1.0 Introduction

In just 10 years, digital ride-hailing platform Gojek dominated Indonesia’s urban motorcycle taxi sector. Worth over 10 billion USD (Cho and Anindya, 2021: 20), the platform reshaped the informal transport economy through its super-app, now expanded to include over 20 services, alongside its initial offering of on-demand motorcycle taxi services (Granmo, 2025: 96). Although celebrated as a feat of techno-modernisation, Gojek’s emergence must be situated within Indonesia’s broader trajectory of labour precarity, where insecure work and limited protections have long defined the informal ojek (motorcycle taxi) market. This essay argues that Gojek reconfigures rather than eclipses the previous labour regime: by displacing the pangkalan’s territorial and kinship-based system with platform-mediated coordination, it introduced algorithmic management that individualise risk, incorporates pre-existing labour precarity, and keeps the work in a legal grey zone. The resulting labour regime is one that is historically contiguous, rather than transformative, as platform governance deepens the labour insecurity that has historically shaped the sector.

The essay examines these dynamics by analysing both the continuities and the shifts between the pangkalan era and the platform-mediated motorcycle taxi work, showing how Gojek embeds a ‘new precarity’ for the paratransit sector.

2.1 Indonesia’s Informal Motorcycle Taxi Sector

Indonesia’s contemporary informal transport economy emerged from both the shortcomings of the formal transport system and the long-standing exclusion of workers from stable, regulated formal employment. Prior to Gojek and other digital platforms, urban mobility was sustained by informal modes of transport that filled gaps left by weak public infrastructure (Nowak, 2022: 92). Under Law 22 of 2009, the ojek as a service cannot be recognised, with the law stipulating two-wheeled motorbikes as inappropriate for public transportation, unlike the taxi, cars and the bajaj (Nowak, 2022: 92; Gusti et al., 2021: 730). Yet it is mostly tolerated and allowed to operate without formal legal recognition. Tracing the ojek’s lineage to the becak, Nowak notes persistent continuities between the profiles of the two labour regimes: becak drivers were predominantly rural-to-urban migrants seeking low-barrier urban work (Nowak, 2022: 72), while ojek drivers emerged from the same urban surplus labour pool, entering informal transport because formal employment was scare, inaccessible, and insecure (Cervero, 2000: 7; Frey, 2020: 42). The ojek gained particular traction as a form of daily transport under similar conditions that had once given rise to the becak: it became accessible and proved convenient for day-to-day travel (Nowak, 2022: 71). After the 1973–74 OPEC Oil Boom, increased state revenue from oil exports facilitated the New Order’s regime agenda to industrialise urban cities, and subsequently brought about the mainstreaming and popularisation of motorcycle use in everyday mobility (Winters, 1996: 96-7). In the automotive sector, politically connected conglomerates such as Astra International and the Liem Group secured privileged licensing agreements to assemble and distribute Japanese motorcycles, forming a state-backed oligopoly that scaled production and reduced consumer prices (Nowak, 2022: 73). Just as becaks were being banned in cities like Jakarta under modernisation policies (Cervero, 2000: 98; Nowak, 2022: 72), motorcycles became widely accessible, enabling the ojek sector to take root as an affordable and flexible form of work, albeit outside state regulation and legal recognition.

The 1997–98 Asian financial crisis further entrenched informality of the paratransit sector: mass unemployment, inflation, and layoffs pushed workers into improvisational survival strategies like selling vendor goods, driving ojeks, or construction work (Yasih, 2024: 103). These activities were responses to deteriorating labour conditions. In the crisis’s aftermath, neoliberal governance normalised outsourcing and short-term contracts leading to the informal sector expanding to buffer against the decline in stable, secure employment opportunities (Yasih, 2024: 46; Tjandraningsih, 2012: 403-4). In Frey (2022), for example, interviews with Gojek drivers show how even today how permeable the in/formal sectors continue to be, with many Gojek drivers having multiple jobs sometimes using Gojek to further increase income potential from work in the formal sector. Like in other informal markets in urban spaces, the gig economy of the ojek sector is largely built out of necessity for providing work and income opportunities which would otherwise not be available for them in the formal sector (Yasih, 2024: 82). In this lens, it follows then that the rise of motorised ojeks does not simply represent a technological shift from manpower-based to motorcycle-based mobility. Rather, it also reflects a continuation of social, economic and political conditions that continues to structure and define the informal transport sector. The elimination of the becak from the streets of Jakarta did little to address the structural economic conditions such as the high barriers to secure formal employment, and high surplus of the Indonesian domestic labour market. The becak became the ojek out of a persistent economic necessity for the un- and under-employed (Frey, 2020: 42). The ojek sector inherited an unregulated domain operating largely outside state control, and its legacies leave its workers without legally recognised statutory labour protections and formal employment status.

