The wrong defendant: BPJS Ketenagakerjaan on trial for laws it never wrote
A response to The Reformist’s vol. 29 on social security system reform
The author is a policy specialist at BPJS Ketenagakerjaan and a deputy chief of its trade union. This article reflects the author’s own views and analysis and doesn’t necessarily reflect those of The Reformist or the official position of his employer and the union.
This article responds to The Reformist vol. 29 on BPJS Ketenagakerjaan, which discusses the shortfalls of the program and how relevant ministries responsible for social security have fumbled protection amid a flailing economy. Read here.
“Social security must be achieved by co-operation between the State and the individual.”
— William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services (1942)
The Reformist recently asked in a volume whether BPJS Ketenagakerjaan can “save” Indonesia’s vulnerable workforce. It is a sharp, well-sourced piece, and it is right about the danger: seven out of ten workers stand outside the employment social security system.
As the article pointed out, the clock is ticking toward financial deficits by 2038. Without genuine reforms, BPJS Ketenagakerjaan, as a social protection program, faces the risk of collapse.
But the article seems to put BPJS Ketenagakerjaan, an implementing agency, on trial for “crimes” committed by the legislature, the Finance Ministry, and the Manpower Ministry. This misdirection risks letting the actors who actually hold the levers walk away free from the consequences of their misdeeds.
An operator on trial for laws it never wrote
Let’s begin with what BPJS Ketenagakerjaan legally is. Under Law No. 24/2011, it is a public legal entity, or, in plain words, an operator. It can collect contributions, manage Social Security funds, and pay out claims across five programs.
It cannot, however, decide the rules of the game it plays. Contribution rates, benefit formulas, eligibility criteria, investment mandates, and enforcement powers are all set upstream. They are stipulated in Government Regulations (PP) and in Ministerial Regulations issued by the Manpower Ministry, the Finance Ministry, the National Social Security Council (DJSN), and ultimately the House of Representatives (DPR).
BPJS Ketenagakerjaan can’t legislate its own coverage, just as a cashier can’t rewrite the menu.
Therefore, please allow me to “defend” BPJS Ketenagakerjaan by redirecting the problems listed in the Reformist’s article to those who are actually responsible:
I. The JHT withdrawal scandal was a policy reversal, not an operator’s blunder
The article treats the hemorrhage of Jaminan Hari Tua (JHT) funds, with more than a million workers cashing out in a single year, as evidence that the program is misdesigned.
It is misdesigned. But BPJS Ketenagakerjaan did not design it.
The lump-sum withdrawal upon resignation or layoff was stipulated in PP No. 60/2015, when the government reversed its own retirement-preservation principle under pressure from organized labor.
The agency administering that rule, BPJS Ketenagakerjaan, had no vote in the matter. To blame the operator for honoring a regulation it is legally bound to honor is to mistake obedience for authorship.
II. Weak enforcement is due to a lack of sufficient manpower (in the ministry inspectorate)
The article correctly references the Ombudsman’s 2021 finding on weak enforcement, especially towards non-compliant employers. Yet it then splits the blame between BPJS Ketenagakerjaan and the Ministry of Manpower, as though the two share the mandate.
They do not.
Labor inspection is the exclusive authority of the Directorate General of Labor Inspection. BPJS Ketenagakerjaan cannot impose sanctions on a non-compliant employer. It can only refer to one.
With roughly 2,400 inspectors stretched across a workforce of more than 150 million, the 523,000 unregistered employers are not a symptom of operator negligence. They are a symptom of a state that funded an obligation without funding the means to enforce it.
III. The missing subsidy is a budget decision
The article accurately notes that BPJS Kesehatan, the country’s national health insurance program, has reached near-universal coverage, while BPJS Ketenagakerjaan languishes. This is true, but it’s not the operator’s fault that it doesn’t have the budget to provide universal coverage.
BPJS Kesehatan thrives in this area largely because the country introduced a scheme called Penerima Bantuan Iuran (PBI), a state-funded program that pays premiums for the poor. But there is currently no equivalent for employment social security.
That absence is not an institutional limitation of BPJS Ketenagakerjaan. It is a deliberate fiscal choice by the Finance Ministry and ratified by the House. Article 14 of Law No. 40/2004 actually mandates PBI for both BPJS, but this is not the case in practice today. In other words, the comparison The Reformist’s article uses to indict the operator is thus, in fact, an indictment of the government’s budgeting decisions.
What the operator can do once the architecture lets it
While it would be wrong to direct responsibility for solving the above-mentioned problems to BPJS Ketenagakerjaan, that doesn’t mean the agency is entirely absolved of blame.
