Shemmy Rory

Shemmy Samuel Rory earned a college degree in economics, but he found employers reluctant to hire a disabled man. He became a parking attendant–one among thousands of Indonesians who participate in a semiformal economy rife with exploitation. Beginning in the city of Solo, Shemmy has created a "forum of the urban poor" that is helping these workers earn more, do more, and "be" more in the eyes of the public.

Shemmy is developing the social infrastructure to improve the economic and political status of informal workers, particularly those who serve the public in a variety of street-level professions. These include parking attendants, food and drink vendors, hawkers, trash collectors, and porters. Each serves an important need in Indonesian cities, yet each is subject to harassment, extortion, and even violence by authorities, criminals, and even their own employers. In addition to being unsafe, these professions also tend to yield a low income with few opportunities for growth or mobility. Shemmy is creating a way for the workers to address their lack of voice and recognition as legitimate citizens, while reorganizing themselves to take ownership of more aspects of their work and expand its profitability. His is the first effort aiming at countrywide action to integrate people in diverse professions.
Shemmy's mission started with parking attendants who are employed through a subcontracting system that gives them little chance to represent their own interests to the city. Realizing that much of the revenue generated by parking was being siphoned off through corruption, Shemmy helped attendants organize a company to bid on contracts for street parking. The company has won some contracts, and Shemmy has seen the future. The city was receiving more of the revenue owed to it, and the parking association was offering better pay under better conditions for its members.
Shemmy's next step is to reach out to others on the street, particularly small vendors, through an enterprise development program. After creating ways to reorganize their daily work, Shemmy focuses on broader developmental issues for the workers. Through dues, profits, and worker contributions, the association has set up a healthcare scheme for members and their families. A scholarship fund is planned to help members keep their children in school. There is a pension fund, as well, and a profit-sharing program that pays "livestock" dividends back to the workers in their rural homes.

Indonesian cities are replete with people who make a living by plying some trade on the street. Some, like small vendors, are businesspeople in their own right. Parking attendants, in contrast, are mere employees of rather disengaged contractors. Whether one collects parking fees or sells fruit–or, indeed, performs one of the three dozen other informal jobs Shemmy has identified on the streets of Solo–working the streets makes one subject to exploitation, violence, and a form of social exclusion that prevents physical and social well-being.
Consider the parking attendant. It is not surprising that people standing on the side of the road collecting money are a target for criminals. Parking attendants and small traders are sometimes robbed, but more often they regularly pay extortion money to local gangs. This "fee" is absorbed by the individual attendant, not by the contractor that employs him. In fact, employers' response to the dangers on the street is typical. Contractors hold individual attendants personally responsible to provide, on schedule, payments that meet employers' expectations of how much parking revenue should be collected. Attendants only earn their wage when they meet that quota. Under the current labor law, the parking attendants are to receive job security including benefits from their employer. In the opinion of the contractors, since the parking attendants took subcontract work from the contractor, they should be responsible for their own job security.
What options do such workers have? They can rally and strike, though the union movement is weak. Unskilled workers are easily dismissed and replaced. And the threat of violence hovers over their every move. Police and other authorities are often beholden to the same powerful interests. In the most unfortunate and severe situations, the police may be complicit in daily extortion. At best, most can hope to find some way out of such jobs. While the particulars of the work may vary, attendants will likely move into some other, slightly more independent profession, like street vending.

