Tobacco’s labor-intensive status questioned

Thousands more jobs may be lost within the Indonesian tobacco industry as manufacturers increasingly turn from manual production methods to cheaper machine systems, according to a story in The Jakarta Post.

Widyastuti Soerojo of the Public Health Scholars Association (IAKMI) said that about 15,000 tobacco workers had lost their jobs last year.

In many cases, she said, cigarette companies had claimed that they had had to fire workers because of the impact on their businesses of the implementation of tobacco control rules. But the companies had used tobacco control as an excuse to fire their workers.

“At the same, according to our record, the production of cigarettes in Indonesia has continued to increase every year,” said Widyastuti. “If cigarette production is high, why do they need to fire thousands of workers?”

Indonesia is likely to see further significant increases in cigarette production following the release by the Industry Ministry of a tobacco roadmap suggesting that production in the country could be ramped up to 524.2 billion cigarettes a year by 2020. A previous roadmap had appeared to put the 2020 target at 260 billion.

Widyastuti said the Industry Minister Saleh Husin had stated that the government considered the cigarette industry a labor-intensive industry and wanted to ensure it could employ more people.

The problem was, she said, the country’s cigarette industry now preferred to use machines, rendering it unable to employ large numbers of people.

Tobacco Control Support Center chairman Kartono Muhamad said Indonesia’s cigarette industry should no longer be considered a labor-intensive industry, negating the government’s labor-related reasoning for pushing cigarette production.

Tobacco activists on Thursday called on Saleh to withdraw the tobacco roadmap, saying that it was aimed only at boosting tobacco production, which would increase the negative effects of tobacco use on public health.