Solidarity among Jakarta’s gig economy drivers

Abstract

Ride-hailing services have flooded the urban transportation market in Indonesia, the strongest market in South East Asia today, offering a wide array of services from transportation to groceries shopping. Go-Jek and Grab, the two biggest start-ups in the region, are estimated to each recruit around one-million drivers throughout the country. They have been joined by other players, including Blu-Jek, Lady-Jek, Bitcar and Anterin, although many have ceased to operate amid heated competition. They are parts of the emerging 'gig economy'-new businesses that rely on a flexible workforce that deliver various services via digital platforms. Workers engage with precarious work-insecure, uncertain, and unstable employment practices, associated with the transfer of most risks from business and the government to workers. Here, the use of digital apps to connect workers and consumers and to supervise work performance makes employer-employee relationships rather ambiguous, depriving workers of fundamental rights at work. Recent scholarship has attempted to predict the impact of rising precarious work on the future of labour politics. The most prominent is Guy Standing who views

Normalizing and Resisting the New Precarity: A Case Study of the Indonesian Gig Economy

“…The operations of the self-organizing vehicles as informal social mechanisms instill individualism in a collectively experienced situation. They do so by enabling workers to share responsibilities to improve welfare and work-related security (Yasih, 2020). A by-product, however, is that some of them justify the neoliberal individualization of major work-related risks and nurture workers’ hesitancy to engage in collective organization, as revealed in an interview with a drivers’ association leader:I often say to our members .…”

“…Although they ended in failure (Akbar, 2018), SPDT-FSPMI’s attempts proved its worth to online drivers. However, very few online drivers resort to unionization, while many others resent it (Yasih, 2020). Being immersed in the entrepreneurial identity, the latter see online drivers as ‘partners’ who are therefore unsuitable for unionization.…”

“…They use social media platforms, especially WhatsApp and Facebook to maintain connections with each other. These all enable the formation of workers' communities, which are given names and logos by their finders, providing a sense of identity and belonging for their members (Yasih, 2020). Communities of online ojek and taxi drivers are mostly organized separately, typically having anywhere between 15 and 75 members.…”