Ex-employees seeking justice

We are writing this letter in order to express our deep concern over Ministry of Manpower regulations which are not implemented accordingly and adhered to by PT Servcorp Indonesia. This letter is specifically addressed to the management of Servcorp and also to the clients of Servcorp. We are former employees of Servcorp who have been mistreated during our employment period and have been forced to terminate our positions without any good reason whatsoever.

Servcorp is an Australian company dealing with leasing small serviced offices and which has its offices in Wisma Bank Dharmala (12th floor) and Wisma BNI 46 (43rd floor). Servcorp's management is headed by a managing director based in Australia and Australian managers based in Jakarta. For the past 22 months, 24 employees have resigned as a result of bad treatment received or they were forced to resign and to tender a resignation letter with compensation of three months' salary. This kind of treatment had been going on and none of us was able to do anything about it. We feel that it is time the Ministry of Manpower took necessary action.

Whenever a new employee is hired, there is no clear job description of who does what, which makes things very complicated. For instance, if a secretary has to carry out work related to accounting, and when the job is done incorrectly as no guidance is ever given by the manager, the blame will definitely fall on the secretary. Whenever the manager dislikes one employee, he or she will be burdened with tremendous pressure, and eventually, the employee will resign because of this work pressure. Or if the employee does not resign, a warning letter is issued giving unpleasant and irrelevant reasons.

Most of the time, management will not discuss with employees the mistakes that they have done; management will only inform the employee that he/she is not performing to the standard expected and, therefore, the employee may either resign on his/her own will or keep working while three warning letters are issued.

There was a case where an employee was fired during her second month of maternity leave and she received the call at home advising her that her contract was terminated. The reason was because she was disclosing confidential information to Servcorp's competitor, which, in no way, the management was able to prove. She is now jobless, with no compensation after almost two years of dedication and good performance to the improvement of the company. We believe that it is very contradictory to company regulations, which are kept from the employees. We strongly believe that regulations must be distributed to each employee so that they can be adhered to.

Another employee was terminated during her wedding leave, under the consideration that she was not doing well, despite the fact that she had been with company for two years.

We are just local employees, who have no capital, no connections or even time to think of our fate. However, we sincerely believe that the Ministry of Manpower will do something about it. Surely Servcorp cannot do whatever it likes to local employees. We fervently hope that the authorities will give due protection to employees against a foreign company operating in this country.

NUNU S. HARDJANTI

On behalf of

ex-Servcorp employees

Jakarta