Search

Indonesia enacted a controversial ‘Omnibus Law’ on Job Creation in late 2020, and its implementing regulations followed in February 2021. This Law, and particularly the labour cluster of amendments within it, has been linked to Indonesia's recent ‘democratic decline’ or ‘illiberal turn’. Many of the amendments reduce worker protections with the aim of producing a more flexible labour market. While it is these obvious amendments in favour of employers’ interests that have attracted the most attention, a deeper analysis of the changes introduced by this Law reveals additional important factors at play. There has been a significant repositioning of labour regulations within Indonesia's hierarchy of legal instruments, as well as important responses to Constitutional Court judicial review cases. Overall, this deeper legal analysis produces mixed evidence for democratic decline in Indonesia.

This Article introduces the Worker Protection Index (WPI), a new measure for quantitative cross-national comparison of the strength of worker protection provided by law. After presenting an overview and critique of existing labor regulation indices, the Article outlines the conceptual and methodological innovations used in order to develop the WPI. The WPI is wider in scope than many other comparable indices and arguably is more sensitive to variance in labor regulation systems around the world. We then briefly present some initial coding results for Australia, China, Indonesia, and New Zealand, illustrating the impact of our innovations by contrasting these findings with the Cambridge Centre for Business Regulation (CBR) Labour Regulation Index (LRI).

On 5 October 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indonesian National Legislature passed a very controversial ‘Omnibus Law’ on Job Creation. This legislation, with a massive 1187 pages, was then signed by President Joko Widodo and came into effect on 2 November 2020 and is now officially known as Law no. 11/2020 on Job Creation (Undang-Undang no. 11/2020 tentang Cipta Kerja).This Paper undertakes the task of piecing together the labour cluster of amendments in the Omnibus Law on Job Creation and aims to explain and analyse these changes in the context of the previous law.

Much of the discussion of informal work in recent years has been couched in terms of the ‘failure’ of formal labour law to regulate and protect many millions of workers around the world. This is usually seen as a failure of the state, either as a deliberate policy or through institutional weakness, to apply and enforce labour laws and standards in both developed and developing economies. As a result, the imagined picture created is of a circle drawn around the centre of state power within which labour laws are applicable, enforced and effective, and beyond which there is a void of regulation where workers are exploited and denied basic labour and human rights.

This article is concerned with a pervasive gender stereotype within Indonesian society, that of janda, meaning both widows and divorcees. The term janda is no neutral signifier of marital status, but rather carries a bundle of pejorative meanings concerned with status and presumed sexual availability to men. It is bound up within assumptions about the normality of heterosexual marriage in Indonesia, and in many ways janda is the antithesis of the ideal of ibu, meaning a virtuous wife and mother. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted by each of the three authors, the article examines the reproduction and effects of this stereotype in three Indonesian communities; a village in East Java, a mining town in East Kalimantan and among Indonesian expatriates in Perth, Australia. Using this multi-sited and multi-positioned material we reflect on the everyday lived experience of being a janda, in particular how the stereotype affects social status, livelihood opportunities and modes of representing ones...

This document introduces a new measure of worker protection – the Worker Protection Index (WPI). The WPI has been constructed for the purpose of assessing the extent to which national legal systems provide a range of protections for workers. The index contains 36 variables. The WPI takes as its starting point a broader conception of worker protection than prior quantitative measures of labour law. While most items included in the WPI incorporate the areas of labour and employment laws covering persons in the formal labour market captured by prior measures, it also includes a number of additional items that cover more general forms of social protection for individuals and households dependent on their labour for subsistence, such as unemployment benefits, workers’ compensation for injury or death at work, and retirement benefits. The WPI seeks first to establish an initial measure of the law on the books (de jure) but then, second, through a reasoned transparent process set out descriptively in the template, to arrive at a more accurate measure of the law’s strength by incorporating appropriate weights for the extent to which the law covers different groups of workers (according to such matters as the status of the employee, the size of the enterprise, the types of industry and so on). The coding for four countries is provided here: Australia, China, Indonesia and New Zealand.

