Bricklaying in Aceh

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http://www.thejakartapost.com/detaileditorial.asp?fileid= 20070405. F07&irec= 6

Bricklaying in Aceh I was looking back the other day at a letter in the British newspaper The Times as written by Professor H. H. Turner in January 1925, who was challenging the government's statement that a good British bricklayer would lay 500 bricks per day which made him the best in the world.The professor claimed to have found one bricklayer who dealt with 2000 bricks in eight hours and another one who laid 890 bricks in just one hour -- one presumes the brickie ran out of steam after a while.

It made me wonder just how many bricks were being laid in Aceh province, bearing in mind the climatic differences between gloomy old England and sun-drenched Indonesia. The heat factor alone could well in fact reduce the work rate by up to fifty percent, and then of course there are the incentive factors of salary and working conditions. An English bricklayer in 1925 would have earned about one shilling per week, and so in the case of the man who dealt with 2000 bricks per day, this equates to about one old English penny per 1000 bricks laid. I've got no idea about exchange rates re: the Indonesian rupiah in 1925, which was probably a sack full of rice (half filled) and two bunches of bananas, but in England labor was cheap almost beyond the slave trade.

So who knows how many bricks an Indonesian lays in an hour or a day, and how does this equate with the Brits? Of course in today's world a British bricklayer earns a small fortune, as does a plumber who can command 35 UK pounds per hour. That is about Rp 625,000 per hour which would be around Rp 25 million per week. If an Indonesian bricklayer earns on average about Rp 60,000 per day, he will need to work 10 days to earn the equivalent of what his counterpart in London earns in one hour. Now the cost of economy return airfare to the UK is about Rp 10 million, which could be recuperated by the Indonesian bricklayer in 16 hours of continuous bricklaying, if he can get a visa, a work permit and lay at least four bricks per minute. On the other hand, if he can lay at that speed in Indonesia then it works out to Rp 33 per brick plus a sun tan and a bowl of rice -- I wonder how much we are paying consultants in Aceh? DAVID WALLISMedan, North Sumatra

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