The drivers who work for Gojek and Grab refer to themselves as ojol, a contraction of ‘ojek online’, ojek being the informal term for motorcycle-taxi drivers, or simply distinguish themselves from conventional car-taxis by referring to themselves as ‘online drivers’. What distinguishes these online drivers from their ‘offline’ counterparts, begins with the creation of a driver-partner account: the entry point to access the app infrastructure, its customers, and income opportunities.
As a customer, making an account is both relatively easy, anonymous and for now, you can always create a new one. For drivers, accounts are a limited resource they must be treated with great care. As I will show in this chapter, the behaviour of a driver affects the quality of an account, its ability to receive orders, access the best bonuses, and thus generate income for its driver. It can also be lost if, for instance, the company decides its owner has violated the terms and conditions of use.
In this section, I centre the experience of these drivers in relation to both the companies and to their customers, and how this has changed as the apps continue to develop. I examine the underlying governance dynamics that the apps implement to mobilise drivers in accordance with the needs of the company. While there is increasing awareness of how these companies can be
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exploitative towards drivers, I also explore how customers are enrolled as participants in that exploitation. I show how the visual language of the apps and the mechanisms of the infrastructure communicate certain expectations to customers which they, in turn, impose upon drivers. In this way, the app configures both driver-partners and consumer-cyborgs into particular unequal exchange dynamics.
“Servant, Probably”
To become a driver, you need to register formally with one of the app companies either in person at their local branch office or through an online service. To be approved, you must submit documentation including your formal identity card, driver license, a photograph, proof of insurance, as well as a clean criminal record. When registering, you must also register your vehicle which must fulfil certain safety standards. Once your registration is approved you can activate your account via the driver version of the Gojek or Grab app. Some drivers described being given additional material, such as a tutorial or driving safety videos to watch or having to pass additional tests. During my fieldwork in Jogja in 2018, the option of registering as a GoCar driver was suspended indefinitely by Gojek. Drivers blamed market saturation and accused Gojek of registering more drivers than there were customers. Some drivers suggested that the suspension was caused by disagreements with local government officials, hoping that whatever the issue was would be resolved soon so that formal registration would open again. For drivers unable to register for a formal account, be it due to the closed registers or for not meeting the requirements, there are still other options. Drivers can register through an ‘account vendor’, a peculiar semi- formal arrangement supported by Gojek where vendors can open accounts for drivers. Vendors control the driver's digital wallet and charge a commission for transferring driver earnings to their designated bank accounts. I will go into more depth about the role of account vendors later in this chapter, and how having a ‘vendor account’ is distinct from having what drivers referred to as a ‘corporate account’, meaning registered directly with the company. By 2019, even vendor registration had closed making the only way to access an account was to buy or borrow one belonging to a friend or relative, violating the company terms of use.
It is also important to understand that many of the drivers, especially earlier in 2018, were maintaining accounts for both Gojek and Grab, doing what they called kerja dobel, or double work.
For drivers, this was a way to optimise their workflow. If they were unable to get customer orders through one app, they might be luckier in the other one. But double work is a violation of the terms of use and many drivers expressed fears of getting caught, deploying a variety of strategies to avoid detection. Some drivers suggested that by activating both apps at the same time the GPS might give you away. Others cited that companies compared databases and to avoid registering
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the same phone number twice you should keep two separate SIM cards. Others felt safer with two separate phones, installing only one app on each, convinced that they would somehow be able to identify each other if on the same device. Other drivers opted to register as a car driver in one app, and a motorcycle in the other, to make sure that the license plates were not the same. This also means that most of my interlocutors did not identify strongly with being either a Gojek or Grab driver. Instead, the defining feature was in being online creating the distinct category of drivers who were offline providing the service of the conventional ojek or taxi drivers. Throughout my fieldwork, there were multiple examples of tension arising between online and offline drivers, at times resulting in physical violence but also in the establishment of ‘red zones’ where online transport was banned. As mentioned earlier in this thesis, the existence of these ride-hailing apps meant that an increasing amount of conventional taxi drivers found themselves forced to use the apps to access customers.
Not all drivers engage in double work and not all drivers even work full time. The drivers I spoke with were very diverse in terms of background and approach to their work as online drivers. From a former bank employee, a pharmacist, a former head of the Faculty of Cultural Sciences, food stall owners, a post office employee, self-taught IT students, an insurance broker, a wedding planner, a logo designer, a librarian, to predictably, several conventional taxi drivers. Some relied on driving as their only source of income, others drove temporarily whilst between other jobs, and some saw driving as a supplementary income. Some drivers also engaged deeply in the identity of being an online driver, participating in company events, demonstrations, or driver communities, while others kept their distance from other drivers, preferring to see themselves as freelancers or self-employed. The particulars of this identity and the dynamics of the driver communities are beyond the scope of this thesis but have been studied by Rida Qadri, who explores how they represent an alternative contextual outcome to the atomisation of the labour force described among other workers of the gig economy (cf. Qadri, 2020a).
