In the Bendungan Hilir neighbourhood, which is right next to Jakarta’s glitzy central business district, a long row of makeshift wooden stalls on the gig sidewalk sell noodle soup, fried rice, and cigarettes to locals.
One place stands out because it’s always busy with green-clad motorcyclists. It’s an informal “base camp” or meeting place for gig drivers with Gojek, Indonesia’s biggest ride-hailing company. These drivers are part of a growing resistance movement against the dispatch algorithms that run their lives.
Gojek has cars as well as motorbike taxis. Its green jackets and helmets are a trademark, and you can see them everywhere as motorbike gig drivers take people on the back of their bikes and deliver food and packages. Gig drivers must charge their phones, eat, and clean up between jobs. Since the company doesn’t offer many places to rest, the people of Bendungan Hilir, also known as Benhil, made their own, like this one.
Regulars like this spot because it’s close to many restaurants that Gojek’s food delivery customers like. They can rest while still being “on-bid,” the local term for being ready to take orders, and this is important because they have to stay “on-bid” for hours.
Before algorithmic ride-hailing services came to Indonesia, people used to set up base camps. Motorcycle gig drivers used to give people rides on the side, and they would get together on street corners and at food stands to talk about the latest news or share tips on how to stay safe on the road. Rida Qadri, a computational social scientist at MIT who studies Jakarta’s ride-hailing driver communities, says that the habit stuck once Gojek and other apps emerged. Base camps became a way for drivers all over the city to stay in touch with each other.
This sense of community makes Jakarta’s drivers stand out from other gig workers around the world. Even though gig workers all over the world feel like they are being squeezed and used by unforgiving algorithms, most have found it hard to organize and make changes to the policy that controls their work or the government policies that allow them to be mistreated.
This is partly because algorithmic management makes it hard for labour organizers to do their jobs. After all, it pits gig workers against each other and spreads them out over a large area, says Jason Jackson, a political economy and urban planning professor at MIT who helped Qadri with his research. By default, it is harder for workers to meet in person and build the needed relationships to get a movement going.
This is mainly true in the US, where Uber drivers haven’t been able to meet with company leaders or get enough support to fight against the organization’s worldly anti-regulation strategies, said Veena Dubal, a law professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law who analysis and advocates for US gig workers. “The way people get together online just isn’t the same,” she says.
Things have been different in Jakarta, though. Through base camps, gig drivers share information and help each other and work together to make Gojek’s system work a little more to their advantage. It has given people new ways to talk to the company and set the stage for long-term policy changes.
Over the years, as more and more retailers have come under the watch of algorithms, more and more experts have pointed out that platform companies use management tools to spy on and take superiority of a large pool of cheap labour, just like colonial empires did. But the experience of Jakarta’s gig drivers could show a new way to fight back: a way for gig workers to gain power as a group, get some security and look out for each other when it seems like nobody else will.
More than 30 million people live in the greater Jakarta area. It’s a vast city that started increasing in the 1970s and 1980s. High-rise buildings, malls, and five-star hotels line its main streets. But a block away, friendly neighbourhoods with tiny tin-roofed houses and winding alleys too narrow for cars.
This city has always been hard to get around, and Jakarta’s first modern metro line didn’t open until 2019. People spend hours getting to and from work every day in cars, buses, or old trains that pack people in like sardines.
It was so hard to get around, especially during rush hour, that people started using motorcycle taxis long before apps like Gojek came along. In this unregulated market, gig drivers of ojeks, the Indonesian word for motorbike taxis, would wait on street corners and offer rides to people without other options.
The experience could be frustrating for the customer. Gig drivers formed groups based on different territories, primarily based on where they lived, and sometimes turned down long trips. In a busy surrounding like a train station, ojek drivers waving and shouting to get your attention and haggling over the price can be stressful.
Gojek’s founder, Nadiem Makarim, saw a business chance in this chaos. Makarim grew up in a relatively well-off Indonesian family. In 2010, he opened a call centre to connect people with trusted motorcycle gig drivers. For the first time, ojeks were put together and sent out by someone other than the people who made them. A year later, when he joined the e-commerce startup Zalora, he took the idea further by letting the company’s last-mile motorcycle delivery fleet drive people around during their free time.
Then, in August 2014, Uber came to Indonesia with its unique algorithm for matching people. A few months later, Gojek came out with its mobile app, which centralized its existing fleet and put the broken neighbourhood model under a single set of algorithms.
Passengers loved that they could order ojeks through an app for a set price. Hian Goh, an ally at Singapore-based Openspace Ventures and one of Gojek’s first investors, says it was also like a “catnip” for investors. Uber’s business model grew like crazy—a sign of Gojek’s enormous potential—and Makarim was the perfect initiator profile for international investors in Indonesia’s underdeveloped tech scene. After years of attending a top school in Jakarta, he went to an Ivy League college and Harvard Business School before getting a position at the top management consulting firm McKinsey.
