Distributive justice in employment tenure compensation caps: a rawlsian analysis of service award limitations

Abstract

This study examines the upper-tier limitation of the Long Service Award (Uang Penghargaan Masa Kerja/UPMK) for workers with 24 years of service or more under Article 40 paragraph (3) of Government Regulation Number 35 of 2021 through a Rawlsian distributive-justice framework. It employs normative legal research, so distributive justice is treated as a doctrinal analytical framework rather than an empirical dependent variable. Primary materials comprise the relevant Indonesian manpower legislation, while secondary materials consist mainly of peer-reviewed legal and labor-market scholarship selected using explicit relevance, recency, authority, and completeness criteria. The statute, conceptual, and philosophical approaches are integrated sequentially through norm identification, grammatical and systematic interpretation, reconstruction of the UPMK tenure structure, and Rawlsian evaluation. Justice as fairness is operationalized through three parameters: relevance and consistency of tenure as a distributive criterion, proportionality between tenure differentiation and benefit allocation, and balance between worker protection and predictable employer obligations. The analysis finds that the statutory schedule differentiates UPMK progressively through the 21-to-less-than-24-year category, then places all workers with 24 years of service or more in a single 10-month-wage category. The rule is legally calculable, while Article 40 paragraph (3) does not expressly state why tenure ceases to generate further differentiation after that threshold. Equal treatment of workers with materially different tenure is therefore not automatically inconsistent with distributive justice; the analytical question is whether the stopping point can be supported by relevant, rational, and proportionate reasons. The study does not measure employer compliance, actual payments, or worker perceptions.