This report is part of a University of Oxford John Fell funded collaborative project:Informality and the Media in Consumer Protection in Emerging Economies. This pilot project seeks to shed light upon consumer complaint behaviour through social media in emerging economies. This report is about Turkey. It offers an overview of consumer protection laws, and a summary of what Turkish consumers complain about and how they choose to do this. The aim is to set the scene and context for further in-depth analysis into social media as a tool for consumer complaints.

This qualitative historical labour law Template was designed as part of the Australian Research Council funded Discovery Project titled: ‘Legal Origins: the Impact of Different Legal Systems on the Regulation of the Business Enterprise in the Asia-Pacific Region’ (DP1095060).The material is arranged in chronological order for legal changes relating to five main variables (forming and ending employment, organisation of work, minimum work entitlements and social protection, voice and representation and enforcement and regulatory agencies) with their respective sub-variables. The Template includes explanations as to the reasons for each legal change and the outcomes of that change where information is available. A Bibliography is provided at the end of the document.This Template completed for Hong Kong is intended to be a working resource document and it will be updated periodically. This version of the completed Template for Hong Kong covers the period 1844 to 2012.

In some recent international literature on comparative law and economics, the Philippines has been misclassified as a civil law family country. This paper provides a corrective to this view by tracing the foreign influences on the Philippine legal system as a whole, and on the development of labor law specifically, to demonstrate that American common law influence has far outweighed that of the Spanish civil law heritage. However, this is only part of the story, as in the post-colonial era, the law of the Philippines has progressively reflected local political and economic conditions and in many instances has developed without any direct reference to external models. Hence, this paper argues that the Philippines is more rightly classified as a hybrid legal system dominated by common law traditions, but that such a classification will still not adequately describe the nature of the current system.

Generally speaking there has been a relative dearth of serious scholarship focusing on the evolution of Indian labour law in its economic, social, and political contexts. Such work as there is tends to be constituted of fragmented and short journal articles and notes, including those by labour economists and industrial relations scholars. The present work undertakes a survey of the literature in the field, examining first the various periods through which Indian labour law has evolved up to the present time, and second the extent to which the labour law system can be seen to have fulfilled its two core objectives: the protection of labour and the maintenance of industrial peace. The survey reveals that Indian “labour law” in the formal sense has very little purchase in terms of its application in pursuit of its objects. This, in turn, suggests that some other approach is required to reach a more grounded and accurate understanding of how, and to what effect, labour is regulated in India.

The question of the extent to which “transplant” countries continue to exhibit a particular style and substance of company regulation that mimics that of their respective “origin” countries has become particularly salient since the influential “legal origins” theory was proposed. This Article examines in detail the long historical evolution of company law in Indonesia from the colonial period to the present. Inspired by the approach of Pistor et al. (2002), this research finds some “legal origins” effects in the ways that Indonesian company law has developed, but it also notes that patterns of change have been significantly different from that of its former colonizer, the Netherlands. Indonesia experienced an extended period of time in which no change to its main company law occurred and has displayed evidence of adaptation to local conditions only more recently. This research reveals, however, that many of the contributing explanatory factors for this long period of legal stagnation in Indonesia are found outside Pistor et al.’s analytical framework. They include the ongoing effects of “colonial legal history” rather than “legal family effects,” particularly of the race-based plural legal system, competing ideological approaches to business regulation, and the existence of informal business entities. This suggests that a more nuanced understanding of postcolonial and developing economy realities is needed in order to redefine the category of “transplant” countries in comparative studies of company law.

This paper examines in detail the long historical evolution of the company form and company law in Indonesia from the colonial period through to the present. The paper engages with existing research on the evolution of corporate law and explanations for the differences between patterns of legal innovation in origin and transplant countries. This research finds some ‘legal origins’ effects in the ways that Indonesian company law has developed, but that patterns of change have been significantly different to that of its former colonizer, the Netherlands. Other mechanisms of continuity and change are observed including the impacts of ‘colonial legal history’ and of informal modes of business regulation.