Global recession affecting the livelihood of kampung folks

I was in Padang, Indonesia for the past one week, visiting my clients' oil palm estates for fertiliser recommendations. One of the estates that I visited was facing the problem of estate workers staging a demonstration. Around 300 workers who were suspended from work due to cost cutting exercise taken by the estate gathered at the estate's office to demand that they be reinstated for work. These workers were considered non-productive general workers who carried out odd jobs such as manual applications of empty bunches in the fields, loose-fruits collection, fertiliser applications and so no. Some of them are already very old but still clock in everyday to earn some money. In the past, the management kept an close-eye on these general workers as the profits were good and thus they won't want to terminate the so-called unproductive workers comprising kampung folks so as not to create any unrest or chaos in the estate. Most of the productive workers such as those involved in harvesting are trans-migrated from Java, they work hard and thus earn a better living than the local kampung folks who are more keen in odd-job. Now, palm oil price is bad and the management is forced to take drastic cost cutting exercise to maintain profit.

Demonstrations like this is very common in Indonesia. In town, urban or even in a remote oil palm estate that the one I'm visiting, the people frequently gather themselves in order to protest or to voice out their grievances. Normally, negotiations will be carried out to look for a win-win situation. However, too often that not, there will be some sort of damage such as the demonstrators went amok and set the office or factory on fire.

It seems that the global recession is not only affecting the businessman or big corporations, it goes to impact the livelihood of the commoners like you and me. Our government should therefore pre-emptive any probable occurrence of retrenchment or sort so that a mutual agreement can be reached so that there would be win-win for both employers and employees should retrenchment could not be avoided.