The Supreme Court recently ruled on an interesting case regarding employment agreements between schools and teachers.
Facts
An international school in Indonesia hires teachers from abroad. In its employment agreements, the school stipulates that once the employment relationship has ended, the teacher is prohibited from working in any other institution in Indonesia for a period of 18 months. If this provision is violated, the teacher will be fined.
In this case, a teacher at the school resigned and then began work at another school. The former school became aware of this, requested that the teacher pay a fine according to the agreement and then filed a lawsuit through the court on the ground that the teacher was in default.
The teacher defended himself on both formal and material grounds. He defended himself materially by drawing upon his human rights laid out in article 28 D(2) of the 1945 Constitution, which stipulates that “everyone has the right to work”. The lawsuit by the school against the teacher was rejected at the first-instance court.
High Court
The High Court held as follows:1
the actions of [the teacher] who had worked for [the school] after leaving the plaintiff’s work were not an act of default . . . the content of article 4.4 is contrary to law number 39 of 1999 on Human Rights, because article 4.4 of the employment agreement prohibits [the teacher] from working elsewhere even though his term of service has ended, so that it is contrary to article 38 paragraph 2 of law number 39 of 1999, which states that everyone has the right and is free to choose the job he/she likes.
The Court’s reference is to article 38(2) of the Human Rights Law, which stipulates: “Everyone has the right to freely choose the job he/she likes and [is] also entitled to fair employment conditions.”
Supreme Court
Considerations at the appeal level were upheld by the Supreme Court: “The plaintiff in human rights cannot prohibit defendant one [the teacher] from working for defendant two [school] after defendant one stopped working for the plaintiff.”2
Comment
This case shows that the provisions in the employment agreement violated the teacher’s human rights. Therefore, this provision could not be implemented: provisions that violate human rights can be considered to have no binding force.
The employment agreement sets out that the prohibition takes effect for “18 months after the end of the employment relationship”. It is unclear whether the provisions would still be unclear if they were to apply while the employment relationship is ongoing.
