“Harga” Seorang Manusia

Tiap negara menetapkan batas minimum upah yang harus dibayarkan kepada pekerja. Tentu saja, semua disesuaikan dengan kemakmuran negara dan kemampuan daya beli warga negara bersangkutan. Dan, ketika aku harus menulis untuk rubrik Komparasi di majalahku, aku menemukan fakta-fakta gila. Ada perbandingan yang cukup fantastis dari "harga" seorang pekerja.

Satu bulan vs satu jam
Tiap bulan, seorang pekerja pabrik di Kuba mendapatkan bayaran 255 Peso – atau bila dikonversi menjadi Rp81 ribu. Jumlah tersebut sama dengan upah yang diterima seorang pekerja Inggris tiap jam! Tentu saja, bila dilihat dari tingkat kemakmuran, kedua negara itu berbeda jauh. Saat ini, mereka yang tinggal di Havana mempunyai kemampuan daya beli US$3.300 sementara, rekan sejawat yang bermukim di London berkemampuan daya beli hampir sepuluh kali lipatnya, US$30.900.

Satu pekerja = 160 pekerja
Kebanyakan, pekerja yang tidak terlatih (unskilled worker) mendapatkan upah paling rendah. Untuk mengerjakan sebuah proyek konstruksi di Dhaka, misalnya, seorang kuli bangunan biasa dibayar 700 Taka (Rp126 ribu) per bulan. Sementara, untuk kualifikasi yang sama, seorang kuli bangunan di Kopenhagen bisa mendapatkan bayaran 14 ribu Krone (Rp20,16 juta) tiap bulan. Jika mengindahkan nilai tukar dan kondisi ekonomi negara, satu kuli bangunan Denmark seharga 160 kuli bangunan Bangladesh.

Indonesia : Rusia : AS
Di Jakarta, pekerja berhak mendapatkan upah minimal Rp819.100, lebih besar dari sejumlah daerah di Indonesia. Bila dalam kondisi cateris paribus, apa yang diterima pekerja di Indonesia lebih baik daripada pekerja Rusia. Tiap bulan, pekerja di negara Beruang Merah ini mendapat upah 1100 Rubel, sekitar Rp342 ribu, sepertiga dari UMP DKI Jakarta. Namun, bila dibandingkan dengan standar pekerja AS, apa yang didapat pekerja Indonesia jauh tertinggal. Per jamnya mereka dibayar US$5.15 (Rp46 ribu), sementara pekerja di tanah air ini hanya mendapat sekitar Rp5 ribu, hanya sepersembilannya.

Upah vs harga sepatu
Beberapa pengusaha menganggap pekerja Vietnam mau diupah minim. Itu yang menyebabkan sejumlah pabrik merelokasi pabriknya ke negara tersebut. Dalam sebuah laporan yang dirilis baru-baru ini, upah minimum seorang pekerja pabrik sepatu di Hanoi adalah Rp378 ribu tiap bulannya. Sementara, harga sepatu Nike mencapai Rp1,3 juta sepasang. Dengan kata lain, upah yang diterima pekerja tiap bulannya, hanya sepertiga dari harga jual sepasang sepatu yang dikerjakannya, di pabrik. Mak!

Dogma

Kepercayaan adalah dogma. Dogma selalu melahirkan fanatisme sempit. Nyaris tak ada logika di sini. Kepercayaan tak memberi ruang untuk berdialog dan berdiskusi. Dia mutlak dan menjadi radiks dari penalaran awal manusia dalam mendekatkan diri pada Yang menguasai dirinya di luar dirinya.

Kepercayaan macam ini dikenal sebagai bagian dari peradaban purba. Masa di mana manusia terputus dari "aliran baik" alias agama wahyu, mengakrabi alam, menyatukan diri dan menangkap vibrasi alam sebagai tanda tentang sesuatu yang bakal terjadi di masa depan.

Hebatnya, di tengah akselerasi modernisasi, paham primitif ini justru muncul sebagai pesaing percepatan teknologi. Dia negator yang bisa menjungkirbalikkan realitas akal manusia.

Antara Presiden dan Presiden Direktur

Sebagai pemimpin negara dan pemerintahan, Presiden --atau Perdana Menteri-- memiliki tanggung jawab luar biasa. Namun, ironisnya bayaran yang mereka terima kadang tidak setimpal. Misalnya, gaji pokok presiden ternyata berada jauh di bawah standar gaji CEO perusahaan.

