B. Herry-Priyono, Jakarta – On Sunday night, April 30, I was still stranded in Aceh (Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam) when I turned on one of the television channels and heard a chilling warning to shoot on spot any protesters committing violence and vandalism. It was the eve of Labor Day, the night when many labor organizations were making last-minute preparations for the next day's rally.
While I was still musing on that warning, a question came to my mind. Would that sort of warning also be applied to business tycoons? Say, "any business tycoons who wreck forests or steal from the Bank Indonesia Liquidity Fund will be shot on spot"? Certainly not! Of course, even in the land of amok, no violence is to be dignified. That is true not only for the act of vandalism in the recent local elections in Tuban, East Java, but also for the violent incidents during the labor protests on May 3, 2006.
But why is the rule applied to workers but not to business tycoons? This is a fact of how policing is conducted discriminately on the basis of the power of purse, and that is how this country is run. It then seems that "government... is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all". Are these the words of Marx or Lenin? No! They are the words of Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.
There is indeed something farcical about how the plight of the poor is treated in this republic. And this is how the aftermath of the violent incidents during the labor protest on May 3, 2006 have enfolded. As is widely known, the air is now marred with a series of exchanges between the President's office and the opposition. While the former indicated that political rivals instigated the violence during the rally on May 3, the latter refuted the accusation as a way of deflecting the issue.
The point is not whether the violence was instigated – to hunt down the instigators is part of hunting down the perpetrators of violence. Rather, what is at stake is that, like many problems concerning the plight of the poor in this country, the roots that make workers go to the street will again disappear from sight. What is tragic is that this process is often greatly assisted by the media. In their day-to-day job of running after headlines, the media are much more interested in the gimmicks of the politically famous. Says a poignant Swahili proverb, "whether the elephants make love or make war, it is the grass that suffers".
So, perhaps there is a virtue to returning to the issue, the workers' demand that the government not slash further their already minimum levels of welfare. And that is what makes them doggedly defend the 2003 Labor Law. It is easy from the high podium of a seminar at a comfortable hotel to accuse workers of being ignorant of the country's need to attract investors. Such an accusation is a form of ignorance, for most workers are by no means unaware of the dilemma, as often assumed.
Why do they address their demands to the government? This question may sound trivial, for it is simply stating the obvious, that the government is in charge of public affairs. But, what if under the pressure of economic globalization, the government's policy wings are increasingly clipped by the powers of investors? Indeed, this last point is evident in the current state of the political economy.
That leaves us with one thin hope. The workers' demands are addressed to the government because it is the government, or at least its legislative wing, that is in charge of law formulation. This point is of course highly normative, and any issue that concerns law could not be other than being normative. Otherwise, law loses its raison d'etre.
From the first moment of its inception, the construction of labor laws was a normative project, whose agenda was to redress the asymmetric relations between employers and workers. That is true both with the onset of labor laws in Indonesia in the early 1900s or with those in Western Europe in the 19th century.
Labor law concerns labor precisely because it aims to protect workers from the caprice of their employers. Bluntly put, labor laws are a form of affirmative action with a quite deliberate bias in favor of workers.
Of course, no thoughtful persons will see this affirmative action as something that can be separated from the other factors, for instance, the investment climate or economic growth. But the inseparability of affirmative action for workers from the investment climate or economic growth does not cancel out the centrality of affirmative action for workers itself.
As much as the subordinate position of workers does not disappear simply by establishing "industrial cooperation" between workers and investors, so does the affirmative action for workers not lose its centrality simply by putting it in the wider context of economic growth or the investment climate.
Where does this point lead us? While it is virtuous to put labor law in the wider context of economic growth and the investment climate, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's government should not lose sight of the reason why the Labor Law is there in the first place. To reiterate the point, when it falls short of affirmative action for workers, labor laws loses their raison d'etre. Then the present government as the guardian of the Labor Law also loses its reason for being there, at least for most workers.
The above point seems crucial, as the expansion of free-market economy in this country, while virtuous, also has its downside. It is the growing power of money in politics: The weaker the purchasing power, the lower the access to policy making.
On this count, the financial clout of investors is of course no match for workers. But this is simply another way of saying that the ground is ripe to perpetually reduce the political influence of the workers.
After toiling day after day in sweat, workers need the Labor Law for affirmative action.
[The writer is a lecturer at the Graduate Program of the Driyarkara School of Philosophy, Jakarta, and holds a PhD from The London School of Economics]