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Despite its name, collective leave is off limits for many
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Office workers walk near the Dukuh Atas railway station in Central Jakarta in June 2021. (JP/Seto Wardhana)
I
dul Fitri appears as a two-day national public holiday in the Indonesian calendar, yet the country seems to come to a standstill for a week or more. The reason for this is cuti bersama (collective leave), or days off declared by the government but which many private-sector workers do not get to enjoy.
For civil servants, cuti bersama amounts to extra leave, explained Kaleb Sihombing, a civil servant at the Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform Ministry, meaning they are granted in addition to the contractual leave days employees have at their disposal.
For this year, a joint ministerial decree issued late last year set 10 days of cuti bersama, four of which were designated for Idul Fitri, two working days before and two more after Lebaran.
Civil servants get the annual collective leave on top of more than a dozen national holidays and their personal leave allotment, but private-sector companies can choose whether to follow the government’s arrangement or not.
Some do, granting collective leave generously to their employees, but others want nothing of it, or they make their own rules, which the law allows them to do.
Cuti bersama is based on Manpower Ministry Circular No. 3/2022, which draws a clear distinction on what the leave means for the public and the private sectors. It declares collective leave “optional” for companies, leaving it up to them to decide on the matter based on operational requirements.
That can lead to resentment, as in the case of Sekar, who told The Jakarta Post on Thursday that her multinational company obliged employees to take leave days for Idul Fitri in line with the government’s cuti bersama arrangement.