2.2 The Pangkalan and the Pre-Platform Labour Regime

The platformisation of the ojek must be understood against Indonesia’s longer history of precarious labour relations shaped by uneven industrialisation. Under the pangkalan system, ojek work was informal, decentralised, and governed through community norms rather than state regulation. Drivers operated from fixed bases like train stations, busy markets, transport nodes, and enforced territorial boundaries through collective monitoring (Vacano, 2021: 213). Entry was similarly governed by social regulation: personal recommendations, kinship ties, and inherited informal permits determined who could work in highly sought-after spots (Vacano, 2021: 221). The ojek market was not only territorially organised but also highly decentralised. Its governance relied on a patchwork of local authorities, including the role of the ormas such as the nationalist paramilitary organisation, FBR (Forum Betawi Rempug) (Wilson, 2010: 251), dispensing the threat of violence to those who violate pangkalan-claimed territory (Nowak, 2022: 78). These networks functioned as a form of informal social protection and in some ways job security by way of exclusivity, compensating for the absence of state oversight and enforcement. This socio-spatial order was embedded in broader dynamics of Indonesia’s labour market. Since the neoliberal industrialisation of the 1980s and the post–1997 crisis economic restructuring, precarious work has become increasingly normalised across both formal and informal sectors (Yasih, 2024: 62-3). The rise of casualised work arrangements — growing from 6.7% in 2001 to 11% in 2009— and the persistence of a vast informal economy (60.47% of total employment in 2020) produced chronic labour oversupply (Yasih, 2024: 62). Many urban and peri-urban workers unable to secure formal sector employment entered informal occupations such as ojek driving. In this sense, the pangkalan system was a localised response to an economic landscape characterised by high levels of work insecurity.

Platform apps such as Gojek and Grab reconfigured this sector by uprooting local governance and replacing it with an efficient, digital infrastructure. Registration as a Gojek driver requires no pangkalan affiliation or payment of local membership fees (Frey, 2020: 39); instead, drivers enrol individually by submitting identification documents, licences, and access to a smartphone (Frey, 2020: 42). Platforms thus partly “formalised” entry through providing unique user accounts, expanding the pool of labour by removing the socio-territorial barriers that once regulated access. This influx of new workers, made possible by the structural availability of precarious urban labour, intensified competition and undermined the informal practices afforded by the pangkalan networks (Frey 2020: 36; Yasih, 2024: 116). Most significantly, platformisation appears to not have fully displaced these older modes of organisation. As scholars note, ojol (online drivers) communities still reproduce pangkalan norms through WhatsApp groups to compete with pangkalan territories, local associations like HDBR (Frey, 2020: 44-5), and komunitas practices that mimic ormas-style protection (Nowak, 2022: 78; 117-18). Many app-based drivers interviewed by Nowak (2022) were formerly opang (ojek pangkalan drivers), and some still alternate between both systems, negotiating territorial arrangements and work-sharing agreements with pangkalan drivers (Nowak, 2022: 82-3). What emerges is a hybridised labour regime where platform-mediated taxi services sit atop long-standing informal institutions. This hybridisation reveals a deeper structural issue that Yasih identifies as the “new precarity”: a heightened form of labour insecurity in which platform firms not only assert themselves as major actors in the informal sector, but also entrench and legitimise precarity and legal ambiguity that have long deifined the sector (Yasih, 2024: 63). Now, platform drivers operate in an adjacent legal grey zone, not dissimilar to the ojek pangkalan: they are individually classified as an entrepreneur, and independent contractor. Legally their entity has changed becoming more embedded in corporate infrastructure, however their precarity remains similar to the ojek pangkalan drivers of the past. Because Indonesian labour law does not recognise platform drivers as employees, nor the ojek as a legitimate form of public transport - they also lack legal protections that would be afforded to them as workers of a company. This means that the platform’s ability to unilaterally change and update their conditions of work has no space for negotiation legally.  The erosion of pangkalan-based protections has therefore not been replaced with statutory rights but with platform-mediated, corporatised control that can be exercised with little to no regulatory oversight by the state.

