Informal Disruptions: Ride-Hailing and Incrementalism in Bandung, Indonesia

• In Event: Disrupting Algorithms: Innovating Work and Life in the Digital Economy - I

Abstract

There is a growing consensus that the proliferation of labour platforms (e.g., Upwork, Uber) requires a reconsideration of labour mobilization, given workers’ atomization, algorithmic management, and lack of statutory rights. I consider some of the many organizational strategies of Indonesia’s vast informal sector, where workers have long developed ways of securing livelihoods in the face of precarity. Based on ethnographic research in the city of Bandung, I explore informal-sector organization among motorcycle taxi (ojek) drivers as they resist and cope with the platform labour regime of Go-Jek, an Indonesian ride-hailing app. I examine ojek pangkalan (older-style informal-sector drivers) and HDBR (a grassroots app-based driver association). Although highly antagonistic towards each other, ojek pangkalan and HDBR use similar organizational tactics, notably micro-territorial basecamps and incrementalist social reproduction strategies, to establish claims to their working lives. Informality in Indonesia thus provides forms of social security in a platform labour context that add to more Euro-American responses such as policy change and platform cooperativism. By examining informal organization repertoires among ojek drivers, this paper contributes to STS by extending a postcolonial, cosmopolitical outlook (Prasad 2009; Stengers 2011) from ways of knowing to ways of resistance.

Author

• Bronwyn Frey, University of Toronto