SHE HAS THREE JOBS AND NONE OF THEM COUNT: THE REAL FACE OF WOMEN'S AND YOUTH WORK IN ASIA PACIFIC
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Part 2 of the "Who Is This Crisis For?" Series — SocDem Asia Pacific
Sondang Tarida Tampubolon is the Coordinator of Social Democrats Asia Pacific (SocDem Asia Pacific) and Deputy Secretary-General of the National Democratic Party (Partai NasDem), Indonesia.
This article is part of the SocDem Asia Pacific editorial series leading up to the webinar "Regional Solidarity in Times of Crisis," August 2026.
Introduction
Meet Ana, Nat, Lurdes, and Sari.
Ana is nineteen, a live-in domestic worker in Metro Manila.
Nat is twenty-two, moving between a small family food stall and app-based delivery work in Bangkok.
Lurdes is twenty-four, helping keep her family alive through subsistence farming — farming mainly to feed the household rather than for large-scale commercial sale — and unpaid care work in Timor Leste.
Sari is twenty-one, combining freelance online work, family work, and unpaid domestic labour in Jakarta.
All four of them work.
They work long hours. They help keep households, neighbourhoods, and local economies running. Yet the systems that decide who counts as a “worker” often do not see them.
Their jobs do not fit the standard model that labour law, social insurance, and pension systems were designed to protect.
Ana works in a private home. Nat works between the street and a digital app. Lurdes works on family land and inside the home. Sari moves between the informal economy — work that takes place without a formal contract or full legal protection — and unpaid care.
Their stories are not exceptions. They are part of a pattern across Asia and the Pacific.
Across the region, millions of women and young people work in ways that are essential but poorly protected. They are domestic workers, street vendors, riders, family farmers, online freelancers, caregivers, and small traders. They work long hours, often for low and unstable incomes, while labour laws and social protection systems still fail to catch up with the reality of their lives.
In the first article in this series, the argument was simple: economic crisis is never neutral. It always has a human face, and very often that face is a woman’s. This article goes further. It asks what that face actually looks like today — and how it also includes young workers entering labour markets already shaped by insecurity.
The Informal Economy Is the Centre
Too often, informal work is described as if it sits at the edge of the economy. In reality, it is part of the centre of economic life across much of Asia and the Pacific.
In Jakarta, for example, planning documents show that informal workers still make up around 36 percent of the labour force. That is not a small leftover group. It is a large part of the city’s economy. Similar patterns appear across the region, especially for women and young workers, who are more likely to enter the labour market through insecure jobs, family work, casual work, or platform work — jobs arranged through digital apps such as delivery or ride-hailing services.
For these workers, informality does not mean being outside the economy. It means being inside the economy without the protections that formal workers are meant to have: written contracts, stable wages, paid leave, health coverage, unemployment support, or a reliable path to a pension.
When growth slows, this kind of work is usually hit first. Households reduce spending. Employers cut costs. Risks are pushed downward. The burden lands on workers who already have the weakest protection.
Four Lives, One System
To understand what this means, it helps to move beyond statistics and look at lives.
Ana in Metro Manila
Ana came to Metro Manila from the Visayas as a teenager to work as a kasambahay, a domestic worker employed by a private household in the Philippines. She cooks, cleans, washes clothes, and helps care for children and an older relative. Her workday is long, and much of her life is shaped by the needs of the family she works for.
On paper, Ana has rights.
The Batas Kasambahay, the Philippine Domestic Workers Act, says domestic workers must receive a minimum wage, rest periods, and registration in social protection systems such as health insurance and social security. In Metro Manila, recent wage orders have raised the minimum monthly wage for domestic workers to around 7,800 pesos.
But law on paper does not always mean protection in practice. Ana’s agreement is verbal. She is paid below the legal wage floor. She is not fully registered for the benefits the law promises. Her workplace is a home, which makes violations harder to monitor and easier to hide.
Nat in Bangkok
Nat works in two jobs at once. During the day, he helps run his family’s small food stall near a transit stop in Bangkok. In the evening, he delivers food through a digital app using a borrowed motorbike.
Both jobs are real work. Both generate income. But neither offers the kind of security that labour law was built around. There is no standard contract, no guaranteed monthly pay, and no real buffer when demand drops or something goes wrong.
Thailand’s informal workforce is huge, with recent reports often referring to around 20 million informal workers nationwide. Young workers are heavily represented in this part of the economy, and women remain concentrated in some of its most insecure forms, especially service and domestic work. There is growing debate in Thailand about stronger legal protection and wider social security access for informal workers, but for workers like Nat, everyday insecurity still comes first.
Lurdes in Timor Leste
Lurdes spends much of her day on her family’s land, growing food that helps feed the household and sometimes brings a little extra cash at the market. The rest of her time goes into caring for younger siblings and an ageing grandfather.
This is work. It takes time, effort, and skill. It keeps a household alive. But much of it is unpaid, and much of it is missing from the categories that states usually use to define employment.
For young women like Lurdes, the move from school into adult life does not necessarily mean entering a formal labour market. It often means moving into unpaid family labour, informal agricultural work, and care work. In countries where social protection remains limited, that means little access to income support, old-age security, or recognition as a worker in the first place.
