Seasonal workers still lack protection

Seasonal workers still lack protection

JAKARTA (JP): The lack of a clear-cut regulation on industrial
labor relationships and poor control from the government have led
to the vast exploitation of workers, especially those hired on a
seasonal basis, according to legal expert Apong Herlina.

Apong Herlina of the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute (LBH Jakarta)
said on Saturday that unlike permanent and temporary employees,
the seasonal workers were not protected by any of the country's
existing laws on industrial labor relationships.

"Still, many people have no other choice but to sign a
completely unsecured, unfair contract because it is not easy to
find a job these days," she told a discussion on legal protection
for seasonal workers.

According to the existing regulation, companies are only
allowed to hire employees on a temporary basis, up five years in
maximum. After five years, such workers should be appointed
permanent workers if the companies still needed them.

In reality, Apong said, many people had been hired as
temporary or seasonal workers for over 20 years.

"Worse still, they don't get the facilities or bonuses given
to their permanent working colleagues despite the fact that they
have worked as hard and produced the same quality services as the
permanent workers do," she added.

She said that under the existing laws, companies can only hire
non-permanent workers to work in areas that are not the
companies' core activities, Apong said.

Many big companies, however, had taken advantage of the
country's unsound legal system by hiring cheaper workers through
recruitment agencies on a temporary or seasonal basis and placing
them in areas that are "significant" to their core business, she
said.

Many banks, for example, hired temporary workers for their
main businesses, such as customer services and credit card
products, she said, adding that some banks had even placed
temporary staff in their relatively "sensitive" divisions, such
as the popular 24-hour telebanking customer services.

"Banks which hired non-permanent workers in their telebanking
divisions have clearly violated the regulation on banking secrecy
because they let non-employees have access to their customers'
accounts," she said.

Director of the working prerequisites office at the Ministry
of Manpower I Wayan Nedeng, who also spoke at the seminar and
admitted that the government had failed to solve the labor
problems, said the most cases found by his office concerned
companies underpaying their non-permanent workers.

"The law orders companies to pay non-permanent workers no less
than what they pay the permanent ones. But, in practice many
companies underpay these non-permanent workers," he said.

Several seminar participants, working as executives at human
resources offices at foreign banks that also hire seasonal
workers through worker agencies, denied the allegation, saying
that the banks had settled payments properly with the agencies.

Separately, Ditta Amarhoseya, head of corporate affairs at
Citibank Indonesia, which recently faced protests from some of
its non-permanent employees hired through local labor agencies,
said workers who were hired through such agencies were not the
bank's responsibility.

"They are employees of the agencies ... The contracts they
signed are with the agencies, not us. Thus, their salaries and
other compensation are the responsibilities of the agencies," she
said in a company statement following the protest.

Some 30 temporary workers at Citibank, some of whom have
worked there for over five years, recently demanded that the bank
-- which recently secured a labor agreement with the company's
labor union -- hire them on a permanent basis.

Ditta said it was common for big companies like Citibank to
hire workers from laborer agencies to be placed in some fields,
such as cleaning services, working as messengers and in
operational divisions, whose volume of work was not constant but
fluctuated according to market conditions.

Wayan said the government was currently working to complete
three new regulations to cover more aspects in industrial labor
relationships.

In the meantime, he urged employees to form labor unions at
their places of work in order to strengthen their positions in
negotiations with their employers.

"The existing laws encourage workers to form labor unions to
help them with their rights ... Companies must not try to stop
workers from establishing unions," he said. (cst)