More than 72,000 workers in Indonesia reported being laid off between January and October 2026, according to figures from the country's Ministry of Manpower, with West Java accounting for around one in five of all cases.

The ministry recorded 72,336 workers reporting layoffs through its Job Loss Guarantee system, known as JKP, in the first ten months of the year. The figures come from the ministry's Satu Data portal and were reported by detikFinance on Sunday 8 November.

West Java recorded the highest number of layoff reports, with 14,694 workers, or about 20.31 per cent of the national total. Banten followed with 8,649, then Central Java with 6,860, East Java with 6,574 and Jakarta with 5,360. Together, the five provinces accounted for 42,137 reports, about 58.3 per cent of the total.

According to West Java's manpower and transmigration agency, the garment and automotive industries have been hit hardest in the province, as weaker global orders squeeze labour-intensive businesses. Falling demand for exports has put particular pressure on factories making textiles, garments and footwear.

The October update added 8,547 reports to the January to September total of 63,789. The ministry cautions that the figures are not final: workers can submit JKP claims up to six months after a layoff, so recent months remain open to revision as more claims arrive. The count also covers only workers who report through the JKP system, not every dismissal in the country.

Trade union leaders argue the true scale of job losses is larger, because many dismissals never enter the government database. Said Iqbal, who leads the Confederation of Indonesian Trade Unions, has said the ministry's count understates the problem, and his federation plans to publish its own updated tally later in November.

The layoff figures sit uneasily alongside otherwise strong headline economic data. Statistics Indonesia reported that the economy grew by 5.47 per cent year on year in the third quarter of 2026, yet many households say they feel little benefit. The statistics agency's deputy for national accounts, Edy Mahmud, told a briefing on 5 November that people outside the fastest-growing sectors may not feel the growth at all.

Unemployment stood at 4.75 per cent in August 2026, down from 4.85 per cent a year earlier, but the informal share of employment rose to 57.93 per cent and underemployment, covering people working fewer than 35 hours a week who want more work, climbed to 8.68 per cent. Many workers who lose factory jobs move quickly into informal work, such as motorcycle taxi driving or casual construction, so they no longer count as unemployed even though their incomes fall.

Individual factory closures illustrate the strain. Shoe manufacturer PT Parkland World Indonesia 6 in Lebak, Banten, dismissed about 1,100 workers on 23 October after reducing its Indonesian operations from six factories to two. The government has set up a layoff task force to prepare for further job losses and to coordinate severance payments, insurance claims and retraining for affected workers.