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Ideal wage for Jakarta journalists $572, says association
The minimum salary for journalists in Jakarta should not be less than Rp 7.5 million (US$572) as they have special needs to keep up with, to be able to produce news independently on a daily basis, a journalists’ alliance has stated.
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Journalists question President Joko Widodo (right) at the State Palace on April 26. The Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) has stated that the minimum salary for journalists in Jakarta should not be less than Rp 7.5 million (US$572). (Antara/Widodo S. Jusuf)
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he minimum salary for journalists in Jakarta should not be less than Rp 7.5 million (US$572) as they have special needs to keep up with, to be able to produce news independently on a daily basis, a journalists’ alliance has stated.
The Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) calculated the budget for goods and services related to the needs of a journalist in Jakarta, including subscriptions to newspapers or the purchase of a laptop and an internet modem, to come up with the ideal wage.
However, currently, the average salary of journalists in the capital city is only around Rp 3-4 million, slightly above the 2016 Jakarta minimum wage (UMP) of Rp 3.1 million, it stated.
“We will ask the Press Council to increase the salary to twice the UMP,” said Ahmad Nurhasim, the chairman of AJI's Jakarta chapter, on Saturday.
Nurhasim further said that a higher salary would reduce the number of journalists prone to being bribed. Hence, he called on all journalists to join a union to fight for a better salary.
According to the Newspaper Publishers Union (SPS) in 2015, 20 percent of its 500 members, as well as a large number of non-member media companies, still paid their journalists below the UMP.
In late 2013 the AJI, as quoted by Tempo.co, stated that the salaries of Indonesian journalists were among the lowest in Southeast Asia. There were local media companies that only allocated 8 to 12 percent of their total incomes for journalists’ wages, it stated, while media companies in Malaysia and Singapore allocated 18.3 percent and 29.3 percent, respectively. (vps/ags)
