Ulma Haryanto – Thousands of workers from a Nike plant in Serang, Banten, are due to receive nearly $1 million for forced overtime without payment in a move apparently unprecedented in Indonesia.

"Last year, we received the complaint from the workers' union at PT Nikomas, a supplier for Nike, that they had been working overtime without pay," Bambang Wirahyoso, chairman of the National Workers Union (SPN), said on Wednesday.

A subsequent investigation by SPN and Educating for Justice, a US-based nonprofit that exposes alleged labor abuses by Nike and other companies, found that at least 4,437 workers had been working overtime for up to two hours a day, six days a week.

The investigation and negotiation, Bambang said, took almost a year before the management at Nikomas agreed to pay up.

"We started research in February last year," Bambang said. "Basically, we distributed questionnaires to the workers and calculated that, combined, the factory owed the workers around Rp 8.1 billion [$883,000] from 593,648 hours of forced overtime."

The amount covered the Rp 13,000 an hour of payments that were allegedly withheld from workers in the past two years. The payout will be distributed in two installments, first on Jan. 20 and the second on Feb. 5, Bambang said.

"This is justice served," Education for Justice director Jim Keady said in a statement. "It took 11 months of work and we had to fight through denials and outright lies by the management, but the workers persevered and we won."

Since February last year, Keady had been corresponding with Nike chief executive Mark Parker and directors from Taiwan's Pou Chen group, which runs Nikomas and several other Nike suppliers in Indonesia, as well as managers from Nikomas itself.

Keady also found that workers at Nikomas were being forced to pay bribes to gain employment and that supervisors verbally abused workers.

Bambang said the victory was the first in Serang and he hoped for other factory workers to have the courage to stand up.

"This is a good precedent for other workers. So far, the Serang case is our first [victory]. We will be waiting for more reports [from other factories]," Bambang said, adding that SPN has established an SMS portal to gather labor-related complaints.

"There are more than 100,000 factory workers in Serang, and those who are most prone to overwork are laborers for branded merchandise, since they have to achieve certain targets," Bambang said.

Last year, the Associated Press reported that West Java workers making sneakers for Converse, which is owned by Nike, received harsh treatment from their supervisors in a factory owned by a Taiwanese group. The head of the union denied the claim.