Sari in Jakarta
Sari lives in East Jakarta. In the morning, she helps her mother sell breakfast from a small stall in front of their home. During the day, she works online for several small businesses as a freelance social media and customer-service admin. At night, she does a large share of the care and domestic work at home.
Jakarta’s official minimum wage for 2026 is around Rp 5.7 million. But workers like Sari often do not benefit from that floor because they are not treated as regular employees. They work in family businesses, on informal terms, or through digital arrangements that leave responsibility unclear.
Sari’s life shows a wider change in urban work. For many young people, the first job is not one stable job. It is a mix of tasks: online work, family work, and unpaid work inside the household. All of it matters. Very little of it is properly protected.
The Architecture of Invisibility
Ana, Nat, Lurdes, and Sari live in different places and do different kinds of work. But they are all shaped by the same system.
First, there is legal exclusion. Labour laws in many countries were designed around a formal worker with one employer, one contract, and one workplace. That leaves out domestic workers, family workers, unpaid caregivers, many street vendors, and many app-based workers.
Second, there is statistical invisibility. Work that is unpaid, home-based, irregular, or family-based is often undercounted or misclassified. If work is not properly counted, it is easier for policymakers to ignore.
Third, there are social norms. Women are still expected to absorb care work, while young people are often expected to accept insecurity as the price of “starting out” or helping their families survive. These expectations shift the real cost of economic pressure from states and employers onto households.
Fourth, there is weak bargaining power. Informal workers are spread out across homes, streets, farms, and digital platforms. Many have no union, no complaint mechanism, and no practical way to enforce the rights they may already have on paper.
How Social Protection Can Reduce Inequality
This is where social protection matters.
Social protection means the public systems that help people survive risk and insecurity: income support, health care, pensions, child benefits, unemployment support, and care services. Social protection floors — the basic guarantees below which no one should fall — matter most for workers who are most exposed to crisis.
In Southeast Asia, stronger social protection could reduce inequality in at least three ways.
First, it can narrow the gap between formal and informal workers. When health care, pensions, and income support are tied only to formal employment, workers without contracts are left exposed. But when those protections are expanded to include domestic workers, own-account workers, platform workers, and family workers, the distance between the protected and the unprotected begins to shrink.
Second, it can reduce the hidden penalty carried by women. Women are more likely to do unpaid care work and more likely to move in and out of insecure jobs because of care responsibilities. Better child care, elder care, maternity protection, and health coverage do not only support families. They reduce the inequality built into labour markets.
Third, it can give young workers a fairer start. Many young people enter the labour market through temporary, informal, or low-paid work. If social insurance and public services are designed only for permanent formal jobs, young workers begin adult life already behind. Inclusive social protection can help stop insecurity from becoming a lifelong trap.
There are already signs of what this could look like. In the Philippines, the Batas Kasambahay recognises domestic workers as workers with rights, not merely “helpers” inside private homes. In Thailand, debates on stronger legal protection for informal workers show growing recognition that millions of workers cannot be left outside the system. In Indonesia, including Jakarta, the size of the informal workforce makes clear that wage policy alone is not enough without wider social protection pathways.
This does not mean social protection by itself will solve inequality. But without it, inequality becomes harder to reduce because too many workers remain one illness, one job loss, or one family emergency away from collapse.
The Political Choice
None of this invisibility is natural. It is the result of political choices.
States decide which workers are recognised. Governments decide whether social insurance is narrow or inclusive. Public budgets decide whether care is treated as a private burden for women or as a shared social responsibility. Labour ministries decide whether enforcement reaches private homes, digital platforms, and informal workplaces — or stops at the factory gate and office door.
A social democratic response should be clear. Existing protections for domestic workers must be enforced. Informal workers and platform workers need real paths into social security systems that they can afford to join and actually use. Care work must be recognised in policy, not treated as an endless invisible reserve of women’s time. And youth employment policy must stop treating precarity as normal.
Regional solidarity should mean building systems that protect the workers who already hold the region together. That includes women who have carried the hidden costs of crisis for years, and young people who are now entering labour markets that were already broken before they arrived.
COUNTING WHAT COUNTS
Ana, Nat, Lurdes, and Sari may not be fully visible in official growth narratives. But without workers like them, households would not function, cities would not eat, and communities would not survive hard times.
The least that public policy can do is count them properly. The more urgent task is to protect them.
That is what solidarity should mean in practice: not just sympathy, but policy.
Sources and Further Reading
· Republic Act No. 10361, or the Batas Kasambahay, the Philippine Domestic Workers Act, with summaries of wage, rest, and social protection obligations.
· Legal commentary on the rights and working conditions of kasambahays under Philippine labour law.
· National Wages and Productivity Commission material on wage orders for domestic workers in the National Capital Region, including recent increases in the minimum monthly wage.
· Reporting and policy analysis on Thailand’s informal workforce and proposals to strengthen legal and social protection for informal workers.
· World Bank Human Capital Project data on youth informal employment.
· Statistics Indonesia (BPS) data on informal employment by age group.
· Jakarta planning documents on labour-force conditions and the size of the city’s informal workforce.
· Reporting on Jakarta’s 2026 provincial minimum wage.
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