Poor enforcement of laws blamed for labor rifts

JAKARTA (JP): Weak legislation is the source of many of the recent labor problems in Indonesia, government officials and legal experts concurred yesterday.

Officials and experts who gathered to look into labor legislation found that many of the problems of industrial relations in Indonesia could have been avoided if the country had stronger laws.

Even the existing laws were still poorly enforced, they said in the seminar organized by the Ministry of Manpower.

Coordinating Minister for Political Affairs and Security Soesilo Soedarman set the tone of the seminar yesterday by pointing out in his keynote address that many existing laws in Indonesia were inherited from the Dutch colonial administration.

Some of these have served their purpose well, while many others that were still on the books had not been fully translated into Indonesian language for effective implementation, Soesilo said.

"We have still 69 Dutch laws that need to be 'Indonesianized,' with many others that need to be reviewed," he said.

Updating or replacing them would be a mammoth task and the government's legal experts are currently involved in drafting 125 new pieces of legislation.

He also pointed out that a 1969 labor law has not been fully implemented because the government had yet to translate all the articles into regulations that could be effectively carried out.

In the absence of these regulations, the workers' right to strike or hold protests and management's right to a lock out -- both of which are recognized in the 1969 legislation -- were impossible to protect, he said.

Lagging behind

Soesilo said Indonesia's legislation has failed to catch up with the rapid economic progress the nation has been making. "The nation succeeded in carrying out the first 25-year economic development but its legal sector is lagging behind."

It is the government's duty to ensure that all laws, including those in the labor sector that provide protection for workers, be properly enforced, he said.

"The administration and or law enforcement agencies should have a strong capability to enforce the laws to provide legal certainty to the people, especially the workers," he said.

Minister of Manpower Abdul Latief said his office was drafting many pieces of legislation including one on labor strikes, one on child labor and another on a national wage system.

The government would review several other labor regulations in anticipation of a changing situation in the future, he said. As an example, he cited the sanctions against companies found violating labor laws, issued in 1969.

"These kind of regulations have to be reviewed because the sanctions stipulated are no longer effective in forcing companies to comply with the labor laws," he said, pointing to the three- month jail term and Rp 100,000 maximum fine.

Andy Hamzah, a former expert staff in the Attorney General's Office, said that law enforcement was still weak. He added that this was reflected in the poor coordination between law enforcement agencies and lack of legal awareness of the general public. (rms)