U.S. congressmen seek information on RI labor
JAKARTA (JP): Two American congressmen met with executives from the All-Indonesia Workers Union Federation yesterday to obtain first-hand information about labor issues in Indonesia.
Republican Joseph Rees and Democratic party member Robert Hathaway spent one hour discussing minimum wages, child labor and other issues in Indonesia.
Rees, a member of the International Relations Committee of the U.S., said he was studying labor conditions in Indonesia in order to measure their impact on international companies.
"There's a strong interest in promoting a good relationship with Indonesia, but also protecting human rights, including workers' rights," Rees told reporters after the meeting.
Reeves said the minimum daily wages in Indonesia, which average US$1.79 according to federation figures, are low even compared to hourly wages in the U.S.
He said that part of their mission is to gather as many facts as possible in order to have more information when preparing international agreements.
"We don't want to encourage by our action as consumers, as traders, the exploitation of children, which some of the labor union officials told us that it is still a problem in some sectors of the Indonesian economy, among the very poor," Rees said.
He said the labor union is expected to maintain contact with the U.S. congressmen. "We don't hear as much as we should," said Rees.
He said that more Americans are seeing "Made in Indonesia" labels and that more information about conditions here will help with the image Americans have of Indonesia.
"So, it's important to know the details (of working conditions here) and maybe next time we'll have a label that says this is made in Indonesia with workers that we treat well and you pay a dollar extra for the shirt," Rees said. "We (the government) have to educate our consumers so that, for instance, we don't buy things made by employers that exploit children."
Federation leader Bomer Pasaribu acknowledged that there are some children who have to work to help their parents.
"We have to see the fact that there are 27 million Indonesian people who live under the poverty line and many children who are supposed to be in school helping out their parents," Bomer told The Jakarta Post.
"We are not trying to cover up the facts... those are the real conditions," he said.
The number of child laborers in Indonesia is lower than in other countries, such as Bangladesh, and working conditions are much better here, he said. "No children work in factories here. They work at home and they do not have to leave school," Bomer said.
A 1993 government survey put the number of Indonesian children working at 2.6 million, 2.31 million of which live in rural areas and 290,000 in urban centers.
Of the 2.6 million child workers surveyed in 1993, about 50,000 work in conditions that fail to meet the criteria set by the International Labor Organization. (ste)