Abstract
Gojek is the largest digital platform company in Indonesia with its drivers constituting almost 2% of the working population. This chapter positions digital platform-based work in Indonesia as a novel and practical solution which does not necessarily provide all the advantages of having a formal labour contract, but as one which does alleviate key pain points many workers within popular economies face in their everyday experience. It brings together the genres of contemporary labour studies, urbanism studies and Southeast Asian studies in order to illustrate the ways in which a technological archetype has been moulded by, and has in turn impacted, the daily circulations of millions of Indonesians.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Change history
31 August 2023
A correction has been published.
Notes
- 1.
For context, over 99% of companies in Indonesia are small and medium-sized enterprises, and only around 3% of the working population of Indonesia is employed by large companies. Gojek drivers are recorded as, loosely insured ‘partners,’ hence do not fall exactly under the ‘informal’ definition widely used in labour studies. ‘’Gojek: Delivery Workers Struggle in Indonesia.’ libcom.org, June 28, 2019. https://libcom.org/blog/gojek-delivery-workers-struggle-indonesia-28062019
- 2.
‘Taking the lived realities, mobilities, connectivities and people’s feelings of belonging as a vantage point for defining ‘areas’ may lead to the approval of a ‘constructed geography’… may also lead us to disapprove of the rather stiff boundaries that are drawn by structuring area studies programmes into Japanese Studies, Chinese Studies, Korean Studies, Southeast Asian Studies, South Asian Studies, Central Asian Studies, and the like. Oftentimes, and increasingly so in the wake of globalization, ‘there is more Delhi in Oman than in India’, a phrase referring to the strong presence of Indian communities in Oman. Transregional, transnational, and translocal (‘transversal’ in one word) connectivities are most visible and relevant for people’s lives; they reflect geographies that are not defined by borders between territorial or maritime spaces, but by the feeling of belonging regardless of ‘where in the world’ one is physically located.’ (Derichs, (2020)
- 3.
Contemporary scholars such as Simone (2004), Kusno (2013), Malasan (2017), and Sopranzetti (2018) frequently and illustratively imply the underrated value of ‘skills’ that are required to perform various forms of seemingly mundane crafts (street food preparation, improvised urban transportation, construction work etcetera), but do not explicitly assert such a position.
- 4.
Per an interview with the CEO of Scotty, a motorcycle taxi company in Turkey during 2018.
- 5.
Indonesian motorcycle taxi driver.
- 6.
‘Nguyen, in her late 50s with a ready smile, has been driving a xe ôm moto taxi in Hanoi for 17 years; today, she rarely has a passenger whom she doesn’t already know. ‘Most of my customers, like me, live in this alleyway,’ she says, sitting on a low blue stool at a tea stand in Hanoi’s Old Quarter. ‘Some work in banks, and they don’t have time to pick their kids up, so I do it. Others are elderly or blind, and they need someone to take them around. If anyone needs to carry their food from the market, they’ll call me, and I’ll go and collect it. ‘There are around 10,000 xe ôm drivers still working in Hanoi. Most are male, in their 50s, and have little formal education. Few regularly use smartphones…The almost familial relationships that xe ôm drivers have built within their communities are practically impossible to replicate through a one-size-fits-all technology platform, demonstrating the difficulties that venture-backed unicorns face as they try to build regional businesses.’—Lampard, A. (2021, January 12). The motorbike taxis versus the unicorns. Retrieved January 13, 2021, from https://restofworld.org/2021/fighting-off-the-unicorns/
- 7.
‘Many consumers in Vietnam prize the personal relationships they have built with their xe ôm drivers and are unlikely to sacrifice those for anonymous reviews on smartphone screens and impersonal conversations with customer service centres. ‘When Grab and Gojek expanded from nothing to everything in the matter of a few years, those relationships became commodified, they became impersonal. Every Grab ride was with someone new,’ says Onat Kibaroğlu, a Ph.D. candidate at the National University of Singapore who researches the ride-hailing industry. ‘The rudimentary business model is the same, but there is no intermediary. Now you have a third party that matches you up with an algorithm and gives you a cheaper price. The business model from afar seems the same, but it’s actually completely different.’ Nguyen, the xe ôm driver, is not worried for her business. ‘No, not at all,’ she says, as she waits to take her next passenger to the bus station. ‘All of my clients know me. They’ve got my number, and anywhere they want to go, they just call me.’—Lampard, A. (2021, January 12). The motorbike taxis versus the unicorns. Retrieved January 13, 2021, from https://restofworld.org/2021/fighting-off-the-unicorns/
- 8.
