Decisive Yet Untested: the Mediator’s Anjuran and the Procedural Standing of Deceased Workers’ Heirs in Indonesia

Abstract

Indonesian labour law confers compensation directly on the heirs of a worker who dies in service, yet the recovery procedure presupposes a living worker or a union facing an employer, so access turns on a document from a compulsory administrative stage whose validity no party must establish. The article asks how the mediator’s written recommendation, the anjuran, should be qualified, how the pre-litigation provisions were worked against an heir’s claim, and how far the presumption of validity may restore the heirs’ procedural standing. A normative case study examined Decision No. 14/Pdt.Sus-PHI/2024/PN.Plg and Decision No. 972 K/Pdt.Sus-PHI/2024 with the instruments they apply. The recommendation was found to be a preparatory governmental act to which Article 83(1) of Law No. 2 of 2004 attaches a conditioning function; a route to review existed but ran from the act rather than from its discovery, leaving it misaligned with the party whose access the document conditioned rather than absent; and the claim succeeded through three judicial substitutions traced to no authorising norm, alongside one determination no forum made. The study qualifies a familiar instrument within settled doctrine and locates the deficit at coordinates traceable to named provisions. The presumption supports an administrative cure of procedural standing that a court may act upon, though no provision makes it binding, and it reaches access to labour entitlements rather than the division of an estate.