Forget money from the Broo! Move to Indonesia:

A friend of mine told me about his experience a few years ago when he resigned from a job to take another and the human-resources officer asked him to come and collect five months' pay before he left.

It wasn't that my mate’s departure so delighted his employer that the boss decided to open the purse strings and make the divorce a joyous occasion for both parties.

It seems someone had simply forgotten to write into the labour law that employees were to be handsomely rewarded if they're fired, not if they quit of their own accord.

That oversight, of course, makes Indonesia an ideal place for job-hoppers. Except for company directors, everyone else is covered by a ``we-pay-as-you-go'' clause. With luck, one might even get a signing bonus from the new employer, making switching jobs an incredibly rewarding experience.

I don't think I can begin to describe just how bizarrely one-sided the Indonesian labour laws are.

So what happens when someone is really sacked?

The costs for firing a worker who has put in 20 years of service amounts to 145 weeks of wages in Indonesia.

The government is fully aware of the impact of labour costs on the nation's competitiveness. However, this administration's efforts to amend the labour laws have been a disaster. The draft law, which had to be withdrawn amid massive and violent street protests by labour unions in April, was so much in favour of the employers that even the employers were taken by surprise.

And that was its undoing. The draft law, which will now be redrawn with input from labour unions, businessmen, the government and academia, had tried to curtail severance pay to 12 months. It would have allowed employers more latitude in hiring contract workers.

Businessmen had expected much less. They would have been happy with some concession from labour on severance pay. What they wanted the most is the right to fire workers -- without compensation -- for misconduct. That's a reasonable demand if labour can be assured of judicial recourse against wrongful termination.

Indonesia's labour laws are like a leaky tap in a bombed-out hotel where the former employees have nicked all the silverware and pillaged all the crockery: They're just one more thing for the new manager to fix.