Rp414,000 for 40 Years of Service: Is This Country Joking?

Bu Ijah opened the envelope slowly. One, two, three, four hundred-thousand rupiah notes. A ten-thousand. Two two-thousand notes. She counted in a calm, almost flat voice, like someone who had long made peace with reality. Total: Rp414,000. That was her final salary. After forty years of teaching. She did not cry in the video. She did not beg for sympathy. She simply said, “I’m not showing off, just stating a fact.” Then she gave a greeting. Finished. And that is what made the video hit harder than any tears. Atrianil, 63 years old, Bu Ijah’s real name, started teaching at the age of 23. A D2 graduate who later continued to a bachelor’s degree while still attending classes. She once tried to become a civil servant. She did not pass. She refused to bribe because she simply did not want to. Eventually, she persevered at a private vocational school in West Jakarta for more than three decades, with a salary that was never adequate, until she herself decided to stop. She was not fired. She left. With her head held high and a thin envelope in her hand. Her students graduated long ago. Some may now hold positions, own cars, own houses. Meanwhile, the woman who helped shape them went home with money that is not even enough to pay for electricity and food for a month in Jakarta. We are not talking about one person’s bad luck. The National Coordinator of P2G, Satriwan Salim, immediately spoke up after the video went viral. He said conditions like Bu Ijah’s are not an exception; this is the “bitter reality” experienced by millions of non-ASN teachers across Indonesia. Millions. Not tens, not hundreds. And this is not new news. That is the most painful part. We have known about this for a long time. We have been noisy on Twitter, it has gone viral on TikTok, there have been discussions in the House of Representatives, there have been promises from minister to minister. But forty years passed and the system did not change enough to prevent the next Bu Ijah. The logic is simple but strange. The state needs teachers to fill schools that lack teaching staff. The state allows the honorary system to run. The state benefits from their work every day. But the state does not feel obliged to guarantee a humane minimum wage for them. Factory workers have a minimum wage that employers must comply with, complete with sanctions if violated. Honorary teachers? It is left to the policy of each foundation. The result can be Rp414,000. It can also be lower. Indonesia’s education budget has long been mandated at 20 per cent of the state budget. A large figure, even compared to many other countries. But that much money can flow everywhere: to infrastructure, to the free nutritious meal programme which P2G recently questioned for taking a portion of the education operational budget, to various projects far from the desks of the lowest-level teachers. In East Kalimantan, hundreds of experienced honorary teachers failed to pass the PPPK selection not because they could not teach, but because they did not pass administrative requirements that are disconnected from their ability to educate children for years. A system that should have opened the way instead became another wall. The more fundamental question is, why do we need to go to the Constitutional Court just to ask that teachers be paid properly? Why was this not resolved at the policy table long before Bu Ijah even started teaching? P2G is now challenging the 2026 State Budget Law at the Constitutional Court. They are asking for honorary teachers to be treated like labourers in terms of minimum wage standards. A demand that is actually very reasonable. Even too reasonable, considering the responsibility borne by a teacher is far greater than many other jobs that have already been protected by law. Some say, “Well, that’s the risk of being an honorary teacher, you knew that from the start.” That sentence sounds logical until we realise that the existing system indeed does not provide many choices. For many education graduates in the regions, becoming an honorary teacher is the only way to teach while waiting for a civil servant formation that is uncertain when it will open and when it can be passed. Blaming their choice is the same as blaming someone running on a broken treadmill for not moving forward. Bu Ijah said she does not blame anyone. The decision to become an honorary teacher was her own choice. That sentence sounds noble, but it also sounds like someone who is too tired to be angry. And we should not hide behind her magnanimity to avoid asking harder questions of the system that allows this to happen. Forty years of service. Then going home with Rp414,000. If that is what we call valuing education, perhaps it is time we are honest that we have not truly valued anything. And as long as there is no binding minimum wage standard for non-ASN teachers, as long as the path to civil servant appointment is still full of irrelevant administrative traps, and as long as the large education budget does not touch the desks of the lowest-level teachers, Bu Ijah’s story will continue to repeat. Only the name will change. The envelope opened in front of the camera will remain thin. And we will remain busy commenting in TikTok columns, then forget two weeks later. Because we are indeed better at sympathising than demanding real change.