When asked to describe their relationship to the app company, drivers would generally describe themselves as mitra, meaning partners, in the sense of being a business associate. This is also the term that the companies use: driver-partners. “Kita mitra!”: we are partners, a driver once told me without hesitation, the others sitting around us at a driver community ‘basecamp’ agreeing about their relationship to Gojek. Next to us, a driver who had been listening to our conversation interjected, “Tapi tidak pernah ketemu”:but we have never met. It was not uncommon for drivers to offer a similar reflection about the conditions of this partnership. They were partners with the app company who relied on each other for income, yet they were not equal parties.
One respondent characterised the relationship as being synergistic, with both sides benefiting
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from one another. After all, the company was providing him with an important income opportunity. He had recently moved back to Jogja to take care of his ailing mother. Despite years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry he had struggled to find work in Jogja until he was able to register for an account with Grab. In his opinion, this is what he felt made the cut of his earnings that the company charged for their services fair. He was not alone in describing this experience of mutual dependence. The dependencies between drivers and the company can be described as follows. Drivers register for accounts and gain access to a job and a source of income.
In return, the companies charge them a cut of their earnings and rely on their infrastructural services to further the interests of the company. Neither can exist without the other. However, the company depends on the drivers as a group, and their concern is to maintain an active and functioning fleet. Drivers, on the other hand, depend upon the companies as individuals and because there are so many of them, each individual driver is dispensable. Thus, it is also the company’s prerogative to cut drivers off from access to the platform if they determine drivers have violated the terms of use. There will always be another person willing to do the job. One driver summarised this problem by pointing out that at the end of the day the company concerns itself with the interests of the customer, the consumer-cyborg buying services through the app by making sure these services are always available, always on-demand.
At the same time, these companies aggressively pursue this partnership narrative through public events, video campaigns and even award ceremonies. One driver proudly told me about how he had recently been invited to a company event because he had been rated among the five ‘best’
drivers in Jogja according to customer ratings. In chapter 2, I showed how comments made by both Nadiem Makarim of Gojek and Jason Thomsen of OVO emphasised the significance of drivers to their companies. Drivers are described in terms that make their work seem important, noble even, and their livelihoods as a core motivation for the business. Makarim even stressed how he felt his app had formalised the ojek trade and improved social recognition for drivers. Meanwhile, one could argue that the use of the term ‘partner’ is also a deliberate category, distinct from the responsibilities and obligations implied by the term ‘employee’.
Alex Rosenblat writes about this use of language in the so-called ‘gig economy’, noting the similar ride-hailing app Uber where “drivers are barely treated as workers at all” (Rosenblat, 2018, p. 8).
For Uber, drivers are legally classified as ‘independent contractors’, excluding them from worker protections. Using expressions such as entrepreneur, contractor, and driver-partner obscure the underlying reality that these companies treat drivers as though they were just another category of user of the app platform. As Rosenblat notes, Uber defines itself not as a transport company, but as a technology company, which affects how they are regulated. In practice, this means that
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these companies categorise both customers and drivers as consumers of the technological platform they provide. Independent equal parties making an exchange on a neutral platform. As a consumer of an app you may access certain opportunities, but you also willingly accept the conditions of use that are subject to its governance mechanisms, risking punitive action from the companies that control them.
By 2019, some drivers openly laughed when I asked them how they felt about the word mitra, explaining to me the disappointment and disillusion they felt with the companies. This emphasises that an equal partnership should be built on mutual respect and collaboration. In a focus group interview with three drivers, one driver laughed when I asked about the word mitra: “That’s what they said [all three laugh]. They said that we’re partners, but what we are feeling is not partnership.” They described various examples of how they felt this partnership role was not being fulfilled by the company, and eventually, I asked them what word they might choose to describe the relation instead:
Q: If you could choose another word, what would it be?
A1: Servant, probably. [laughs]
Q: What would you normally say?
A1: Just driver. Well, we are just drivers. We are not partners. If we are partners, then there should be two-way communication.
A2: It’s like this. According to me, we need them, but they don’t need us.
[Imitating company] “If you don’t want to work with me, then suit yourself.” That’s how it is. If you want to quit, then go ahead. But why can’t we be like that? Because we need them, we need jobs from them, you see.
That’s how it is.
