and labour protections is not merely a market failure but a structural impediment to development.
Precarious work is not only a labour rights issue – it is also a key driver of broader social inequality. This insecurity traps platform workers in a vicious cycle of financial vulnerability, limits social mobility and ultimately undermines human rights by reinforcing systemic disadvantage.
Despite Indonesia’s broad domestic legal framework and international commitments to labour rights, in practice legal ambiguities and weak enforcement mechanisms render these rights and social protections inaccessible to platform workers. The country’s governing labour laws, such as the Manpower Law (Law No. 13 of 2003) and the Omnibus Law (Law No. 11 of 2020), which establish labour rights and labour market flexibility, were drafted within traditional employment conceptions and fail to account for the realities of platform workers. Digital platforms exploit the so-called “partnership” model, which underpins most digital gig-economy arrangements, effectively forgoing their obligation to provide formal labour rights protections. This exclusion is compounded by the lack of regulatory frameworks and clear legal definitions governing digitally mediated work.
Although Indonesia has ratified all eight International Labour Organisation (ILO) Core Conventions, including those on collective bargaining and freedom of association, and supported the 113th International Labour Conference’s recognition of platform workers, these commitments remain largely theoretical. Indonesia’s industrial-relations framework has traditionally operated under a tripartite model involving government, employers and employees, with trade unions serving as the primary vehicle for collective bargaining. However, platform workers’ associations are not formally recognised under Trade Unions Law (No. 21 of 2000) as they are not classified as employees, which prevents them from engaging in collective negotiations.
These legal loopholes create immense risk and uncertainty for platform workers regarding responsibilities, rights, and dispute resolution, while enforcement authorities lack the legal capacity to act. These conditions have left platform workers without access to the fundamental human rights enshrined in Indonesia’s 1945 Constitution.
From a human rights perspective, the denial of stable income and labour protections is not merely a market failure but a structural impediment to human development and dignity. Workers also have little say over assignments, performance evaluation and schedules set on their platforms. Opaque algorithmic management further erodes that autonomy – workers have no meaningful voice in the decisions that govern their livelihoods.
Taken together, these factors illustrate that platform work in Indonesia contributes to wide-ranging human rights concerns. This includes the country’s responsibility to fulfil, respect and protect economic and social rights, while also demonstrating the need for legislative reforms that harmonise Indonesia’s digital labour standards with its international labour and human rights obligations. Platform work must be grounded in a human rights framework that acknowledges rights as universal, belonging to all workers irrespective of employment type; inalienable, meaning they cannot be overridden by the algorithmic governance of digital platforms; indivisible, recognising that safety, fair pay, and representation are inseparable; and interdependent, as labour, privacy, and equality rights are deeply connected, each reinforcing the other.
About the author
Meg Hocking
Meg Hocking is a recent graduate of the University of Melbourne, having completed a Bachelor of Arts and Diploma of Languages in Indonesian.
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