This move responds to the Constitutional Court’s ruling of Nov. 25, 2021, which found the job creation law to be conditionally unconstitutional on two grounds: Its use of an omnibus law format and lack of prior public consultation. The House was given two years to rectify these problems.

There is now a need to hold public consultations to deal with the Constitutional Court’s second objection, and therefore the House still has the chance to reconsider the content and form of the law.

The labor cluster of amendments within the law has been particularly controversial and vehemently opposed by the labor movement. Trade unions have highlighted the removal of time restrictions on fixed-term contracts, reductions to severance pay calculations, and the removal of dismissal procedures, among other issues. 

My in-depth legal analysis of the labor cluster of amendments indicates that there is another set of largely unrecognized, problems.  

The first issue is that having the large number of labor law amendments buried within the voluminous Job Creation Law impedes access to legal information. It personally took me many hours of flipping between the original 2003 Labor Law, the Job Creation Law amendments, and the related implementing regulations to understand exactly how the law had changed.

While this is a generally occurring problem because Indonesia does not publish official amalgamated versions of original laws with their amendments, it is particularly problematic in the area of labor law, which affects the everyday lives of so many people.

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