Workers at Marriott’s 5-star W hotel in Bali-Seminyak began forming a union in January 2018. They legally registered their organisation on 31 January. About 40 per cent of the hotel’s workers were on precarious fixed-term contracts. They lived with the permanent threat that their contracts wouldn’t be renewed, and sometimes had to work 12-hour shifts with no compensation for overtime.
Union members immediately came under pressure from management to resign their membership in the union, holding the threat of non-renewal of their short-term contracts over their heads. Then, on 2 March, the union’s chairman, Agus Sarwatama, was suspended over a purely internal union matter which was turned into a case of allegedly harming the business.
When his contract expired on 31 July it was not renewed, leaving the workers without their elected union chairman, their union still unrecognised and no process for negotiating a collective agreement.