‘…the meaning of on-demand is not necessarily ‘now’, but ‘when I want it’.’ Read This Before You Build Uber for X. Retrieved December 16, 2020, from https://blog.ycombinator.com/read-this-before-you-build-uber-for-x/
- 9.
‘… a complex unity a new sensibility to poverty and to the duties of assistance, new forms of reaction to the economic problems of unemployment and idleness, a new ethic of work, and also the dream of a city where moral obligation was joined to civil law, within the authoritarian forms of constraint. Obscurely, these themes are present during the construction of the cities of confinement and their organization.’—Foucault, Michel. ‘Madness and Civilisation,’ Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977.
- 10.
One of my interviewee pengojek in Bali mentioned that when he began riding for Gojek‘…it was first to fill in empty time.’ He noted that that he typically works 12 hours a day, 6 days a week on average. Given he is expected to be at the weekly ceremonies at his village, so he turns off the application once a week in order to ‘…become offline.’
- 11.
‘Surge pricing, which multiplies prices for passengers and earnings for drivers during periods of high demand, is another form of algorithmic management that encourages drivers to relocate to certain areas at certain times. The drivers get in-app notifications, heat maps, and emails with real-time and predictive information about spikes in demand. A driver who wants to go home and is trying to log out might be prompted with an automatic message: ‘Your next rider is going to be awesome! Stay online to meet him.’—Rosenblat, Alex. Uberland. University of California Press, 2018.
- 12.
‘…workers during the nineteenth Century used to shoot clocks in the city squares denouncing the time mechanism of their exploitation. Now, in their rebellion, precarious workers need to shoot the calendars which mark the separation and non-continuity of time and their alienation… like the migrant, the precarious worker is constantly looking for a place to rest.’—Negri, Antonio, Counter-melody, 2013.
- 13.
An expression in user-experience parlance, where an application employs everyday language instead of a ‘machine-like’ vocabulary within its front-end user interface. Many of Gojek’s publications across platforms such as Medium and Linkedin use this particular terminology in order to communicate its user experience.
- 14.
A demographic feature, that for example is not true for Istanbul, another gridlocked city, yet with much fewer motorbike solutions for passenger mobility—hypothetically due to not enough knowledge, trust, and interest in using motorbikes for daily commutes.
- 15.
‘Parents name newborn son ‘Gopay’ after Gojek’s e-payment service, get Go-Pay credit as gift’, Coconuts Jakarta, 21 March 2019. https://coconuts.co/jakarta/news/parents-name-newborn-son-gopay-Gojeks-e-payment-service-get-go-pay-credit-gift/amp/
- 16.
Colloquial for guard, vigilante, and makeshift traffic police
- 17.
Administration
- 18.
Jacobs, Harrison. “Why should we make foreigners rich?’: Taxi drivers are taking on Uber and Grab in Bali, and some are turning to violence’. 23 June 2018. https://www.businessinsider.sg/uber-grab-bali-attacks-taxi-drivers-2018-6/?r=US&IR=T
- 19.
Indeed the founding story of Uber in the mid 2000s is traced back to one of the founders’ astonishment at a James Bond scene where a car is moving through the map in a GPS system. Ten years on, the company has realized this ‘fictional’ scene en masse.
- 20.
photos taken by the author during my fieldwork in Bali between late 2019 and early 2020.
- 21.
‘On the fiercely tribal island, an influx of tourist dollars has steadily expanded the local economy even as a sense of territorialism reigns. Traditional taxi drivers speak of Bali’s ‘local wisdom’, which dictates that they alone should attend to the needs of tourists staying in their banjar, or local community.’—Jacobs, Justin. Southeast Asian Globe. May 7 2018. ‘Traditional Bali taxi drivers’ aggressive war on ride-sharing apps’—http://sea-globe.com/war-on-ride-sharing-apps-bali/
- 22.
Gede is part of the ‘Bali Innova Community,’ which is a community of Toyota Innova owner taxi drivers, who contribute around 10 k rupiah per month to form an informal safety net for each other in cases of accidents. Toyota offers them discounts on repairs and tyre changing. There have been many groups like this for a long time, but they have proliferated since Uber entered the market; groups like ‘UBD’ (United Bali Drivers) formed to collaborate and mitigate the problems Uber cause and also have the collective leverage to ask for bargains and perks from the local distributors of Japanese automotive companies who lease/sell them the taxis.
