Spiritually surviving precarious times: Millennials in Jakarta, Indonesia

ABSTRACT

It is increasingly urgent to consider how work conditions have shifted with neoliberal transformations and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. The precarious nature of work faced by millennials is widely acknowledged in the academic literature, but few scholars consider how spirituality is intimately connected to the multiple labour market challenges in the Global South. This paper uses sequential mixed methods to depict the social realities of millennials living in Jakarta, Indonesia. Importantly, precarity has become more entrenched into the nature of work during the pandemic, through the passage of the 2020 Job Creation Law. Precarious millennials in this Muslim-majority city use spiritual lexicons as coping strategies, as these help urban millennials to accept (ikhlas) the gradual disappearance of financially rewarding jobs and dwindling prospects for upward mobility in the formal economy. While spiritual narratives might seem religiously specific, they are useful for both Muslim and non-Muslim millennials to respond to broader and systemic job insecurity.

KEYWORDS:

• millennials
• precarity
• Indonesia
• spirituality
• pandemic

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the millennial research team, Afra Suci Ramadhon, Dwi Aini Bestari, Adinda Zakiah, Timothy Tirta, and Ayu Larasati for their hard work and company. We also thank the organisers of the Asia Institute, Indonesian Hallmark Research Initiative (IDeHaRI), and the Indonesia Forum, which co-organized “The 2019 Indonesian Elections” public panel and workshop in August 2019. A previous version of this paper was presented under the title “Labor Abundance in Precarious Times” at this workshop. We also thank the organizers of the 2022 Australia National University (ANU) Indonesia Institute’s “Young People in Indonesia” program, which allowed us to measure and compare our analysis against other research on young people. We thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their comments and feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript. Together, they have made our arguments stronger.

Notes

1 Howe and Strauss 2000; Woodman and Wyn 2014.

2 Cf. Friedman 2014; Morgan et al. 2013; Neilson and Rossiter 2005; Standing 2011; Worth 2016.

3 Mirrlees 2015.

4 Murphy and Simm 2017

5 Murphy and Simms 2017:347

6 Harvey 2007.

7 Akhlas 2020; Rakhmani et al. 2020.

8 World Bank 2016. According to the World Bank, “in 2002, the richest ten percent of Indonesians consumed as much as the poorest forty-two percent combined; by 2014, they consumed as much as the poorest fifty-four percent.” See World Bank 2016, 7.

9 Oxfam 2017.

10 Hill 2021; Yusuf and Sumner 2015; Yusuf et al. 2021; Yusuf and Warr 2018; Yusuf et al. 2014.

11 Harvey 2007.

12 Harvey 2005.

13 Enterprise Singapore 2022.

14 Morelock 2018.

15 McGuigan 2014.

16 Mahy 2021.

17 Harvey 2007.

18 Utomo et al. 2018a; Beta, 2020; Anaroga and Sakai, 2023.

19 Allen 2016.

20 Rudnyckyj 2009; Rudnyckyj 2011a.

21 Beta 2019, 2020; Heryanto 2011; Saefullah 2017; Rahman et al. 2021; Nisa 2018a, 2018b, 2021; Smith-Heffner 2019.

22 Barker 2007.

23 Utomo et al. 2018a; Beta, 2020; Anaroga and Sakai, 2023.

24 Lee and Mason 2006.

25 UNESCAP 2020.

26 Gellert 2015.

27 Cohen 2021; Pinsker 2021.

28 Utomo et al. 2018a; Anoraga and Sakai, 2023.

29 Utomo et al. 2018a.

30 Naafs and Skelton 2018.

31 Rodrik 2016.

32 Yusuf and Sumner 2015; Andriyani and Irawan 2018

33 Churchill et al. 2019.

34 Ortiz and Cummins 2012.

35 Kamim et al. 2019; Yasih 2022

36 ILO 2023.

37 Nilan et al. 2011.

38 Leaver et al. 2020.

39 Martinez and Masron 2020.

40 BPS 2021.

41 Initially, we followed up our survey with face-to-face in-depth interviews with a sub-sample of the survey participants in the first quarter of 2020. Due to the unanticipated disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, follow-up interviews were delayed and shifted to online in-depth interviews. The interval between survey data collection and the timing of in-depth interviews ended up working to our advantage. First, the spacing between the two rounds of data collection allowed us to analyze our survey results and identify key themes and issues to be brought to the fore during the qualitative data collection period. Secondly, we were able to capture the temporal effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