[FGD 3]
When drivers sign up, they accept the terms and conditions that come with working as an ‘online driver’. However, as many interlocutors have pointed out, those conditions frequently change without warning or consultation with the drivers. There is no two-way negotiation about the challenges that drivers face from the app and driver-partners are subject to changing conditions rather than actively contributing to the development of their role. The fact that drivers depend on the apps individually means that they are also precariously positioned. They experience that the apps define them as on-demand servants, their labour mobilised and channelled through the app infrastructure to serve the needs of the consumer-cyborgs, and ultimately the financial interests of the companies.
This point, that driver-partners function as on-demand servants, is well illustrated by a story told to me by an interlocutor over dinner in early 2018. She had grown up in Jogja, moving back to settle there with her family after spending some years abroad. To manage the daily logistics, she
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employed a driver who could be trusted to transport her children to and from school, as well as their other social activities. After a few months, the driver quit. He had earned enough money for a down payment on a motorcycle and informed her that he was now going to work as an online driver. She told me, it had become clear that he was earning more than he had done while working for her full time. At first, she had been stumped about how to manage the logistics, but taking a leaf out of the driver’s book, decided that perhaps online drivers could be a solution for her as well. Now, she uses the apps to book any necessary drives for her children, paying directly with the app. She confided, the whole family now uses online transport rather than driving themselves.
The low minimum wage in Indonesia, and particularly as pointed out earlier in Jogja, mean that the driver initially found it more profitable to change to on-demand labour. Meanwhile, the interlocutor found that it was also cheaper and more convenient for her to simply hire someone to drive her when she needed it, rather than employ someone full-time.
Making an Incentivised Living
To better understand how drivers are mobilised as on-demand servants, I want to convey how earning a living through these platforms is experienced. While the overarching app governance mechanisms are similar across all the cities where the apps are in operation, each location has its variations and they change rapidly as the apps are updated regularly by the companies. The details described here are specific to the Jogja context at the time I was conducting fieldwork.
There are two ways for drivers to earn money built into these apps; 1) payment and tips for services from customers, and 2) a daily bonus issued by the company.
When a customer makes a booking, the app suggests a route and calculates the cost of the trip based on a set fee per kilometre called a tariff. For instance, in Jogja, the minimum rate for an order was Rp 9,000, followed by a set rate of Rp 3,500 per kilometre for a car ride, and less for a motorcycle ride. Many drivers expressed that these tariffs were set artificially low by the companies to attract customers by making the service cheap. The driver is not compensated for any travel involved in reaching the customer, or for the return trip if the customer travelled far away. Though these apps deploy dynamic pricing in times where there is a surge in demand, it does not consider the time spent in traffic jams. Customers can choose to offer a tip either through the app’s digital payment system or in cash after the trip to compensate for such inconveniences, but this still relies on the customers' sense of responsibility and does not provide a reliable source of income.
To compensate for the low tariff and to incentivise the drivers to work as much as possible, drivers can earn bonus points according to a three-tiered point system. Each tier has a target number of
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points and corresponds to a set amount of money denominated in rupiah. Points are accumulated throughout the day and the bonus is calculated at midnight, after which drivers are supposed to receive their bonus in the form of credit issued to their digital wallet. This bonus can comprise a major portion of daily earnings. One motorcycle driver estimated that if he reached the highest tier, which was worth Rp 80,000 at the time, he could earn about Rp 240,000 per day on average, meaning that the bonus constituted about a third of his daily income.
Driver-partners are not employees and are not guaranteed to earn an hourly or even daily minimum rate no matter how many hours they spend on the road looking for orders and customers. Meanwhile, they continue to have basic expenses stemming from the work itself such as vehicle fuel, pulsa and data packages to ensure that they can receive orders. Many drivers also rent their vehicles, committing in advance to paying daily instalments putting them in a difficult and vulnerable position if they are unable to reach their daily income goals. Thus, drivers often depend on reaching the daily bonus tiers in order to make a viable living from the app. In practice, this means that many drivers find themselves ‘chasing points’, ending their workday not at a set time, but when they were able to tupo, a contraction of tutup poin meaning to ‘close the points’
needed for a target bonus tier. Through the point system, the apps also subtly communicate to drivers what they can consider working hours. As two drivers described it:
A1: So, we were told indirectly that we should be resting for those 5 hours.
And then when 5 a.m. arrives, we’d be able to work again.
A2: Well, they don’t really tell us, but we’re just kind of obeying them. I don’t really know, the system over there is the one regulating it.
[FGD 3]
Though the app is always operational, Grab does not award points between midnight and 5 in the morning, meaning that the reward for driving at that time is reduced. For drivers, this means there is no purpose in chasing points, and thus this time period operates as a form of enforced rest.
Gojek on the other hand allows drivers to collect points 24/7. In Figure 14, three drivers show me how the incentive mechanism appears in the driver app: