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.