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)