Nobody likes to come back to work after a long holiday, but that’s hardly an excuse to not show up at the office. But every year, thousands of Jakarta’s civil servants (PNS) decide to extend their Idul Fitri holidays by not coming to work when they are supposed to.
This year, Jakarta Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama warned the capital’s PNS that those who did not show up to work yesterday, the first day after this year’s Lebaran break, would be punished, at a minimum, by having their Regional Performance Allowance (TKD) cut. He also said that demotions and dismissals were also possible punishments for the worst offenders.
Despite those warnings, an inspection conducted by Deputy Governor Djarot Saiful Hidayat found that exactly 6.072 PNS failed to show up for work yesterday. With 39,913 civil servants on the Jakarta government’s payroll, that’s a staggering 15.2% of all PNS who couldn’t be bothered to show up for work.
That number is somewhat muddied by the fact that 1,217 of the machines used by the government to record worker attendance were found by Djarot to be broken. The government has 3,100 of the machines,which requires PNS to clock in using a fingerprint scanners, in total, meaning about 28.2% of them are not working.
Djarot did not accuse PNS of sabotaging the machines so that they could skip out on work, but instead blamed their malfunction on problems such as poor maintenance and rats chewing through their wires. However, the deputy governor said that the attendance machines being offline could not be used as an excuse for civil servants to skip work, as PNS are required to manually log their attendance and work performance when the machines are not working.
Hopefully losing out on their work allowances will serve as a lesson to civil servants that the government will no longer tolerate laziness and undisciplined behavior from PNS who are supposed to be serving the people whose taxes are paying their salaries.
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