ALSA 2025 meeting

In Indonesia’s legal and policy framework, Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) are hailed as the backbone of the national economy. However, this celebration often obscures the precarious reality faced by informal women workers within these enterprises. This study investigates home-based laundry businesses in a semi-peripheral urban area where most workers—predominantly women—are employed without formal contracts, paid as low as IDR 1,000–2,000 per kilogram of laundry, and exposed to health risks from equipment such as steam irons. Despite fulfilling all elements of dependent labour—working under employer orders, bound to work hours, and performing repetitive labour-intensive tasks—these workers remain legally unrecognized.

Employing a socio-legal methodology that combines regulatory analysis and grounded field observation, this paper examines how Indonesian law (Law No. 20/2008 on MSMEs and Law No. 6/2023 on Employment) structurally excludes informal labourers. The study argues that the legal definition of “worker” in Indonesian labour law is narrow, formalistic, and gender-blind, leaving informal women workers beyond the scope of labour protections.

This paper contributes a novel analytical shift: it situates informal labour not as a legal vacuum, but as a site of institutionalised exclusion—produced by policy frameworks that favour capital and productivity over labour rights and gender justice. While policy debates often focus on formal workers or domestic workers under the Domestic Workers Bill (RUU PPRT), this research draws attention to a "grey zone" of informal workers employed in MSMEs who fall through the cracks of both labour law and welfare protections.

This study calls for an urgent redefinition of “worker” in Indonesian labour law to include informal wage-dependent labourers in MSMEs—particularly women—thus ensuring that economic growth does not come at the cost of invisible, unprotected, and undervalued labour.