Will manpower bill create trouble?

Will manpower bill create trouble?

By Kastorius Sinaga

JAKARTA (JP): In a hearing on the manpower bill between Forum
Nusantara 1928 and the special committee of the Development
Functional Faction (FKP) on July 4, an FKP member said the
manpower bill resembled a "supermarket bill". What he meant was
that the bill gave the impression of regulating in one package
all matters with different substances and implications.
Automatically, another impression is that various interests are
pushing and squeezing one another to gain prominence and that in
the final analysis this will benefit the same party,
businesspeople.

This stands to reason as the bill, made up of 19 chapters and
159 articles, will later indiscriminately revoke and replace
simultaneously 14 legal products on labor affairs now in force.

As a public policy which will directly affect the interests of
more than 45 million of our workers (a quarter of the entire
Indonesian population), it is necessary to question the vision
and spirit underlining this manpower bill. This is especially so
considering the bill is categorized as a regulative policy, which
in terms of a public policy theory, contains in it a
discriminative tendency under the principle of the zero sum game,
a principle explaining the balance of advantages that a
particular group enjoys at the expense of other group's
disadvantages.

As a member of FN 1928, a forum for the assessment of public
policies on the basis of the 1928 spirit, the writer wishes to
set forth the ideas raised during the hearing. The bill contains
at least two major problems.

From a macroeconomic point of view, the manpower bill is a
public policy investment which tends to produce disadvantages
from the long-term developmental economic viewpoint. The bill
contains the policy of social dumping at the cost of workers, who
by virtue of this manpower bill will have to undergo a dual
exploitation process. Economically, the authority to determine
wages does not involve the workers and their unions and
politically, the reduction in workers' basic rights such as the
right to strike, join a union and terminate a working
relationship.

If a country, particularly a developing country, applies a
policy of dumping in its manpower law, the products exported,
particularly those from small and medium-sized businesspeople,
will be the sitting-ducks of boycott attempts in the
international market. An assessment of this manpower bill has
shown that there are at least three areas whose substance and
regulation contradict and whose quality is worse than the
International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention, namely labor
unions, collective labor agreements and dismissal. In addition,
four other areas regulated by the manpower bill do not fulfill
the ILO standards at all, namely occupational health and safety,
the wages system and protection of women's rights and child
labor.

Although the manpower bill is still under discussion at the
House of Representatives, the ILO has threatened to take the
matter to a WTO session if the vision of the bill is not adjusted
to the spirit of the ILO Convention. The labor union is one
example. Although the ILO Convention No. 98/1948, which has been
ratified in Law No. 18/1956, stipulates that "a worker has the
right to be a member of a labor union of his own choice and he
cannot be dismissed from his work because of joining the labor
union of his own choice", the spirit of the manpower bill is a
long way from this stipulation as it wishes to see the
establishment of a sole labor union on the basis of the "tyranny
of the majority" principle. The manpower bill is also less
forward-thinking and will therefore have an adverse long-term
political implication at home.

Although the issue of wages has been the main trigger for
labor strikes, it is not a separate phenomenon. This crucial
issue is obviously linked to other matters concerning the
strength of the bargaining position of workers in general in the
existing concept of the Pancasila Industrial Relationship (HIP).
Therefore, the bargaining position of workers in wage matters is
the accumulative function of the volume of the basic rights of
workers such as the right to go on strike, form a
union/organization and obtain legal protection in the settlement
of labor disputes and the position of workers in dismissal cases.

Explicitly and implicitly, the manpower bill has reduced most
of the basic rights of workers. In terms of workers' wages, for
example, workers and their unions play no role and have no
authority in the mechanism to determine the wages, as this is the
monopoly of the government and employers.

In terms of a strike, labor expert Dr. Vedi R. Hadiz believes
the manpower bill has reduced workers' collective strike into an
individual strike. In the meantime, solidarity has disappeared
and is impossible to organize pursuant to this bill. As for the
dismissal matter, the manpower bill's articles 75 to 80 give a
greater chance to two forces, that are actually two sides of the
same coin, namely business/employers and the authorities, to
easily dismiss workers whose behavior is considered unsuitable to
the wishes of the company.

A more profound aspect is concerned with the right to form a
union. The manpower bill has denied the possibility that labor
unions will grow strong and be deep-rooted at production bases
and beyond factories, particularly in our political
infrastructure. In fact, from the viewpoint of organizational
sociology, we know that people or social groups will not only
become "wild" but will also never develop if they are not allowed
freedom to organize in a way suited to their interests and
tastes. Ironically, the manpower bill provides an alarming number
of contradictions. On the one hand, regarding national
development, the bill considers workers as national assets and
production means above the basis of materialistic ideology. But
on the other hand, regarding workers' rights and obligations, it
considers workers as "dangerous animals" which must be put behind
bars through the reduction of workers' rights of going on strike
and joining labor unions.

Labor upheavals and unrest in the last few years have
indicated that labor demonstrations and strikes are more of a
white-cat strike phenomenon (uncontrolled strikes) as a result of
the alliance between workers and forces outside factories,
particularly nongovernmental organizations and student activists.

It is difficult to predict the time and frequency of strikes
of this type, but they can easily escalate in other areas and
will automatically call for repression from security apparatuses.
It seems that the manpower bill under discussion does not take
full account of this phenomenon and tends to institutionalize the
white-cat strike phenomenon through total reduction of workers'
basic rights and alienation of the working class from
prodemocracy movements beyond factories. Through the express
manpower bill parcel, which seemingly is being discussed nonstop
by the House of Representatives, we have set our own political
time bomb.

The writer is a postgraduate lecturer at the University of
Indonesia.