Braving the worst flooding in more than a decade, two dozen union and non-government organization (NGO) staff members attended a health and safety training in Jakarta, Indonesia, February 4th through 7th. This training was a follow-up to the four-day training in June 2000 involving many of the same unions and NGOs, and was designed to build the capacity of the participating organizations to conduct their own health and safety trainings with workers and community residents throughout Indonesia.

The February training consisted on two days of sessions on effective training techniques, a third day in which participants conducted trainings of their own with members of their organizations who came to the training center for the morning, and a fourth day of evaluation and action planning. The event was coordinated locally by the LIPS organization, as was the case in 2000, and the trainers included lead trainer Diane Bush and Betty Szudy of the Labor Occupational Health Program (LOHP) at UC Berkeley, and Network Coordinator Garrett Brown.

Among the union and NGO participants were (in the usual Indonesian alphabet-soup) SBSI, SPSI-Reformasi, ABGTeks, GSBI, PBI, IPJ, LEC, Bupera and PKU. The Jakarta office of the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS) sent staff member Willy Leba, and two staffers from the Hong Kong Asia Monitor Resource Center (AMRC), Sanjiv Pandita and Stephen Frost, also participated. Indonesian participants came from the cities of Bandung, Bogor, Serang and Tangerang as well as Jakarta.

During the first two days, participants from SBSI, IPJ and SPSI-Reformasi prepared two-hour trainings to be presented to members of their organizations who were to come on the third day for a morning session. Because of the widespread flooding in Jakarta, only a handful of outside participants were able to make it to the PKBI family planning education center where the training was held. Nonetheless, two-hour sessions were conducted on reproductive health by the IPJ participants, on chemical hazards by the SPSI-Reformasi participants, and general health and safety concepts by the SBSI participants.

The fourth day was devoted to evaluation and action planning for activities to follow up the 2000 and 2002 trainings. One proposal emerging from the discussion was to form an ongoing "forum" on occupational safety and health which would periodically bring together the participants of the two trainings, and other interested organizations, to exchange experiences, materials and resources, and to explore the possibilities of joint trainings and other activities. Also suggested was the creation of an electronic list serve of participants and others to share experiences and suggestions on occupational safety and health activities in Indonesia.

LOHP trainers Bush and Szudy reported that their organization has many lesson plans and teaching materials on key health and safety topics that they can make available to Jakarta participants for use in Indonesia. Based on a similar interest from China project participants, LOHP will be publishing in the near future a booklet of lesson plans and other materials in English, which can be translated and adapted by health and safety trainers in Indonesia, China and elsewhere.

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Seminar Held in Jakarta on Local and International OSH Resources

On February 6th, a seminar on occupational safety and health resources in Indonesia and internationally was held at the PKBI center in Jakarta as part of the follow-up training. The goal of the seminar was to help training participants make contacts with local and regional organizations who can provide human and technical resources for occupational safety and health activities by unions and community-based organizations throughout Indonesia.

Speakers at the seminar included Fauzi Abdullah of LIPS, Verdi Yusuf and Indah Susanti of the Jakarta office of the International Labor Organization (ILO), Willy Leba of the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS), Dr. F. Handoyo of the Indonesian Association of Occupational Health and Safety, Sanjiv Pandita of the Asia Monitor Resource Center (AMRC), Betty Szudy of the Labor Occupational Health Program (LOHP) at UC Berkeley, who presented slides of the August 2001 training in China, and Agatha Schmaedick of the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), an organization in the U.S. which was conducting an investigation of a factory in the Jakarta area which produces clothing for U.S. universities.

The Jakarta ILO office already has ongoing workplace health and safety projects in Indonesia, including trainings with employers and workers, as well as a library of printed materials in several languages. AMRC also has conducted trainings in Asia, including Cambodia, Korea and Thailand, and has health and safety-related printed materials. ACILS has not yet addressed workplace health and safety issues in its extensive array of activities in Indonesia, but there is an interest to integrate health and safety into its ongoing programs. Dr. Handoyo presented his organization’s activities and offered their professional assistance to the grassroots organizations at the training.

The two-hour seminar, reportedly the first of its kind in Indonesia, laid the basis to build relations and links between the Indonesian and regional groups to share resources, experiences and possible joint activities in the field of occupational safety and health.

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