Beneath the humid tropical heat, a sweltering 33-degree Celsius, Taufiqurrohman drives a taxi in Jakarta’s traffic jam. Eight months earlier, he was a senior producer in the news production division at the CNN Indonesia television news network, responsible for political programs and creating news items. Since 1999, Indonesia has enjoyed press freedom, but the workplace environment for journalists has remained unchanged from the authoritarian era of the previous three decades. According to research by the Alliance of Independent Journalists, only 20.6 percent of journalists have a union at the media company where they work.
Human rights and justice for journalists in the workplace have eroded because of the vulnerable situation. That is what Taufiqurrohman and 13 of his colleagues at CNN Indonesia suffered. On August 27, 2024, they established a labour union called the CNN Indonesia Workers Solidarity (SPCI), and a few days later all 14 declarators had been fired by Trans Media, the sole owner of CNN Indonesia, as part of the licensing arrangement from Warner Bros. Discovery.
Taufiqurrohman and his friends founded SPCI as a forum for fighting against unilateral wage cuts. Eight workers are fighting their dismissal in court.
One of the fired journalists, award-winning Miftah Faridl, made a documentary film entitled Cut to Cut, which tells their story of struggle.The film, produced with Watchdoc Kolaborasi, an audio-visual documentary production house, was published on the YouTube channel on 6 March 2025, and has 46,511 views.
“This film wants to document (our resistance) and act as campaign material because the number of labour unions in the media is tiny. We made the documentary independently, with simple equipment and cameras, so the production costs were cheap. We saw the documentary as an effective campaign medium. In the mainstream media, it seemed very difficult to publish issues like this because editorial politics were always related to business conflicts of interest,” Taufiqurrohman told MDI.
He says that workers at CNN Indonesia received incomplete information about the planned wage cuts in early June. Meetings were only attended by workers at the producer level, such as in the news-gathering division, but did not involve many correspondents or field teams. There was no mention of how deep the wage cuts would be and how long they would last. Management explained that income had decrease without any reference to the company’s financial condition. Taufiqurrohman says the company had already made its decision, so there was no negotiation.
MDI contacted the President Director and Chief Editor of CNN Indonesia, Titin Rosmasari, who did not respond to repeated WhatsApp messages.
The employment dispute between Taufiqurrohman and six other colleagues facing the defendant PT Trans News Corpora (known as Trans Media, owner of CNN Indonesia) is currently in the at the Central Jakarta District Court. The plaintiffs are demanding payment of wages during the process of resolving the industrial relations disagreement dating from September 2024 until the verdict, including least six months of wages in cash. Meanwhile, Faridl has .
According to the Chairwoman of the Press Council, Ninik Rahayu, CNN Indonesia never communicated this internal problem between the press entities until it became a labour dispute before the courts. However, journalists reported on the plan to establish labour-union solidarity, Rahayu tells MDI. She says that journalists had submitted a request for a bipartite and tripartite meeting, but the Press Council has no authority to handle labour disputes.
The fired journalists are limping to court without any institution fulfilling part of the economic burden they face.. “The government has done so (aiding limited social assistance) during the COVID-19 pandemic. There is no scheme for financial support for journalists or news media when their sustainability is imperiled. Hopefully, this aspiration will be executed by the next members (the new Press Council will get going in mid-May). The trust fund can be a priority not only for the Press Council, news media, and the government but also for civil society and non-state actors to think about,” conveys Rahayu.
Philosophizer and university lecturer Abdullah Khusairi, highlighting the CNN brand taken by Trans Media for the Indonesian-language broadcast version and website, says he thinks initially there was supervision and quality control of the CNN Indonesia, but then nothing.
Media giants in Indonesia, including CNN Indonesia, are known to have business interests in many other areas outside the communication and information sector. In addition to 14 news brands, its parent company has financial services, leisure and hospitality businesses such as hotels and airlines, entertainment, property, retail, and lifestyle.
“It is time for the media business to separate from the others. The Press Council should initiate it in the form of company requirements. There should be no smell of a relationship between one corporation and another unless they have one type of communication and information business,” said Khusairi, a lecturer at the Imam Bonjol State Islamic University.
He argues that limitations on media owners are necessary, particularly concerning their core business. If not limited, there will be an oligopoly. Indonesia must continue to fight for news media to be part of civil society’s interests, otherwise, there will be other Taufiqurrohmans.
Arpan Rachman is an independent journalist. He placed third in the 2013 Indonesia Stock Exchange journalism writing contest and was a fellow of the 2014 Southeast Asian Press Alliance annual fellowship.
