Garment factory workers seek severance payments

JAKARTA (JP): Over one hundred workers of PT Aneka Citra Busana garment factory marched to the manpower ministry yesterday, demanding that the company give them severance pay before transferring them to the nearby PT Tritexindo.

The workers are refusing to be moved, fearing that the new management would not take their working experience into account.

Both companies are under the management of Mayatexdian Industry Group, which for reasons of declining business dismissed 700 of their employees last year.

More than 400 workers of PT Aneka however, agreed to be moved to PT Tritexindo.

"We heard complaints from our friends there that the factory is overcrowded and it is impossible to accommodate all of us," said Wati, one of the protesting workers.

The workers told officials of the ministry yesterday that they demand the same treatment as their 700 fellow workers who received severance pay last year after refusing to be moved to another factory.

This was the second time the workers staged a protest; the first being last week.

The workers told the ministry's Director for Workers Standards, Sabar Sianturi, that even though PT Tritexindo also belongs to Mayatexdian Industry Group, they had heard the owner was new.

They said they feared that the new management would not take their working experience into account. They said they had worked for PT Aneka for two to eight years.

Sianturi said the workers' demand for severance pay would be fulfilled only if the two companies have different legal status.

Some officials of the ministry and the protesters were then taken in four buses to the factory office in the Kawasan Berikat Nusantara (Nusantara Bonded Zone), East Jakarta, for a tripartite talk with the management yesterday.

PT Mayatexdian's personal manager Gaspar Bapa told the protesters and the ministry's officials that the workers would have the same rights and status at PT Tritexindo.

He also said the decision to move the workers was made with the agreement of the company's unit of the All Indonesia Workers Union Federation.

"We made the decision to move them in order to save all of us from the company's imminent bankruptcy," Gaspar said.

He denied the workers' statement that the factory could not accommodate all of them.(03)