Wage Discrimination: When the State Swiftly Calculates Welfare for Some, But Not for Educators

Every time the state decides to improve the welfare of one group of its servants, that decision should be born from a principle that can be accounted for consistently to all other groups, not merely from momentary political calculation. The societal dynamic surrounding the issue of wage disparity is not a matter of gratitude or a lack thereof. Often, when the welfare gap among educators is raised in the public sphere, it is met with rhetoric that simplifies a structural problem into a matter of inner attitude, such as ‘one should be grateful to still be able to serve,’ or even the impression that ‘devotion should not be measured by money.’

Such rhetoric systematically diverts questions about justice into accusations about individual morality. Yet what is being questioned is not the sincerity of the dedication of lecturers and teachers, but rather the state’s policy disparity, which is exhibited starkly: welfare can be corrected within months for one profession, while for another, the same correction must be fought for over more than a decade through a long and exhausting legal process. This is not about gratitude; it is about justice.

There is a disquiet that deserves reflection every time we read news of salary increases for state officials: how capable the state is of moving quickly and measurably when calculating the living standards of one group of its servants. Yet, how difficult that same calculation seems to be when those knocking on the door are lecturers who have served for decades but must still make peace with a base salary far from adequate. Earlier this year, the government officially raised the allowances for judges within the judiciary by up to 280% through Government Regulation No. 42 of 2025, with performance allowances ranging from Rp46.7 million to Rp110.5 million per month. President Prabowo Subianto personally conveyed the reasoning that judges must live honourably so they cannot be bribed, as they handle cases worth trillions of rupiah. Not even a year later, it was the turn of TNI soldiers and Ministry of Defence employees to receive performance allowance increases of up to 90% through Presidential Regulations No. 42 and 43 of 2026, with the highest nominal amount reaching Rp48.6 million per month for a chief of staff. The reasoning was also logical: recognition for bureaucratic reform and the burden of duty in safeguarding state sovereignty.

There is nothing wrong with these arguments. Judicial independence and defence professionalism indeed deserve to be rewarded appropriately. What is wrong is that there has yet to be any policy attention touching on the welfare improvement for other professions that equally support the nation’s future, left to operate with allowances that have been frozen for nearly two decades.

In the ongoing judicial review of the Teachers and Lecturers Law at the Constitutional Court, the facts revealed are a slap in the face to common sense. The functional position allowances for lecturers, as regulated by Presidential Regulation No. 65 of 2007 concerning Lecturer Allowances, have never been adjusted since their issuance in 2007. The details are Rp375,000 for an assistant professor, Rp700,000 for a lecturer, Rp900,000 for a senior lecturer, and Rp1.35 million for a professor. These figures were set when the price of premium petrol was still below Rp5,000 per litre. An expert presented at the trial calculated that with an average inflation rate of 4.31% per year from 2008 to 2025, the value of these allowances has been eroded by approximately 113%. The lecturers’ allowance has been frozen for nearly two decades, and the response has not been a swift presidential regulation, but rather a tortuous legal process that the lecturers themselves must fight all the way to the Constitutional Court, because the parliament and government have not budged.

The argument of ‘no budget,’ often voiced by officials when the issue of educator welfare is raised, is now increasingly difficult to believe at face value. The state budget apparently is flexible enough to raise the performance allowances of certain professions by tens of millions of rupiah per month, or even to allocate enormous funds for specific programmes. The Free Nutritious Meals programme, for example, received a ceiling of up to Rp335 trillion in the 2026 State Budget. Even after being cut by the government mid-year, the figure remained around Rp268 trillion, still far larger than the entire need for adjusting the allowances of all lecturers and teachers across Indonesia. This does not yet account for various other strategic programmes that always find their way into the annual budget posture, no matter how large the value. Thus, when it comes to the welfare of educators, the argument of fiscal limitations feels awkward to maintain, as if the state suddenly forgets how to calculate and chooses to act as if it does not hear, even though the call has been voiced for years.

This is not merely a matter of rupiah amounts. It is a matter of the priority scale built by the state: who is deemed worthy of being given a sense of financial security so they can work with integrity, and who is considered sufficient to ‘serve’ with a mere calling of the soul. In public policy studies, such a pattern actually has a structural explanation. Aaron Wildavsky, one of the important thinkers in public budgeting theory, in his classic work The Politics of the Budgetary Process, asserts that the budget is an arena of power struggle to answer the fundamental question of ‘who gets what, and how much.’ He further explains that the state budget is essentially not just a technocratic document, but a reflection of the struggle of interests and political bargaining power among actors. From this perspective, the size of the budget allocation for a professional group is not solely determined by objective urgency or rational calculation of real needs, but by the extent to which that group possesses political leverage to compel the state to listen.