As more money came in from investors, there was little worry that Gojek would face any of the labour problems that Uber was beginning to face. In the United States, Uber changed taxi driving from a full-time job with benefits to a series of short-term jobs. But in Indonesia, Gojek made unofficial transportation into a more organized semi-official industry. The government thought the change was good because most of Indonesia’s economy was informal. This included everything from pop-up food stands to unlicensed businesses that did laundry or house cleaning.
At first, so did the gig drivers.
People who signed up to drive part-time quit their jobs and switched to Gojek full-time very quickly after they signed up. Ojek gig drivers who stuck to the old way of doing things were forced out as the company bought out their coworkers with big bonuses and promised that they could make up to three times what they were making before.
But in exchange for the early benefits, gig workers gave up a lot of control. Before, ojek gig drivers could say what they were paid and how they worked, and now, they have to follow the rules of the platform and its all-seeing algorithm.
Soon, this fact started to affect Gojek’s brand-new fleet. As the company hired more and more operators, jobs became scarcer, and prices fell because there were too many gig drivers. Then, as it fought a price war with its Singaporean rival Grab, it cut drivers’ bonuses, making them work more hours for the same pay.
“When I talk to people in the driver community, they say that their life with Gojek is like a drug enslavement,” says Suci Lestari Yuana, a PhD candidate at Utrecht University who is learning about the conflicts and controversies surrounding the platform economy in Indonesia. They see their income go down, but “they don’t have any other way out,” says Yuana. “They know that they depend on the company a lot.”
“Our driver partners are the heart of our business,” says Tanah Sullivan, head of sustainability at GoTo Group, Gojek’s parent company. “Their security will always be our top priority.” “Since most gig drivers only do it part-time, Gojek’s flexibility gives them the chance to make more money in other ways… Based on our data, the overall satisfaction of both two-wheel and four-wheel drivers has been improving, especially regarding how much money they can make on our platform.
Kejo, who is in his 30s and has two young daughters, rides his Honda scooter to the Benhil base camp around 7 p.m. Like many drivers, he wears the logo of his gig driver community, Gojek on Twit, or GoT. This is an informal group that he helped start in 2017 and that stays in touch through base camps and online groups.
His work day usually starts in the early afternoon, but today it ended with a long ride he hadn’t planned. He was tired but happy that he had reached his daily goal. He says with a smile as he eats fried rice that he almost always hits his target. He is aware that he is one of the lucky ones. People call his account gacor, which means it has a steady stream of new orders for no apparent reason.
Kejo joined Gojek in 2015 when the app was becoming very popular. Like many Indonesians, he only has one name. The OECD says that three-quarters of Indonesia’s workers do everyday work, but he wasn’t one of them. He toiled as a car salesman and a bank teller, both of which were stable jobs with benefits. But ride-hailing became more interesting when Uber, Grab, and Gojek came along. It promised more freedom than working in an office and, most importantly, more money.
He could make between 700,000 and 800,000 Indonesian rupiahs (about $48 and $56) per day from 2014 to 2016 when Gojek gave big bonuses to its most active gig, “driver-partners.” That could mean making much more money than the minimum wage in Jakarta, which is 4.6 million IDR ($320) per month.
He now makes at most IDR 300,000 ($21) if he works from 2 to 7 or 8 p.m. Gojek stopped giving bonuses over time as its drivers and competitors grew.
Kejo shrugs. Even though it doesn’t bother him, that doesn’t mean it’s been easy. Small mistakes, like delivering a package to the wrong door, can cause a gig driver’s account to be frozen or closed if the driver doesn’t explain or fix the problem. The algorithm also punishes workers for not doing anything, even if they are sick with covid, and this lowers their account status and keeps them from getting jobs that pay more regularly.
Amalinda Savirani, an associate professor at Gadjah Mada University who studies social movements among Indonesia’s urban poor, says, “It leaves workers with no choice but to keep working.” “The technology has become a tool for exploiting labor in this way.”
“We have several programs in place, such as education and training, health insurance, sick pay, and wellness initiatives, that directly improve drivers’ working conditions and give them chances to move up,” says Sullivan. “These are in addition to the comprehensive programs put in place to help all of our driver partners deal with the problems caused by the pandemic.”
Kejo finds help in Game of Thrones. It grew out of a small group of early ride-hailing users like him who wrote about their experiences on social media.
Kejo’s job is to spot scams and tell drivers about them. Some drivers who are new to smartphones can be easy targets. For example, scammers sometimes call pretending to be Gojek employees and steal login information and personal information. He uses his network to learn about new scams and how common they are, and he then tells his over 17,000 Twitter followers about them.
Liam, another early member of GoT, says that any Gojek driver with a social media account can choose to join. If one person shares a tip or concern, it quickly spreads through a loose network of WhatsApp, Telegram groups, and social media.
Budi Prakoso met the group when he was a regular at the Benhil base camp. He says the group helps with “everyday problems on the road.” When his bike broke down once, he told the group immediately, and a member who was close by came to help him.
Qadri says that the base camps in Jakarta have given rise to hundreds of driver communities like GoT. Drivers will check in with each other daily to talk about anything from the best way to make a delivery to ways to make more money. During the pandemic, they gave money and food boxes to each other’s families. This helped them get through the ride-hailing bans and strict lockdowns, which would have hurt their incomes badly.
