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New law protects nonpermanent govt workers from mass layoffs
The House of Representatives passed the state civil apparatus bill into law on Tuesday, protecting the country’s millions of nonpermanent government workers from mass layoffs but leaving their path to permanent employment in question.
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Civil servants attend a ceremony to mark National Education Day on May 2, 2023, at Tegar Beriman Square in Cibinong, Bogor regency, West Java. (Antara/Yulius Satria Wijaya)
T
he House of Representatives passed the state civil apparatus bill into law on Tuesday, protecting the country’s millions of nonpermanent government workers from mass layoffs and paving them ways to be promoted into civil servants.
The new law, which revised the 2014 Civil Servant Law, bars government institutions from recruiting new nonpermanent workers until the government finishes verifying their status by December of next year.
Pending the verification, existing nonpermanent workers will be allowed to continue working for their institutions.
“The new law serves as a legal umbrella for the management of nonpermanent state workers without mass layoffs, as ordered by [President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo] from the beginning,” said Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform Minister Abdullah Azwar Anas in a recent statement.
The government had initially planned to eliminate all non-permanent positions by November of this year. But the plan was scrapped in September amid concerns that it would result in mass layoffs.
The government then pushed for the revision of the Civil Servant Law to address the profusion of nonpermanent state workers.
The National Civil Service Agency estimated in 2022 that some 2.3 million nonpermanent workers were employed by the government. Most worked in regional administrations as stop-gap replacements for retiring civil servants.
