Expert claims 1.2m jobs lost this year

Expert claims 1.2m jobs lost this year

Ridwan Max Sijabat, The Jakarta Post/Jakarta

The true picture of the country's unemployment is much worse than
is being acknowledged by the government, a prominent labor
analyst said.

Bomer Pasaribu, director of the Center for Labor and
Development Studies (CLDS), said on Friday that the number of
workers who had lost their jobs this year was estimated at 1.2
million.

He warned that the country would soon be facing an explosion
of unemployment and poverty along with other negative social
impacts if the government failed to create more job
opportunities.

He was responding to an earlier report quoting a senior
official at the Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration as saying
that the number of dismissed workers from January to November of
this year was only around 110,000. The official, however,
admitted that the data was incomplete as since the implementation of
regional autonomy in 2001, the office often encountered
difficulties in compelling regional administrations to submit
their labor statistics.

Bomer, who is also a former manpower minister, said that his
estimate of the number of dismissed workers was based on a recent
survey of industrial zones in Java, Kalimantan and Sumatra.

According to the survey, the highest number of labor
dismissals occurred in the manufacturing and plywood industries
and had a lot to do with the two fuel price hikes in March and
October this year.

"Labor-intensive companies in the forestry and manufacturing
sectors conducted downsizing and cut the number of their
employees because of the rising prices of imported raw materials
and the government's policy barring the export of logs," he said.

Bomer predicted that open unemployment would increase to 13
million in 2006 from 11.6 million this year, while hidden
unemployment, referring to the number of people working less than
35 hours a week, would reach more than 40 million.

"An unemployment explosion will happen unless no serious
attention is paid to cope with it," he said.

Bomer, who is also an economist at the Bogor Agriculture
Institute (IPB), suggested that the government push the growth of
small-scale enterprises, particularly in the agricultural, marine
and handicraft sectors, and revive the social safety net program
to help ease the unemployment problem that has reached alarming
proportions.

"If the country's economic growth could reach at least seven
percent, the unemployment rate could be reduced to 10 million,"
he said.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has recently reshuffled his
economics ministers, whose main task would be to promote
macroeconomic stability and lure badly needed investment to
create higher economic growth.

Regarding poverty, Bomer said that the number of poor this
year had nearly doubled to 72 million from 36.5 million in 2004,
and increased by 30 percent compared to 28.5 million in 1980.

"The increasing number of poor has something to do with
zero growth in investment, fuel price hikes, high inflation,
which reached 18 percent this year, and the damaged
infrastructure in rural areas," he said.

Separately, chairman of the Indonesian Labor Exporters
Association (Apjati), Husein Alaydrus, said the government should
allocate more funds for training programs and disburse more bank
credits to labor exporters to send more workers overseas in an
endeavor to help cope with the rising unemployment and poverty
problem.

"The overseas market is open for Indonesian workers, but we
cannot meet the demand because of the absence of serious
attention by the government to accelerate labor export," he said,
saying that Indonesia could increase labor export to 1.5 million
annually from the current 325,000.