Precarious Workers in the Gig Economy

Yasih decisively advances the state of the art in research on the politics and political economy of precarity. Mobilising conceptual resources from Marxian political economy and Foucauldian governmentality studies, she presents an empirically rich analysis of work and workers in the Indonesian gig economy. A tour de force that navigates multiple spatial scales and their many interconnections, Yasih’s book shows us how managerial control is both exercised and contested in Indonesia’s app-based transport sector, and deftly explores the challenges that workers confront as they attempt to forge bonds of solidarity against the individualising pressures of neoliberal entrepreneurialism. This book is a signal achievement in its field of research and will be read with interest by critical scholars in the field of development studies, labour studies, and Asian studies. –Alf Gunvald Nilsen, the University of Pretoria, South Africa. This book focuses on gig work and organising among gig workers in the Indonesian online transport service, situated within the context of widespread precaritisation and digitalisation in today’s world of work. It addresses the challenges experienced by precarious gig workers in Indonesia in articulating their struggles through the discourse of precarity. Such challenges are related to the reproduction of neoliberal-derived entrepreneurial aspirations amidst the historical relative absence of stable work patterns (previously associated with more advanced economies), and the historically rooted marginalisation of broad-based labour movements as a social force. Though showcasing the specific experiences of Indonesian workers, the analysis in this book is supplemented by broad comparative insights. It offers empirically based analysis for those interested in new forms of collective organisations and politics that emerge among workers under the imperatives of neoliberalism in Indonesia, and by extension Southeast Asia. Diatyka Widya Permata Yasih, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology and Deputy Director for Academic Affairs at the Asia Research Centre, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Universitas Indonesia. Her research is centred on increasing precarity in work and in life under neoliberal pressures and its link to social and political developments in contemporary Indonesia.