BY DAVID GOSLING
YOGYAKARTA Indonesian workers are braving police repression to oppose President Megawati Sukarnoputri's IMF-inspired draft labour laws. So far strikes and protest rallies across the country have succeeded in pushing back the parliamentary debate on the laws until at least October, buying time for workers to organise against them.
Indonesia's current labour laws are a mix of Sukarno-era and Suharto-era regulations, some of which could provide some protection for workers if they were ever enforced by the government. This has led the International Monetary Fund to push for new laws, which will "regularise" industrial relations and impose legal restrictions on the growing trade union movement, instead of the arbitrary repression that was used under General Suharto's New Order regime.
Despite a campaign against the individual contract system by many unions, the new labour bills propose to permit contract hiring in all sorts of work, without time limits. Oral contracts will be allowed, and a new "training wage" of 80% of the minimum wage introduced. Retrenchments and sackings will no longer require the formal approval of the labour ministry or industrial tribunals.
The attacks on the right to organise, however, are the most serious parts of the bills. Employers will be given the right to withhold payment from workers, not just during strikes but also during negotiation periods. Political and solidarity strikes, and all strikes not directly connected with pay and conditions, will be banned outright and punishable by prison sentences and huge fines for both organisers and rank-and-file workers.
And if there is more than one union in the factory, only the union with an absolute majority of workers as members will be recognised in negotiations. Given the diversity of unions in Indonesia, representing different religious and subcultural groups, this could be a powerful divide-and-rule tactic for employers.
Ninety per cent of Indonesia's trade unions have come out against the new laws. The Indonesian National Front for Labour Struggles (FNPBI), led by Dita Sari, has formed an alliance with other unions the Committee against Oppression of Workers to fight the bills. Its members include the FNPBI, the Independent Journalists Alliance (AJI), the F-SPSI (a split from the old government "yellow" union federation), two Islamic union federations and the Nusantara Workers Union.
Other unions have been drawn into united-front protests against the draft laws. The largest action to date was on August 19 in Bandung, the capital of West Java province, where strike action by 30,000 workers shut down almost 600 factories. The strike was coordinated by a committee involving the FNPBI, Muchtar Pakpahan's SBSI, the white-collar workers' union Aspek and the Gaspermindo federation.
Police tried to block some workers from leaving the factories to join the strike, firing on some strikers. An SBSI organiser, Suparjo, and one worker were hospitalised with bullet wounds. Thirty-one people were arrested, including Suparjo, who was removed from hospital and detained in a police-cell, despite the bullet wound in his leg.
Police have charged the 31 arrested with "spreading hatred against the government" and have tried to scapegoat the FNPBI as "provocateurs" in an attempt to break the strengthening alliance of unions by smearing its most radical element. However, there is little sign that this tactic is working.
From Green Left Weekly, September 4, 2002.
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