Garbage truck drivers strike over wages

TANGERANG (JP): The local administration is at odds with scores of garbage truck drivers who are demanding higher wages, access to a social security program, health allowances and the right to moonlight.

Some 160 garbage truck drivers and their assistants staged a protest on Monday by parking their vehicles in front of a government office to dramatize their demands.

They stopped every garbage truck on its way to Kedaung Wetan dump site and invited the occupants to join the protest.

They dispersed peacefully only after two government officials overseeing city sanitation, Bahar Zein and Dadang, promised to look into their demands.

The workers submitted an eight-point petition in which they also claimed that administration officials had threatened to dismiss them any time they objected to government policies.

Top priorities were their demands to be included in the state social security program, given easier access to loans from the workers' cooperative and be allowed to moonlight.

They demanded that the administration make their status clear because, they said, many had worked for a great many years but were only paid Rp 9,000 (US$90 cent) a month and that they were required to extend their contracts every year.

"We have never received overtime even though we are often made to work extra hours," said the workers' spokesman, Gofur.

Lately, Gofur said, the government had refused to share the payments from private factories who hire them to dispose of waste for between Rp 50,000 and Rp 100,000.

In the past, up to Rp 30,000 of the money would go to the workers, he said.

"The government says we are no longer entitled to share the money (from private) companies on the pretext that every cent should go to the state coffers as locally generated revenue," Gofur said.

Tangerang mayoralty government spokesman Harry Mulya Zein said that the administration was "looking for the best solution" to the problem.

"We are thinking of how to reach a fair solution without sacrificing locally generated revenue, such as garbage-disposal fees from factories," he said.

Harry defended the administration's regulation on moonlighting on the grounds that the activity would shorten garbage trucks' lifespan quicker without contributing money to the government's coffers. (41/09)