- 23.
Notable though during my fieldwork in Bali I noticed that there is a latent nostalgia for having Uber around. Drivers across Indonesia (also in Singapore, in line with the findings in my previous fieldwork during early 2018) tend to speak fondly of Uber and none are happy it left. They univocally claim Uber gave wider insurance packages and better support to their drivers.
- 24.
According to Gede, ‘… the biggest fights happened in Ubud and Canggu provinces as those areas they are serious about their drop only policy… once they do drop-only, that also discourages the ‘drop’ option too, drivers do not want to return empty.’
- 25.
‘Drivers of online transportation services Gojek were seen carrying out a demonstration carrying banners in front of Gojek office at North Sumatra, Indonesia. During demonstration drivers online transportation services require a system established by the company that is considered detrimental to drivers and unilateral termination of partners by Gojek company.’—‘Drivers Of Online Transportation Services Protest In Indonesia’. November 22, 2018. Barcroft Media via Getty Images.—https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/drivers-of-online-transportation-services-Gojek-were-seen-news-photo/1064338008
- 26.
‘The demand is still the same, rationalizing the tariff and asking the House of Representatives (DPR) to revise Law No. 22/2009,’—‘100,000 Online Ojek Drivers to Hold Protest on Monday.’ 11 April 2018, Tempo.Co.—https://en.tempo.co/read/917493/100000-online-ojek-drivers-to-hold-protest-on-monday
- 27.
It is important to note that this sentiment is not necessarily shared by all Balinese drivers I have encountered during my fieldwork. In one of my interviews, I asked a pengojek how often he works, and he replied ‘everyday, except for ceremony days,’ echoing many other Balinese drivers I talked to. When I mentioned taking time off for holidays, he claimed ‘I am already on vacation with you—this is like vacation for me, not work.’ I could sense that he saw his driving as an opportunity to improve himself, especially his English language—a method he refers to as ‘auto-didact,’ so the job felt quite fulfilling to him, at least more than one might initially suspect.
References
Berry, D. M., & Dieter, M. (2015). Postdigital aesthetics: art, computation and design. Palgrave Macmillan.
Boutang, Y. M. (2012). Cognitive capitalism. Polity Press.
Bunnell, T., & Goh, D.. (2020, December). Where is the future for cities? 18.
Cote, J. (2014). Cars, conduits, and kampongs: The modernization of the Indonesian city, 1920–1960. Brill.
Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society. Wiley-Blackwell.
Choudary, S. (2020). The State of the Platform Revolution 2021. Platformation Labs Production.
Clifford, J., Fortun, K., & Marcus, G. E. (2010). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography: A School of American Research advanced seminar. University of California Press.
Davidson, Nestor M., Michèle Finck, & John Infranca. (2018). The Cambridge Handbook on the Law of the Sharing Economy. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3247816
Davis, F. (1959). The cabdriver and his fare: Facets of a fleeting relationship. American Journal of Sociology, 65, 158–165.
Derichs, D., Malmi, T., & Schnieder, C. (2020). The effect of dialogue and relative performance reports on professionals’ productivity. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3313500
Dubal, V. (2017). The Drive to Precarity: A Political History of Work, Regulation, & Labor Advocacy in San Francisco’s Taxi & Uber Economies. Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law, 38(1). UC Hastings Research Paper No. 236, 2017.
Ford, M. (2011). Workers and intellectuals: NGOs, trade unions and the Indonesian labour movement. ASAA Southeast Asia Publications Series, NUS Press.
Ford, M., & Honan, V. (2017, December). The Go-Jek Effect. Digital Indonesia, 31, 275–288.
Ford, M., & Honan, V. (2019). The limits of mutual aid: Emerging forms of collectivity among app-based transport Workers in Indonesia. Journal of Industrial Relations, 61(4), 528–548.
Foucault, M. (1984). History of Sexuality’ Part Five (Vol. 1). Éditions Gallimard.
Foucault, M., & Gordon, C. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977. Pantheon Books.
Franco, D. S., & Ferraz, D. L. D. S. (2019). Uberização Do Trabalho e Acumulação Capitalista. Cadernos EBAPE.BR, 17, 844–856.
Fuchs, C. (2014). Digital labour and Karl Marx. Routledge.
Glöss, M., Mcgregor, M., & Brown, B. (2016). Designing for labour. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Graham, M., & Anwar, M. A. (2018). Digital Labour. In J. Ash, R. Kitchin, & A. Leszczynski (Eds.), Digital geographies. Sage.
