City urged to speed up labor-intensive projects

City urged to speed up labor-intensive projects

JAKARTA (JP): City councilors urged the municipality yesterday
to speed up the implementation of its labor-intensive projects
designed to ease the unemployment crisis which has gripped the
city over the past few months.

Saud Rachman from Commission D for development affairs told
The Jakarta Post that the city needed to start the projects soon
since they should have been started months ago.

"The municipality is acting slowly on this matter. There were
indications of increasing unemployment problems as long as four
months ago. If they had addressed this matter sooner, the number
of unemployed people here could have already been reduced," he
said.

The city was experiencing an unemployment crisis with 900,000
people estimated to have lost their jobs this year alone due to
the current monetary turmoil, he said.

Saud praised the municipality's plan to hire blue-collar
workers for its projects, but he said the process of employing
them was taking too much time.

"We must remember that the higher the rate of unemployment,
the higher the chance for us to be hit by possible social unrest
or riots."

"God knows what hungry people could do. This is very
dangerous," he added.

Djafar Badjeber, head of Commission B for economic affairs,
shared Saud's opinion, saying that the city needed to determine
what it would do with the workers who had been "saved" through
the projects.

"The city cannot possibly take care of them all the time.
There must be a long-term plan for them. This is related to
population problems, too. Imagine, if they thought that it was
easy to find jobs in Jakarta, they would always keep coming
back."

Despite the fact that the city needed long-term employment
planning, Djafar said the most important thing was to start
employing the workers through the short-term projects already
planned.

"Cut the long procedures. Hire them promptly and properly," he
said.

In a bid to save the city from an unemployment disaster,
Governor Sutiyoso said Wednesday that the city administration had
received Rp 4 billion (US$444,444) from the National Development
Planning Agency to implement the labor-intensive projects
utilizing the unskilled workers.

Sutiyoso said that the fund would be used to pay workers in
the projects. Each worker would be paid Rp 7,500 daily, he said,
adding that the projects were expected to start next week.

"We hope that the projects will give the workers an
opportunity to earn incomes, especially in the coming Idul Fitri
holiday," Sutiyoso said after inaugurating the new head of the
city cooperatives and small enterprises office, Soenardi, the
head of the city manpower office, Sabar Sianturi and the head of
city public works office, Sanapati Tarebbang.

Based on data from the city manpower agency, the number of
unskilled workers to be included in the projects will reach
344,070 out of a total number of some 435,000 known unemployed
laborers in the city at present.

The labor-intensive projects will include waterworks repairs,
river dredgings and renovation of dikes and water canals
throughout the city's five mayoralties.

In its clean river project, the municipality, in cooperation
with private consulting firm PT Kirana Satria Asta Enam, will
hire 90,000 blue-collar workers.

The first phase of the project, which will be financed by the
World Bank, is to clean the 100 kilometers of the Banjir Kanal
Barat and Banjir Kanal Timur rivers. Jakarta's 11 other rivers,
including the longest, Ciliwung River, are also slated to be
cleaned following the first phase.

"The project will help Jakarta get ready to face the rainy
season. Floods have been predicted to occur here," Rosita Noor, a
representative of the firm, said. (edt/ind)