Limit foreign workers: Workers federation

JAKARTA (JP): The Federation of the All Indonesian Workers Union is calling on the government to limit the number of expatriates working in the country.

Taxing them will not prevent them from taking jobs that could go to local workers, chairman Marzuki Ahmad said Thursday.

"Their number must be limited," Marzuki told a media conference to preview the new year at his office.

He estimated there were currently around 70,000 foreigners working in Indonesia, and their total wage bill comes to $200 million a month. This, he added, was hardly comparable to the tiny remittance Indonesia received from its workers abroad.

He supported the argument, put forward by economist Polin Pos Pos this week, that the large presence of foreign workers was a huge drain on the nation's foreign exchange earnings.

He said he was confident Indonesian workers were just as good as most expatriates.

"I can't accept the argument that local workers cannot take their place," he said, reported Antara.

He said the government has yet to show its political will to restrict the number of foreign workers.

"We still find too many foreign workers in certain places," he said, adding that countries like Japan and South Korea also imposed restrictions on foreign workers.

He also suspected that outside the 70,000 or so registered expatriates, there were many foreigners working illegally in the country, some of them coming on tourist visas.

Marzuki, who took over the helm of the only government- recognized union in November from Bomer Pasaribu, called on the government to hike the minimum wage levels by an average of 16 percent this year.

In the case of workers in Jakarta, the proposed hike will take their monthly minimum wage to Rp 171,000 from Rp 156,000.

He said the current minimum wage level only covered 92.5 percent of what constituted the minimum physical requirements of a single worker.

The government last year awarded an average of 10.63 percent increase to the minimum wage levels across the country. This was well below the 16 to 17 percent sought by the union.

Marzuki said this time, the union would not accept anything less.

Failure to comply could mean more strikes. "I am not responsible for anything that happens then. Who can stop workers from demanding what's rightfully theirs?" he asked.

Marzuki underscored the nation's commitment, as stipulated in the Broad Outlines of State Policy, that minimum wage levels should cover the minimum physical requirement by the end of the current Sixth Five Year Plan in 1999.

He said companies should stop looking at their employees as simply workers because they were consumers too.

Giving them higher salaries would not cause inflation, but rather would bolster demand for more products, he said.

Marzuki said the outgoing 1996 was still characterized by the weak legal protection for workers.

He highlighted the dispute between workers and the Hongkong Bank, in which 166 workers were fired.

He said the union planned to set up units of activists who could be sent to assist with labor disputes anywhere.

"It will be like the police rapid reaction unit," Atika Karwa, the union's deputy chairperson, said. (03)