Shemmy's answer is to create new paths to economic success within existing street professions. Economic security is both an incentive for workers to organize and a factor in improving their social status. In order to respond to local issues and events, he organizes his work according to a city strategy, with city-level "forums of the urban poor" organizing and running the programs.
Economic success for parking attendants requires some degree of independence. Shemmy helped the workers in Solo organize an independent cooperative to gain its own parking contracts from the city. This was a monumental transformation in the role of the attendants from unskilled, dispensable employee to owner-operator. Organizing alone would not have been enough to make this change. Shemmy had to convince enough members of the city council and local parliament that parking revenues would increase. He had the facts to prove it, having organized a comprehensive survey of parking in the city, comparing anticipated revenues with the actual money remitted. Shemmy thus managed to point out the graft that existed generally in the city.
He held public campaigns to raise public awareness on the negative effects of the current regulation on the community and a possible solution for the problem. The campaign used local and national print electronic media. Shemmy also mobilized a protest march to advocate for a better parking management system. He and his colleagues even conducted a strike and threatened to withhold payment to the contractors. He uncovered a scandal in the bidding process conducted by the committee and the private labor contractors. As a result, many government officials resigned. Apart from his advocacy, Shemmy never stops finding room for collaboration with government to increase revenue from parking, improve working conditions, and provide better service.
Drawing publicity to corruption and offering a ready alternative, he created pressure on at least some lawmakers to allow the lowly attendants to submit a bid. Street by street, parking attendants are beginning to enjoy the benefits of their independent work.
The glue that holds such a movement together is Shemmy's association. In 1997 workers organized themselves legally as a presidium-type association called P3S (Solo Street Parking Attendants Association) in the city of Solo. Shemmy believes that the strength of the organization depends on the strength of its members. He therefore empowered the parking attendants to become the basis of the organization by providing human development training and widening the organizational network. After years of struggle he successfully managed to mobilize parking attendants to influence the street parking management in Solo. Within the association, he introduced a code of conduct and activities to make parking more professional. To attendants' daily work he also added income-generating services like distributing flyers for local businesses. As members signed up and became active, Shemmy helped them to create new programs both to raise their income and to branch out to other groups.
Since attendants and food vendors share the streets, Shemmy began looking for ways to serve both and gain new allies. Vendors are supplied by merchants who buy produce at very low cost in the countryside, transport it to town, and mark it up substantially for vendors. Shemmy realized that parking attendants occupy virtually the same space as vendors and know them well and, accordingly, had an opportunity to pool their respective resources, pay farmers a better price, and sell lower to vendors. This became an important expansion strategy for the association because it gained vendors' trust.
Shemmy's success in pooling parking attendants' resources has motivated him to spread the work to cover other occupation-based groups including waste-pickers, paddy-cap drivers, sex workers, "diff-abled" workers, and others. The street-vendor association has followed the path of the parking attendants' movement and is currently processing new draft regulation. P3S has also expanded the membership to cover other parking attendants from the metropolitan area of Surakarta. Because of his accomplishment, Shemmy was also asked by the neighboring District Sukoharjo to organize their parking attendants. Shemmy is laying the foundation for his vision of a City Forum that can accommodate the urban poor voice to ensure their better future.
His third strategy aims to improve the members' welfare through cooperative activities. He is expanding this aspect of his work based on successes in Solo. Shemmy established cooperatives to meet a social mission for the members by applying profitable practices from outside the organization. They structure themselves in different co-op groupings. A primary co-op consists of at least 20 members based on the street parking lot, while the secondary co-op lies in the region and the tertiary co-op in Solo city. Each level of co-op has different functions: managing daily bookkeeping of income and savings; calculations of credit loans and pension fund payments; determining profit-sharing through purchase and distribution of livestock to members; running small businesses.
Shemmy is continuing to reach out to new constituencies of street workers throughout Java. He sees the best opportunities for expansion in midsized cities. With enough of these active, a future National Forum can begin advocating for broader change that will both empower and require city forums to develop.

Shemmy was born physically "diff-abled" 42 years ago in Sangir, North Sulawesi from a Javanese mother and Manadonese father. He has irregularly formed hands and feet–possibly the result of an overdose of medication administered to his mother during pregnancy.
Following his family tradition, at 17 he left home to live on his own. He grew up in an environment where he had to fight for survival. He remembered his grandmother saying that because he was handicapped, Shemmy would have to be clever. Young Shemmy worked hard as a market porter, street singer, street vendor, and a shoe shiner–moving from one city to the other in order to further his education as well as to earn his living. When he finished his university degree and started to look for a job, he found himself being discriminated against because of his physical condition. He realized that there is no place in the society for the diffabled unless they make it for themselves. He became rebellious against the system and the leaders that had created such a discriminatory system. In 1986 he first mobilized the people's power to advocate against discrimination of diffabled people. His interest grew wider when he realized that similar discrimination was routinely applied to the urban poor. He then contributed to changing the system by joining the labor movement. His focus was on the nonformal workers, among others, the parking attendants.
Since 1996, when he was engaged in various urban poor issues, like discrimination against the diffabled and the formal and informal labor, Shemmy learned that the urban poor faced the same problem. They were marginalized because of a system created by the society. Many people took economic measures to overcome the problem. However, to Shemmy, changing the current system is actually changing the current policy. He thought he needed to set a strategy to change the existing policy. Believing in the people's power, he then worked together with his colleagues for a citizens' movement for democracy. Consistency is his main principle for effecting change.
Becoming self-reliant is his life philosophy. Life has taught him that independence must be won, and once won, one has to use it. Shemmy has lived this principle in several competitive arenas, including the World Olympics for the diffabled and the Scouts–through both of which he has won high international honors.