Report on Income Volatility and Recovery for Southeast Asian Gig Workers During the Pandemic — Epoche B2
Report: Income Volatility and Recovery among Gig Workers in Southeast Asia, 2020–2022 1. Purpose and scope This report examines what happened to the earnings of motorcycle-taxi riders, delivery couriers, tour guides and freelance service providers in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam between the first pandemic control measures of March 2020 and the reopening of borders during 2022. Throughout, gig work means paid work allocated task by task rather than by a continuing contract of employment, and platform work means the subset of it distributed through an application — Grab, Gojek, Foodpanda and their competitors — which matches a worker to a customer and takes a commission on each completed job. The report sets out the causal chain from regulation to income loss, then identifies the factors associated with subsequent recovery. It draws on published government measures, platform announcements, official tourism statistics and contemporary press reporting. It does not attempt to quantify losses at regional level, and the reason is worth stating because it is itself a finding. Most of this work is informal employment in the sense used by the International Labour Organization: employment not covered by formal arrangements, and therefore absent from employer payrolls, tax withholding records and contributory social-insurance registers. Those three sources are precisely what a statistical office would use to measure an earnings shock quickly. Informality is defined by absence from them. Measuring the sector therefore requires household labour force surveys — and in 2020 many national surveys in the region were suspended or moved to telephone interviewing, which changes who can be reached and breaks comparability with earlier rounds. No reliable regional figure exists because the instrument capable of producing one was disabled by the same event it would have measured. 2. Cause: the withdrawal of demand This section establishes what actually caused the loss, because the common account — that work dried up because people were afraid — misidentifies the mechanism. The mechanism was not a fall in willingness to work but the removal, by regulation, of the situations in which gig work is performed. Three measures had the sharpest effect: Enhanced Community Quarantine across Luzon, from 17 March 2020. This was the Philippine government's strictest category of restriction, confining residents of the Manila metropolitan area to their homes except for essential errands and suspending most public transport. For a rider whose income comes from carrying passengers, the suspension of transport was not a constraint on the job; it was the abolition of it. Large-Scale Social Restrictions in Jakarta, from 10 April 2020. Known by the Indonesian abbreviation PSBB, these were created by Government Regulation (Peraturan Pemerintah) No. 21 of 2020, which sets out the categories of activity a province may suspend, and applied to Jakarta by provincial decree. Their initial Jakarta form barred motorcycle taxis from carrying passengers at all. The position was not uniform: the national Ministry of Transport issued a regulation permitting passenger carriage under health conditions, and the resulting divergence between national and provincial rules is one reason riders' accounts of what was permitted in April 2020 disagree with one another. What is not in dispute is that the passenger business stopped. Closure to foreign arrivals, Indonesia and Thailand, early April 2020. Indonesia barred foreign visitors from entering or transiting from 2 April; Thailand's civil aviation authority halted inbound passenger flights from early April. The scale of what this removed is visible in the official arrival statistics. Thailand recorded 39.9 million foreign arrivals in 2019 and 0.43 million in 2021 — a fall of about 99 per cent. Indonesian arrivals, on the foreign-visitor series published by Badan Pusat Statistik, the national statistics agency, fell from 16.1 million in 2019 to roughly a quarter of that in 2020. For guides, drivers and freelance event staff in Bali, Bangkok and Phuket, this was not a reduced market. It was the removal of the client base. Two features of gig work converted these measures into an immediate loss rather than a gradual one, and both can be stated precisely. The first is the accounting period. A worker's daily net income can be written as $$\pi = (p - v)\,n - F,$$ where $p$ is the payment received for one completed job, $v$ the variable cost of performing it (chiefly fuel), $n$ the number of jobs completed that day, and $F$ the fixed costs that fall due whether or not any job is performed — the motorcycle instalment, the data plan, the rent. Regulation acted directly on $n$, driving it towards zero. Revenue and variable cost then vanish together, but $F$ does not, so net income does not fall to zero: it falls to $-F$. This is the formal content of the observation that costs did not fall. And because $n$ is counted per day rather than per month, the fall registered within days. A salaried employee under a monthly contract experiences the same shock, if at all, at the end of a pay period and often after a notice period; the difference in timing is a property of the contract, not of the industry. The second feature is the absence of automatic replacement income. Social insurance — contributory schemes paying out on unemployment, sickness or old age — is generally tied to registered employment, so workers outside it receive nothing automatically when earnings stop. The International Labour Organization's statistical picture of the informal economy puts informal employment at 61.2 per cent of all employment globally and 68.2 per cent in Asia and the Pacific; that majority is, by construction, the population outside contributory schemes. The joint Asian Development Bank and International Labour Organization assessment of the regional employment crisis adds the point about concentration: the activ