HongkongBank workers' strike is legal: Lawyer

HongkongBank workers' strike is legal: Lawyer

JAKARTA (JP): The strike by HongkongBank workers is legal, the
chairman of the labor law department of the Jakarta Legal Aid
Foundation, said yesterday in a statement that was refuted by the
bank's management.

"According to Indonesian Labor Law No. 22/1957 workers can go
on strike after they have informed the Manpower Ministry
following a deadlock in negotiations," Apong Herlina explained.

The law says that workers should inform the other party and
the Manpower Ministry in a written statement of the plan for
action, accompanied by an explanation that repeated talks
regarding the problem have been held, with the Manpower Ministry
as a mediator.

Herlina said that because the workers had informed the
Manpower Ministry that they would go on strike and because
repeated negotiations since January had not resolved their
grievances, "the workers had met the conditions for going on
strike."

But the bank's personnel manager, Leila Djafar, emphasized
yesterday that according to Indonesian labor law, workers could
only go on strike with agreement from the Manpower Ministry,
seven days after submitting the strike proposal.

"But they went on strike on the same day they submitted the
letter to the Manpower Ministry on April 17. So their action is
illegal," Leila said.

However, the director of Labor Standards of the Manpower
Ministry, Sabar Sianturi, said earlier that the workers had not
been allowed to go on strike because the negotiations were still
on-going.

"The workers can go on strike after having informed the
Manpower Ministry, but they are not allowed to do it if the
negotiations are still in progress," he said.

According to Herlina, the Manpower Ministry has no right to
forbid the workers to go on strike. "There is no law that says it
can," she said.

She said the protracted negotiations, which yielded no
results, must have made the workers very disappointed and this
became worse because the Ministry prohibited them from going on
strike. "This urged them even more to go on strike," she added.

And because the strike had been carried out for a certain
reason, the management cannot regard the workers as having
voluntarily resigned because they were absent from work, she
said.

The management has regarded 189 striking employees as having
resigned by referring to law No. 3/1996 which states that a
worker is considered as having "resigned" if he or she has been
absent from work for five consecutive days without a written
explanation and valid excuse and after being called on by the
management to appear.

In the notification letter of resignation, which the
management has mailed to the workers, the management says they
would welcome the workers to reapply for their jobs at the bank
and that their applications will be processed according to the
qualifications required by the management.

The chief executive officer of Hongkong & Shanghai Banking
Corp. Ltd. in Jakarta, P.C.L. Holberton, told The Jakarta Post
yesterday that of the 189 employees who were regarded as having
resigned, 39 had reapplied. (03)