42 We adopted measures for subjective well-being, religiosity, and economic standing from earlier studies on young adults in Greater Jakarta and other settings. Cf. Utomo et al. 2014; Nartova-Bochaver et al. 2019.

43 When analyzing questions about Islam and /or the practice of Islam, we have limited our analysis to Muslim participants in the sample (n=528).

44 Worth 2019, 445.

45 We have included all responses for all participants, regardless of their religion. We have excluded missing data from our tabulations.

46 The percentage distribution among tertiary educated participants was as follows: 1= 6.6%; 2= 25.8%; 3=19.2%; 4 =20.7%; 5=24.8%; 6=3%, with 1 being very unsatisfied and 6 being very satisfied

47 ILO 2016, 9.

48 Jeffrey 2008.

49 This sense of in-betweenness resonates with Jeffrey’s concept of time-passing (2008) – to pass time, waiting (jobless) by keeping busy (remaining active). See also Jeffrey and Dyson 2021.

50 Newhouse 2017.

51 “Letting go” (pasrah) is a form of mental surrender to hardships and God’s will. Such lexicons appear as individual narratives within broader discourses of precarity. They are useful as forms of recourse and reflection in times of strife and stress.

52 Ikhtiar (to choose) is part of how to be a good Muslim (Abukari, 2014). Colloquially, it means effort, endeavour, and persistence in the face of challenges. However, as many have argued, Islamic narratives and teachings are not monolithic and there is heterogeneity in piety. Cf. Rakhmani, 2016.

53 The term hijrah refers to a Muslim’s transformation from being less religious to more religious. It is commonly expressed through their choice of dress—an Arabim, full cover veil with robes (jalabiya­) for women, while men generally wear pants that stop above their ankles (isbal) and don a beard (lihyah) like the one worn by the Prophet (Sunesti et al., 2018). Interestingly, some leave their jobs to carry out a complete and perfect hijra (Arabic: kaffah; meaning a comprehensive form of Islam) (Akmaliah, 2020). This is usually to avoid impurity in working environments that involve usury (riba) or working with infidels (kafir)(Farhan and Rosharlianti, 2021; Ningsih et al., 2022).

54 Jahroni 2015.

55 Nisa 2018b.

56 Hadiz and Rakhmani 2017; Hasan 2010; Rakhmani and Hadiz 2022.

57 Rakhmani 2019; Utomo et al., 2018b.

58 Fealy 2008; Nisa 2018a; Rakhmani 2016; Rudnyckyj 2009; 2011a; 2011b; Saefullah 2017.

59 Albrecht and Heaton 1984.

60 See Rudnyckyj 2011a; b; see also Fealy 2008; Yasih and Hadiz 2023.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Indonesian Endowment Fund for Education (LPDP) on behalf of the Indonesian Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology and managed by Universitas Indonesia under the PRIME Program (Grant No. PRJ/120/2021).

Notes on contributors

Inaya Rakhmani

Inaya Rakhmani is an associate professor in communications and the Director of the Asia Research Centre, Universitas Indonesia. She is the author of Mainstreaming Islam in Indonesia published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2016, which was translated into Indonesian by Mizan Publishing in 2021.

Ariane Utomo

Ariane Utomo is a social demographer, working primarily on gender, work, marriage, and the family in Indonesia. She is currently a senior lecturer in Demography and Population Geography at the School of Geography, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences, The University of Melbourne.