Better treatment for street vendors sought

Better treatment for street vendors sought

M. Taufiqurrahman, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Analysts are calling on the city administration to manage street
vendors in Jakarta appropriately because since the start of the
economic crisis they have served as a social safety valve for
many of Jakarta's poor.

Economist Didik J. Rachbini said the Jakarta administration
lacked policies and programs to handle street vendors in the
city, and it consequently looked for a quick and easy solution by
conducting raids and evictions to deal with them.

"Given their immense contribution to the wellbeing of the
city's population, the administration should come up with a
regulation that will help them to flourish," Rachbini told The
Jakarta Post on Monday.

He said that street vendors as part of the informal sector had
thrived, while the government, still beset by the multi-faceted
crisis, was unable to provide jobs for the city's population.

In 2002, the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) revealed that out
of 89.7 million people employed in the country, some 62 percent
or 55.6 million people worked in the informal sector.

Street vendors, Didik added, could even be integrated into the
formal sector as long as business entities were willing to
accommodate them.

"Offices and supermarkets in the city's high rise buildings,
for example will reap the benefit if they allocate space for food
stalls, so that their employees can have easy access to cheap
foods during lunch breaks," he said, adding that the two could go
together.

City Bylaw No. 2/2002 on private markets stipulates that
private shopping centers of over 500 square meters in size are
required to allocate 20 percent of their space for street
vendors. This ruling, however, is not properly implemented as
there are only a few, if any, private shopping centers which are
willing to do so.

Separately, the head of urban community division of the
Jakarta Legal Aid Institute (LBH) Tubagus Haryo Karbyanto, said
that the city administration had taken a wrong approach in
dealing with street vendors.

"City officials perceive street vendors as a source of traffic
congestion and garbage that hinder the implementation of proper
city planning. They, therefore, solve such problems by removing
them to isolated areas," Karbyanto said, adding that the new
location sometimes was difficult for customers to reach.

He said that instead of removing street vendors, the city
administration should keep them where they were and organized
them in order that they did not take too much public space.

In some of the city's spots like Jatinegara in East Jakarta,
Senen and Tanah Abang in Central Jakarta, where street vendors
thrived, he demanded that the city administration remove the
thugs (preman) who regularly extort money from them.

"If they don't have to give money to the thugs, all the money
will go the city administration and it will be a great source of
revenue," he told the Post.

Sharing the same conviction that the formal and informal
sector could support each other, he said: "The likelihood of
cooperation is great, but the informal sector is never given a
chance."