Palm | Kelapa Sawit

N. Sumatra plantations hiring children: NGOs

Many large-scale oil palm plantations in North Sumatra are employing child labor, according to several NGOs.

The NGOs — Pelita Sejahtera, Lentera Rakyat and Sawit Watch — issued a report that said 115,000 children were employed by the plantations.

The children, according to researcher Saurlin Siagian of Lentera Rakyat, accounted for 50 percent of the total number of people working on plantations in North Sumatra.

“The kids are mostly below 16 and have dropped out of school. Only a few of them are still going to school,” Siagian told journalists when presenting the report in Medan, North Sumatra, on Thursday.

Siagian said the children were mostly casual day laborers or as field helpers tasked with collecting oil palm fruit bunches.

The children were underpaid, Saigan said. Their wages depended on the amount of work they could finish in a day.

Children employed as casual laborers might make between Rp 300,000 (US$33) and Rp 500,000 every two weeks, while those employed as helpers earned from Rp 5,000 to Rp 10,000 a day.

“The wages they receive are not comparable to the risks of the work that they are doing in the field, especially because they are not equipped with protection equipment,” he said.

Quoting the Manpower Law and the principles of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), Siagian said that the employment of child laborers on oil palm plantations violated the law and the RSPO principles.

Exploiting child laborers was subject to sanctions that might be given in the form of certificate revocations and expulsion from the RSPO.

“Ironically, such sanctions have never been imposed on oil palm companies that were found to have been employing child laborers,” he said.

Siagian also said that the NGOs wanted to establish a working group on labor issues to develop guidelines on a just labor system for oil palm plantations.

Contacted separately, the secretary of the North Sumatra branch of the Oil Palm Employers Association (GAPKI), Timbas Prasad Ginting, said children were not employed by local GAPKI planations, as the practice was illegal.

“We ban oil palm companies from employing child laborers. They will be sanctioned if they violate so,” Ginting told The Jakarta Post on Thursay.

Ginting, however, said that some smaller, individually owned plantations might employ children.

“Suppose it is true that the kids are employed by individual employers. It still needs to be further proven, because what happens may be is that the kids were brought along by their fathers, who are working for that particular individual employer,” Ginting said.