48 companies punished under labor legislation
48 companies punished under labor legislation
JAKARTA (JP): Forty-eight companies in Indonesia were punished for violating the country's labor laws in the 1994/1995 fiscal year, the Ministry of Manpower announced yesterday.
Director General for Industrial Relations and Labor Standards Suwarto told reporters that the government had prosecuted 202 companies between April 1994 and March 1995 for violating a host of labor regulations, including those concerning minimum wages, overtime pay and social insurance.
The 48 firms convicted received penalties ranging between Rp 50,000 and Rp 5 million (approximately US$ 2,272). The owners of four of the 48 companies chose not to pay fines. Instead, they were imprisoned for a period of up to 15 days.
Suwarto acknowledged that the penalties might be perceived as being too lenient.
"Okay, so the fines were rather small, but they were in accordance with the laws," Suwarto said, immediately adding that the Ministry of Manpower was currently preparing a bill to amend the existing labor laws which govern penalties.
The 48 companies already penalized are located in the provinces of North and South Sumatra, Jakarta, West and East Java, Bali and West Nusa Tenggara.
Five other companies are currently facing trial for similar violations, he said.
Nine other provincial offices of the ministry have also found violations but have not brought the companies to court because the owners immediately agreed to stop the violations.
Those provinces are West, Central, South and East Kalimantan, Yogyakarta, East Timor, and North, Central and Southeast Sulawesi.
The ministry has been campaigning hard to punish companies that continue to violate the labor laws, particularly the minimum wage regulations.
Ministers Abdul Latief is now planning to publicize the names of companies that are repeat offenders and to circulate the list to other government agencies and commercial banks in the hope that they will deny the recalcitrant companies services or loans.
Suwarto also disclosed yesterday that there were far fewer workers' strikes in the first five months of this year as compared with last year.
He said the government recorded 31 strikes nationwide between January and May. Seven of them were caused by the companies' failure to implement the officially-set minimum wages regulation.
During the same period last year, 225 strikes took place and 94 of them concerned minimum wages, he said.
In a related development, the Saudi Arabian embassy announced yesterday that the decline in the number of Indonesian workers employed in Saudi Arabia has resulted from the high cost of importing them.
In what appears to be a response to Indonesian labor exporters' lamentations about Saudi Arabia's tough new procedural laws, the embassy said that "the Interior Ministry of Saudi Arabia leaves it to its citizens to decide whether to import laborers; it never limits the number of Indonesian workers".
The statement acknowledged that the embassy has been receiving questions about the decline in the number of Indonesian workers exported to Saudi Arabia.
"Due to the high cost of importing Indonesian workers, Saudi citizens will turn to other countries with cheaper costs and easier import procedures."
A number of labor suppliers have recently criticized Riyadh's decision to hike working visa fee by 2,000 percent and to require AIDS-free certificates from incoming workers.
The suppliers have said that the new regulations will make it virtually impossible for them to send workers to Saudi Arabia, which has, until now, been a major destination for Indonesians seeking employment abroad.(swe)