Indonesia
Pemerintah RI tidak berencana menaikkan gaji presiden. Untuk 2006, Presiden masih akan menerima gaji sebesar Rp362,88 juta per tahun. Nilai tersebut setara dengan enam kali gaji pokok tertinggi pejabat negara lainnya. Namun, bila dibandingkan dengan gaji pokok seorang CEO, nilai yang diperoleh Presiden Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono "tidak ada apa-apanya". Menurut taksiran, rata-rata gaji eksekutif level atas di Indonesia adalah Rp1,8 miliar per tahun.

Amerika Serikat
AS boleh bangga dianggap sebagai negara adidaya dan kiblat kapitalis dunia. CEO termahal sedunia pun bermukim di sana. Misalnya Jeff Immelt, CEO General Electric, mendapat bayaran US$3 juta per tahun. Itu di luar bonus US$5,3 juta yang diterimanya tiap tahun. Bandingkan dengan gaji George W. Bush yang hanya US$400.000 per tahun.

Filipina
Negara yang beribu kota di Manila ini membayar presidennya 300.000 peso atau setara Rp54 juta per tahun. Sementara CEO San Miguel diperkirakan mendapat bayaran hampir tiga kali lipatnya, 960.000 peso atau Rp172 juta setahun.

Inggris
Tony Blair selama ini tidak pernah mendapat gaji untuk jabatan Perdana Menteri, melainkan untuk titel First Lord of the Treasury yang disandangnya. Tahun ini ia mendapat jatah US$303.000 untuk setahun penuh. Nilai itu menjadi sangat kecil bila dibandingkan dengan gaji CEO Vodafone yang mencapai US$1,44 juta per tahunnya.

Nah! Ketika menulis berita ini, aku lalu berpikir: apa ini yang menjadi biang mengapa banyak pejabat negara korup? Wong presidennya saja gajinya hanya segitu.. Gimana bawahannya?

Ide gila terlintas, mungkin kalau pemerintahan mengadaptasi gaya perusahaan, gaji pejabat pemerintahan boleh setara dengan pegawai korporasi. Tapi, mereka juga harus rela lembur nyelesein detlen proyek, sukur-sukur kalo mereka ngrasain potong gaji kalau telat masuk kantor hehehe... Cekrek!

Woman execs paid less: close eyes, reach in hat, pick reason

Filed under: Bad news, Press releases, Management, Television, Magazines, eBay (EBAY), PepsiCo (PEP)

I want, oh so deeply, to be shocked. But I'm not. Here's the thing: women are powerful! Women are amazing! Women are reaching the upper echelons of corporate America! Hurray! And while I'm sure everyone at NOW threw a soda party when Indra Nooyi took over as CEO of PepsiCo, Inc., I'm sure they also tried to get mad about today's "news": male executives make way more than female executives. And then I imagine they remembered: this is nothing new. This is nothing surprising.

Women have been making less than men since the dawn of time. And although Oprah and Indra and Meg are so darned powerful, they can hardly sway the enormity of gender history in a few decades of exerting their collective feminine force.

Let's try one reason female CEOs, CFOs and the like make pocket change compared to their male brethren (and no, there seems to be no relation between executive pay and corporate profit, sales, stock performance, or how many pageviews your bio on the corporate homepage got this year): there just aren't as many of them. Naturally that doesn't explain why (for instance) the top-paid female executive, Safra Catz -- president and CFO Oracle Corporation -- made a sad 36% of what the top-paid male executive made (that's Eugene Isenberg, CEO of Nabors Industries Ltd., for the record). Catz wasn't even the highest-paid executive at her own company, pulling in about half of what founder and CEO Larry Ellison scored.

Well. That is Larry Ellison after all. His ego has to be worth at least as much as three women executives put together.

And, in fact, Larry is worth three women CEOs; 3.22x eBay, Inc. CEO Meg Whitman's pay, that is.

Because it's fun (or maddening, depending on whether or not you're me, or one of those aforementioned NOW members) to wonder why, and make lists, here is a list of reasons why women make so much less than men:

• Women don't negotiate as well as men do. Don't hate me for saying it, it's true. Since executive pay isn't established by the Federal Reserve Board, but instead by handshakes over shrimp cocktail and dirty martinis at Sparks, negotiating is the biggest reason why CEO X makes more than CFO Y.
• Women don't value themselves as highly as men do. You have to have unmitigated gall to believe anything you can do is really worth $50 million a year. Very few women have such cajones.
• Women aren't in the workforce as long as men are, on average. A few years off for maternity leave, and presto, earning power cut in half? Maybe it seems a bit harsh, but someone has to bear the overpaid CEOs of tomorrow!
• On average, women executives manage smaller companies. Naturally, given the weak connection between corporate revenue and pay, this doesn't really explain anything. But it's a nice place to turn if you're on the compensation committee of Oracle's board and are feeling a bit guilty.
• Women aren't as corrupt as men. Big paychecks such as those at Enron and Worldcom are typically hauled in by men. Just kidding! Turns out men and women are equally able to lie, cheat and steal.