2.3 Platformisation of the Ojek Sector

The rise of Gojek is often narrated as a story of technological innovation: a platform that “modernised” Indonesia’s unregulated motorcycle taxi sector by implementing digitally-mediated valuable networks to create efficiency and ease for customer-users (Nowak, 2022: 36). Yet this narrative obscures how platforms like Gojek scaled by drawing directly on the structural conditions of Indonesia’s new precarity. As Indonesia shifted from agricultural economy to industrial and service-sector growth, labour became increasingly flexible and albeit precarious. By the early 2000s, insecure forms of work (for example, temporary contracts, day labouring, and informal urban occupations) were already widespread (Yesih, 2024: 46). Gojek’s adoption of a “lean platform” model, reliant on owning no transport assets and outsourcing labour (Frey, 2020: 37; Nowak, 2022), aligned seamlessly with this landscape allowing for the marketising and making legible to investors this ‘new precarity’ in the form of offering paratransit services on-demand. As this essay argues ultimately, the platform did not create labour precarity nor did it ever intend to appropriately address this issue in the informal sector; it capitalised on its ubiquitousness in Indonesia, inadvertently creating new forms of precarity which continue to marginalise ojek drivers in this line of work.

A central mechanism enabling this expansion of labour precarity is the legal categorisation of the “independent contractor.” Gojek’s Terms and Conditions explicitly deny an employment relationship, avoiding obligations such as minimum wages, social security, paid leave, accident compensation, and protection from unfair dismissal (Gojek, 2024). This legal classification is not peripheral but foundational to platform profitability: it shifts the costs and risks of work - vehicle ownership, maintenance, fuel, data plans, downtime, and even accident liability - onto drivers themselves (Yasih, 2024: 125; Nowak, 2022: 140-1). The entrepreneurial framing of the ojol driver as a “micro-entrepreneur” transforms precarity into an individualised, ‘atomistic’ condition (Yasih, 2024: 158), reframing this work-related vulnerability as a necessary burden of personal choice to engage within the platform economy. This ideological move is reinforced through algorithmic management. Platforms exert managerial control through digital systems that allocate jobs, set fares, monitor performance, and dispense discipline. Job distribution, star ratings, dynamic pricing, and automated suspensions or deactivations function as forms of management without managers (Yasih, 2024: 112; Frey, 2020: 41). As Kuhn and Maleki (2017) note, algorithmic oversight allows platforms to scale managerial power while minimising accountability. Drivers often internalise this logic, interpreting fluctuations in earnings or penalties as reflections of their own effort, strategy, or initiative. One driver interviewed described the pressure of achieving bonuses as “a risk of the job…it is really up to me” (Yasih, 2024: 156), signalling how deeply platform discourse reconfigures labour risk into a matter of personal responsibility and how platform workers internalise the platform’s logic.

This governance structure produces a paradox: workers possess flexibility in theory but operate under constant algorithmic supervision in practice. Job availability, income stability, and continued platform access hinge on opaque computational processes, leaving drivers unable to challenge unilateral company decisions. When Gojek reduced per-kilometre fares in 2016, drivers had no legal recourse (Frey, 2020: 45). During COVID-19, demand collapsed for 4 million Gojek drivers, yet the company had no legal obligation to compensate for lost income or provide adequate protective measures (Rachmawati et al., 2021: 32). The precariousness of the work, long recognised in Indonesia’s informal ojek sector, in a sense, has been intensified through digitisation, as Yasih (2024: 63) argues. Under this perspective, Gojek’s rise reveals how the platform economy appropriates modernisation and neoliberal narratives, arguably deepening or obscuring Indonesia’s longstanding structural precarity. As Scholz (2015) writes, platforms rely on “the spectacle of innovation to conceal the worker” because their business model hinges on extracting value from their already precaritised drivers. Drivers of the app are framed as autonomous ‘micro-entrepreneurial’ agents while algorithmic systems structure their labour, extract value, and dispense discipline without affording them the rights associated with employment under labour law (Frey, 2020: 41). The platform thus extends the logic of the new precarity: it anchors platform work in informality, transfers risk without recourse to drivers, and legitimises this arrangement through the rhetoric of choice and the individualisation of risk.

3.0 Conclusion

Gojek’s organisational model reveals that platformisation does not resolve the vulnerabilities of Indonesia’s informal paratransit sector but rather it reconfigures them through a neoliberal, digitally-mediated corporatised governance. By classifying drivers as autonomous entrepreneurs while exercising algorithmic control over their work, the platform entrenches the structural insecurity that has long defined informal labour in Indonesia. What appears as technological innovation thus functions primarily to deepen a new precarity: risk is individualised, absence of worker rights is normalised, and platform workers’ livelihoods remain contingent on systems that govern them without recognising them functionally as workers with legal rights and recognition.

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