Super-apps and green jackets: lessons on the gig economy from Indonesia

Working via online platforms is on the rise worldwide, but the debate on the gig economy is mostly focused on the Western world. To get a more complete picture, it is good to take a look at countries with a different institutional landscape. For example, Indonesia.

This summer, I travelled through this particular island state for six weeks and ordered taxis dozens of times via the Asian platforms Gojek and Grab. These 'super-apps' offer numerous services on a single platform: taxi rides, meal and grocery delivery, cleaning, and financial services. They are wildly popular, and you can see this on the streets. In big cities like Jakarta, Surabaya, and Yogyakarta, a sea of men in green jackets on motorbikes.

What does the gig economy mean for Indonesian (platform) workers? For The Gig Work Podcast from the WageIndicator Foundation, Martijn Arets speaks to Suci Lestari Yuana, Ph.D. researcher at Utrecht University and working in the Department of International Relations at the Faculty of Social and Political Science at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

The interview’s highlights can also be found in this blog.