The people of Indonesia & their culture, politics, economy and environment - Inside Indonesia: The peoples and cultures of Indonesia

Work

Memeing the precarity of Indonesian startup workers

Beyond the hype, workers in this booming industry are seeking not only comic relief, but real improvements in their conditions. An Instagram account is helping with both.

Struggling for a job

Misinformation and lack of opportunity form disproportionate barriers for rural youth looking for work

Is education the golden plough?

Flores youth migrate for education, but are their university degrees worth the investment?

Roadside medicine men

Bootleg medicine sales are part of Indonesia’s healthcare infrastructure

Transport policy in gridlock

Attractive public transport and well-considered traffic policies are what Jakarta needs

Minibus and Transjakarta: Transport wars?

New mass transport infrastructure is disrupting Jakarta’s minibus economy

Resource nationalism as imperialism

A worker at a mining site points to the low-hanging clouds.

Foreign investment in large-scale mining has encountered serious obstacles

Mining the land, mining people

A mining base, with a pipe running across the foreground and some wooden structures.

Irrespective of location or commodity, peasants now compete with multinational mining companies on the mineral-rich tracts of Indonesia

Community mining in West Timor

A group of miners stand near a community manganese mine, South Central Timor.

Small-scale manganese mining supports livelihood diversity

Review: Beyond decent work

A new book examines Indonesian labour struggles through the lens of international political economy theory

The Go-Jek effect

Has this phenomenally successful app-based transport service improved the lives of the motorcycle workers it employs?

Samarinda’s deadly mining pits

A GSM plaintiff and a farmer stand on the edge of her mined land in Samarinda - Armin Hari

The end of the boom has not meant an end to the perilous impact of coal mining in East Kalimantan

In sickness and in wealth

Double-storey modern house funded by a migrant in Hong Kong - Carol Chan

Village morality complicates our assumptions about what it means to ‘succeed’ as a migrant worker

Boosting youth entrepreneurship in creative industries

Campaigns to promote creative industries promise new avenues of entrepreneurship for creative youth, but real career options remain uncertain

Making their way

Indonesia needs to create better pathways from school to work

Negotiating access

Entering a competitive work environment, young men in Cilegon find their ambitions for employment hampered

Underemployed ambitions

Struggling in their transition from education to work, educated young people in rural Flores are often both dependent on and critical of local social support networks

Aspiring to become a civil servant

Trying to secure a government job, educated youth in Pontianak are rethinking the meaning of work and middle class success

Youth employment prospects and aspirations

Young Indonesians display considerable resourcefulness in coping with difficult pathways into work, but more comprehensive policies are needed to improve their job prospects

Balancing business

Indonesia’s unions are engaging in electoral politics in unprecedented ways in an attempt to balance the influence of business

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Lontar Modern Indonesia

A selection of stories from the Indonesian classics and modern writers, periodically published free for Inside Indonesia readers, courtesy of Lontar.