Practising being precarious workers: State, policy and the labour regime in Indonesian academic internships

The working conditions of academic interns are not widely discussed in the literature on precarious working relations, even though internship programmes – in the case of Indonesia, formally regulated by the government as part of the higher education (HE) curriculum – lack protections and decent work standards. With the largest number of informal workers in Southeast Asia, its HE policy implies that the Indonesian state has contributed to interns’ precarious conditions in the context of a labour market with a relatively high surplus population. Drawing on a survey regarding indicators of decent internship work with 215 student interns in Indonesia from HE and senior high schools, as well as in-depth interviews with five student interns, this article attempts to show that the precarity in labour relations in the current labour regime is the result of a combination of state intervention, labour division and social reproduction. Participants thus perform precarious work during their internships, at the same time as practising it for the future.