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)