The persistent confusion with BPJS Kesehatan, the friction in the informal-sector onboarding, and uneven outreach are real — and these are indeed the agency’s to fix.
It should also communicate more openly with the public about these constraints, especially the workers it serves, so that it does not bear the brunt of public frustration alone.
But these are second-order problems. The binding constraint is upstream, and that is precisely why the agency’s potential is being underestimated.
Consider what the operator already has: a national collection and investment machine, a grassroots agent network (Perisai), digital enrolment channels, and a growing web of cooperation agreements with sub-national governments. The premium cut of Rp 8,400 for informal workers, stipulated in PP No. 50/2025, shows the instinct is there.
What this machinery lacks is not competence. It lacks a mandate with teeth, a fiscal instrument to subsidize those who cannot pay, and an enforcement partner that is actually resourced.
If we give BPJS Ketenagakerjaan a statutory coverage mandate backed by a functioning inspectorate, a PBI-equivalent subsidy carved out of the APBN, and the DJSN’s willingness to coordinate rather than spectate, the coverage curve that has crawled fourteen points in twenty-eight years will bend. The limiting “ceiling” is not the operator but the policy architecture. In fact, the operator has been trying to break it with one hand tied behind their back.
What genuine cooperation would actually look like
If the constraint is the architecture, the remedy must be architectural, and it requires that every party move at once. The point is not that BPJS Ketenagakerjaan is blameless. It is that no single actor can close a thirty-point coverage gap alone. Here is what the actors’ orchestration could look like:
The government holds the heaviest instruments. The Finance Ministry should carve a contribution subsidy for the poorest informal workers out of the State Budget, a PBI for employment modeled after the health version, beginning with the cheapest and highest-impact floor (work accident and death coverage, JKK and JKM, at roughly Rp 16,800 a month) before layering pensions on top.
Enrolment should become automatic immediately after a regulation is formalized, bolted onto the OSS business-licensing system, the issuance of a business identification number (NIB), tax registration, and the Regsosek social registry. This will ensure that protection follows the worker instead of waiting for the worker to discover it.
The Manpower Ministry must properly resource its Directorate General for Supervision and Occupational Safety and Health, with more inspectors reaching the district level and a live data bridge to BPJS so that non-compliance becomes visible and actionable. And the DJSN must finally start coordinating rather than merely spectating, gradually restoring JHT’s retirement-preservation purpose.
Employers will comply when evasion costs more than compliance. Registration should be tied to procurement eligibility, license renewal, and tax and export clearances, so that the billion-rupiah fine written into the 2011 law stops being a useless deterrent it is today. Firms that comply should be rewarded with recognition and lighter reporting, not merely spared punishment.
Workers, especially in the informal and online gig economy, will not enroll on their own through a counter they do not know exists. Gig workers should be automatically enrolled, with the right to opt out, as a condition for platforms (e.g., Gojek, Grab, Maxim) to operate at all.
Everyone else is best reached through the associations they already trust, the ojol communities, the market-trader cooperatives, the fishing and farming groups, rather than through atomized individual sign-ups. And, importantly, JHT must stop being treated as a severance ATM, which requires both financial literacy and a redesign that makes the long-term products genuinely worth holding.
Trade unions, including this author’s own, must own their share of the problem too. The 2022 campaign that forced the reversal of JHT preservation protected short-term liquidity at the direct expense of long-term retirement adequacy.
The labor movement should now spend its considerable mobilizing power on the opposite goal: an adequate retirement pension (Jaminan Pensiun) and stronger job-loss insurance (Jaminan Kehilangan Pekerjaan), so that defending workers no longer means defending their own poverty in old age.
Unions should also drag the tripartite forums from grievance toward genuine co-design, and extend their organizing to the informal and platform workers that the whole system currently forgets.
This is what cooperation between the State and individuals, in Beveridge’s phrase, would actually require. Not just a slogan, but a synchronized set of decisions by the very actors the original article left out of frame.
Let’s stop asking the wrong question
So the question is not whether BPJS Ketenagakerjaan can save Indonesia’s vulnerable workforce. The honest question is whether the other actors will finally do their part by writing the laws, funding the subsidy, and staffing the enforcement that an operator cannot conjure on its own. The agency can carry the load. But it cannot be asked to build the road, pass the budget, and hire the inspectors while doing so.
The time bomb is real. But it was assembled in the ministries’ and the parliament’s meeting rooms, not in the operator’s offices. Pointing the spotlight at BPJS Ketenagakerjaan makes for a tidy villain. But it also lets the people holding the detonator stay comfortably out in the shadows.
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