TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The Ministry of Manpower has accepted the request for a meeting filed by Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) employees on Monday, after the workers reported a number of company policies that had inflicted financial losses caused by the firm’s arbitrary 30 percent wage cut since April of 2020.

“We will soon follow up what the [KFC] workers had mentioned,” said Manpower Ministry general secretary Anwar Sanusi on Monday, April 12.

The workers who filed the official protest to the government are joined under workers’ union movement ‘Solidarity of Indonesian Workers Struggle’ or SPBI PT Fast Food Indonesia Tbk. 

PT Fast Food is none other than the sole licence holder of the KFC brand in Indonesia.

The workers also revealed that the firm had implemented other policies that are claimed to help survive the economic impacts of Covid-19 pandemic in April 2020. Among those are the wage cuts or ‘wage hold’, not paying the religious allowance THR in accordance with KFC collective labor agreement, and delayed payment of workers’ overtime. 

Tempo confirmed the workers' protests to the Fast Food Indonesia director Justinus Dalimin Juwono who did not detail about the number of occurrences that the workers mentioned happened in reality. 

He only said that everything had been discussed and agreed upon collectively with a workers union SPFFI. The SPFFI and SPBI are two separate unions with the former claimed by Juwono as the one that represents most of the KFC employees. 

Read: Covid-19 Forces KFC Indonesia to Cut, Suspend Wages

FAJAR PEBRIANTO