Harms, E. (2009). Vietnam’s civilizing process and the retreat from the street: A turtle’s eye view from Ho chi Minh City. City & Society.
Harms, E. (2011). Saigon’s edge: On the margins of Ho chi Minh City. University of Minnesota Press.
Harms, E. (2012). Beauty as control in the new Saigon: Eviction, new urban zones, and atomized dissent in a southeast Asian City. American Ethnologist.
Harms, E. (2016). Eviction time in the new Saigon: Temporalities of displacement in the rubble of development. Cultural Anthropology.
Harms, E. (2017). Luxury and rubble: Civility and dispossession in the new Saigon. University of California Press.
Harvey, D. (2008). The right to the City. New Left Review, 53.
Harvey, D. (1989). From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: The transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography.
Harvey, D. (1992). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Wiley-Blackwell.
Kusno, A. (2010). The appearances of memory: Mnemonic practices of architecture and urban form in Indonesia. Duke University Press.
Kusno, A. (2013). After new order: Space, politics and Jakarta. University of Hawaii Press.
Lee, D. (2011). Styling the revolution. Journal of Urban History, 37(6), 933–951. https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144211410526
Lee, D. (2014). Absolute Traffic: Infrastructural aptitude in urban Indonesia. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39(2).
Lee, D. (2016). Indonesia. Activist archives: Youth culture and the political past in Indonesia. Duke University Press.
Lee, D. (2018). How Ojek became GoJek: Disruptive technologies and the infrastructure of urban citizenship in Indonesia. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.
Lefebvre, H. (2003). The urban revolution. University of Minnesota Press.
Low, S. M. (1999). Theorizing the City: The new urban anthropology reader. Rutgers University Press.
Low, S. M. (2017). Spatializing culture: Ethnography of space and place. Routledge.
Malasan, P. L. (2017). Feeding a crowd: Hybridity and the social infrastructure behind street food creation in Bandung, Indonesia. J-STAGE.
Mörtenböck, P., & Mooshammer, H. (2016). From urban talent to Commodity City: Encountering marketplaces in the informal economy. Encountering the City.
Pflieger, G. (2005). The social fabric of the Networked City. Routledge.
Poerbo, H. W. (2010). Competing for the sidewalk: On asian streets and public space.
Pye, O. (2017). A plantation precariat: Fragmentation and organizing potential in the palm oil global production network. International Institute of the Social Studies.
Rafael, V. L. (2019). The Sovereign Trickster. The Journal of Asian Studies, 78(1).
Racauskas, M. E. (2009). Identification of differences between rural and urban safety cultures. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 41(5).
Rast, J. (2011). Why history (still) matters: Time and temporality in urban political analysis. Urban Affairs Review.
Parker, G., Van Alystne, M., & Choudary, S. (2016). Platform revolution. W.W. Norton.
Raunig, G. (2013). Factories of knowledge, industries of creativity. MIT Press.
Rosenblat, A. (2018). Uberland.
Sears, L. J. (2007). Knowing southeast Asian subjects. NUS Press.
Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state. Yale University Press.
Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. Oxford University Press.
Simone, A. M. (2006). Urban Africa: Changing Contours of Survival in the City. Africa Development/Afrique et Développement, 31(3) Special Issue: Electoral Politics in Africa.
Simone, A. M. (2004). For the City yet to come: Changing African life in four cities. Duke University Press.
Simone, A. M. (2013). Urban security and the 'tricks' of endurance. Open Security.
Simone, A. (2014). Jakarta: Drawing the City near. University of Minnesota Press.
Sopranzetti, C. (2018). Owners of the map. University of California Press.
Stone, B. (2017). Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb and the killer companies of the new Silicon Valley are changing the world. Penguin.
Tran, M., & Sokas, R. (2017). The Gig Economy and Contingent Work: An occupational health assessment. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 56(4).
Vasconcellos, E. A. (2001). Urban transport, environment and equity: The case for developing countries. Earthscan.
Waterson, R. (2006). Southeast Asian lives: Personal narratives and historical experience. NUS Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kibaroğlu, O. (2023). Gojek as Labour Infrastructure: Platformization of Work in Indonesia. In: Surie, A., Huws, U. (eds) Platformization and Informality . Dynamics of Virtual Work. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11462-5_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11462-5_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-11461-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-11462-5
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)