Informal communities also allow female drivers, who are a minority on the platforms, to stay safe. Rita Sari is a driver for Gojek’s four-wheel service GoCar. Whenever she rides to a new neighbourhood, especially at night, she sends her live location to GoT. It doesn’t matter that most of GoT’s members are motorbike drivers for Gojek, and even drivers who work for rival companies like Grab are a part of their group of friends.
Help also comes from the community as a whole. Base camps are made and kept by the relationships between Gojek drivers and the people in the neighbourhood. Business owners provide space, and local authorities let them be used for regular meetings. Food stalls and mosques also serve as makeshift shelters for young men who moved to Jakarta to work as Gojek drivers but don’t have family or a place to live.
Qadri says that the many layers of social connections are essential for drivers to stay alive in this way. And it was from this base that the resistance movement began.
It all started when drivers devised little tricks to make their daily jobs more manageable. As more and more of their peers ran into the same problems, they shared their solutions like any other information. Over time, these tricks turned into what Savirani calls “everyday resistance”—tactics that helped drivers regain control in small, cumulative ways without any help from the government.
Kejo likes to use “account therapy,” which is a way to get Gojek’s algorithm to give him more orders when it isn’t giving him enough. He used to have an account that mostly sent him food, but it was too hard to keep up during the rainy season. Having noticed that the Gojek app learns drivers’ preferences by keeping track of which jobs they accept, he started turning down food orders and only taking passenger rides. After he kept trying for a week without getting any work, he says, the system finally “got it.”
Other drivers who are good at figuring out how the algorithm works offer to help people who are having trouble for a fee. A therapist will take over a client’s phone for a week and slowly bring the account back to health before giving it back to the owner.
Then some hacks are more intelligent. Qadri says that the more tech-savvy drivers have made a whole ecosystem of illegal apps that help drivers change and tweak their accounts. Some are pretty simple and were made to eliminate the need to rely on Gojek’s engineering team. For example, they make the text on the app’s user interface bigger to make it easier to read or help drivers automatically accept jobs, a feature that Gojek already has.
But spoofing a phone’s GPS is the most popular, with more than 500,000 downloads. They can make it look like a driver taking a break is still at work. This can help you avoid getting fined for taking sick days or move your account quickly to a higher level with more earning potential. These apps can also let drivers get to places where there are a lot of customers without having to push their way through the throng.
These apps are called tuyul, a mythical creature in Indonesian folklore that steals money for its owner (though sometimes at a great price). The account is closed if Gojek finds out that a driver is using a tuyul. Savirani says this has led to an app war, in which developers make more complicated features to hide from Gojek’s tracking systems while Gojek makes more complicated trackers find them.
As driver networks have grown and gotten more powerful in politics, they have also tried to push for more significant changes. They use social media to complain about app updates they dislike or ask for new features. Gojek now sends people to base camps to talk to drivers about upcoming changes and get their feedback and approval.
Budi thinks that Game of Thrones just made a big step forward. When picking up a food order, drivers must pay for parking. But because they fought against the policy, Gojek is now charging customers the fee at some malls and offices. Budi says it has also added a way for drivers to make extra money by sending updates about which malls charge parking fees and how much.
“Their community structure gives drivers a lot more confidence to talk to management and negotiate in a way I haven’t seen among Uber and Lyft drivers in the US,” says Qadri.
Not just management but also the people in charge of rules. When Jakarta was getting ready to host the Asian Games in 2018, a group of motorbike taxi drivers called Garda threatened to go on strike, and this would have made it hard for people to get to and from the games. The Ministry of Transportation had to meet with the drivers because of the threat that Indonesia would look bad on the world stage.
So, the ministry finally gave legal status to motorbike taxis, which had been illegal before. Yuana says that will make it easier for rules to be implemented to improve their working conditions.
Dubal says that these successes teach labour rights activists outside of Indonesia an important lesson: that a robust social infrastructure can be a powerful way to fix technical fragmentation. She says, “You can’t get the rules you want without worker power, and you can’t get worker power without worker community.”
That doesn’t mean we’ve won the fight, far from it. Taha Syarafil, the head of the drivers’ association Asosiasi Driver Online, says that the law in Indonesia still doesn’t protect motorbike drivers or app-based transportation services in general. And relying on daily resistance and mutual help to improve things without having the proper legal rights won’t work forever.
Gojek has been getting tougher and tougher with unauthorized apps and violations as time goes on. The company has also started to buy the loyalty of some leaders in driver communities by giving them things like early access to new features and side jobs.
But after their first victories, drivers, especially those who are part of formal groups like Asosiasi Driver Online, plan to push for more changes to the rules. This includes getting the highest level of government to recognize gig work. This would let the Ministries of Transportation and Labor set minimum standards for how ride-hailing companies treat drivers.
Even if that happens, though, informal communities will still help with the problems that come with the job, like giving out food aid, fixing flat tyres, and raising money for a friend who is in the hospital. “The group is strong,” says Liam. “Very, very strong.”
Edited by Prakriti Arora