What's your favorite reason why women make so much less than men?

Beg the Peg

Indonesian government had tried three systems of exchange rate, just to fit with the national economic condition. Just like any other country, Indonesia implemented the fixed exchanger rate on early years after its independence.

During the Sukarno era, the government lifted most restrictions on international transactions that were heavily regulated. To maintain the exchange rate, BI was obliged to buy or sell as much foreign currency as demanded to get the predetermined rate. Fortunately, country reserve was far bigger than the debts, due to Guided Economy system, a new economy system stressing socialist and co-operative ideals with priorities given to state-run companies than private ones, so had enough finance to do that.

On the year of 1970, government decided to let rupiah sold freely against a basket of currencies of country’s main trading partner, such as US dollar, Japanese Yen or Dutch Guilder. However, Bank Indonesia had to intervene in the market, so that rupiah kept on desired range of currency price against the dollar. Every morning, the central bank had announced the highest and lowest level of price of rupiah to one dollar. For over 25 years, BI had revised the limit for seven times.

Asian financial crisis reduced the rupiah value almost one third overnight. On June 1997, rupiah had traded on Rp3,035 per dollar, and it reached the lowest level of Rp16,800 to one dollar just exact one year later.

In view to secure foreign exchange reserved, made the monetary policies more effective, the Government phased out the intervention band and adopted a freely floating exchange rate system, since August 1997.

However, analyst Farial Anwar of Currency Management said Indonesia just an IMF’s victim. “It created too much speculators,” he said. The rupiah, he added, is more sensitive toward rumours on the political situation rather than toward economic fundamental. And it necessity to restrain the exchange of rupiah with implemented again the managed float system. Because the more rupiah is fluctuate, the more uncertainty in the business.

As November 2006, rupiah is selling on Rp9,100 to one dollar.

When he thought something gonna be happen...

All fixed, fast, froze relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed once become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with her kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its product chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, and establish connections everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose product are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the world.

In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the product distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nation into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are heavily artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

My God!! I can't believe that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote it on their phenomenal book Communist Manifesto. The book was published in 1848. Almost one and a half centuries ago! Were they read the future, palm reading, maybe??

While the shrinking and flattening of the world that we are seeing today constitute a difference of degree from what Marx saw happening in his day, it is nevertheless part of the same historical trend Marx highlighted in his writing of capitalism – the inexorable march of technology and capital to remove all barriers, boundaries, frictions, and restrains to global commerce.

Marx was one of the first to glimpse the possibility of the world as a global market, uncomplicated by national boundaries. Marx was capitalism’s fiercest critic, and yet he stood in awe of its bower to break down barriers and create a worldwide system of production and consumption. In the Communist Manifesto, he described capitalism as a force that would dissolve all feudal, national, and religious identities, giving rise to a universal civilization governed by market imperatives.

Marx considered it inevitable that capital would have its way – inevitable and also desirable. Because once capitalism destroyed all national and religious allegiances, Marx though, it would lay bare the stark struggle between capital and labor. Force to compete in a global race to the bottom, the workers of the world would unite in a global revolution to end oppression. Deprived of consoling distractions such as patriotism and religion, they would see their exploitation clearly and rise up to end it.

Indeed, reading the Communist Manifesto, it is hard to believe that Marx detailed the forces that were flattening the world during the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and how much he foreshadowed the way these same forces keep flattening the world right up to the present. Wow!

Are we born to be free?

Free will is the most difficult of God's gifts to understand or appreciate.

Freedom is one of the most valuable things there is, although many of us have no idea how precious it is until we suffer the loss of it. It is considered to be one of the basic human rights, and to attempt to withhold that right without very just cause is a most serious sin. We all like to think that we are free and that we have free will when making our choices in life — but let us think for a moment about the realities of the situation. Are we really born to be free? And if so, in what ways? What does this mean for us?

I think free will is something God granted to human beings which He did not grant to angels...

...because humans have the power to change through their own free will, and these decisions alter their fates.