- Title
- The regulation and adoption of internal dispute resolution procedures in Indonesia
- Creator
- Sumange, Andi
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2017
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- This thesis examines internal dispute resolution procedures (IDRPs) established within enterprises in Indonesia to deal with employee grievances and resolve disputes over employment issues. This broad topic is addressed at two levels: the promotion and regulation of IDRPs by governments, and the adoption and operation of IDRPs within an individual enterprise. At both levels, the aims are to describe and explain the types of IDRPs advanced and the circumstances in which they emerged. The intellectual tradition informing the study is institutionalist employment relations. The existing literature on IDRPs in this, and related, traditions is extensive but quite diverse. Both description and explanation are marked by many insightful studies, but few that develop any comprehensive or integrated analytical frameworks. In an attempt to move beyond this diversity, this study offers descriptive and explanatory frameworks by which government regulation and enterprise-level initiatives can be analysed. This is an important contribution. The account at national level found that the Indonesian government has twice sought explicitly to promote and regulate IDRPs: during the 1986-1988 period and from 2004 until the present. In both cases, the government relied mostly on ministerial decrees as the legal instrument, although this was underpinned by legislation in the latter period; namely, Law No.2/2004. In the earlier period, the government intended to make IDRPs mandatory, while the latter only mandated that ‘bilateral negotiations’ be used to address grievances/disputes within enterprises, while more detailed procedures came in the form of voluntary guidelines. The types of IDRPs promoted by the respective regulations differed slightly, according to their formality, the parties involved in resolving disputes, the scope of the issues addressed and the processes used. The explanations developed for why the Indonesian government approached IDRPs in these ways were multi-faceted, recognising the influence of a range of contextual and agency factors. In both periods, the governments were impelled by forces beyond their control (economic, legal, political and international), but the specific responses they took – and therefore their respective approaches to IDRPs – varied according to their political ideologies, their approaches to economic development and their preferred political strategies. The account at the organisational level comes through a case study of IDRPs in an Indonesian state-owned bank, Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI). It finds that after a stalled attempt in the late 1980s, BNI introduced several formal IDRPs in 2001, 2002 and 2011, while collective agreements negotiated between the bank and its union also included provisions aimed at resolving disputes internally. By 2012, this evolution had produced a formal IDRP which comprised two parallel procedures, aimed at resolving different types of grievances/disputes. This picture of IDRPs at BNI, however, is incomplete because few disputes actually progressed through the various steps of the formal IDRPs. In practice, most employee queries and grievances about employment issues were expressed through an informal process, centred around telephone and email contacts by employees with a centralised ‘hotline’ established by the bank’s Human Capital Division. Explanation of how and why BNI came to have this pattern of IDRPs again focuses on a combination of contextual and agency factors. The bank’s managers were almost solely responsible for the establishment of these procedures, because neither the trade union nor employees more generally had much input. In making their decisions about IDRPs, managers were certainly responding to various economic, political and institutional imperatives (especially the laws outlined earlier), but these factors left sufficient space for managers to mould the IDRPs according to their values and human resource strategies. Overall, the thesis presents original empirical analysis, in that IDRPs have rarely been studies in Indonesia specifically or in developing countries generally. The attempt to develop and apply more comprehensive analytical frameworks – both descriptive and explanatory – is also novel.
- Subject
- internal dispute resolution procedures; employment relations; indonesia
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1385047
- Identifier
- uon:32162
- Rights
- Copyright 2017 Andi Sumange
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 2 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 575 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |