Govt denies allegation over labor exports
JAKARTA (JP): Minister of Manpower Fahmi Idris has denied labor export companies' allegations that the government plans to monopolize labor exports.
"The government has insisted that there will be no monopoly in sending workers overseas and it will end all forms of monopoly in the labor sector," he said here on Wednesday.
The Association of Indonesian Labor Export Companies (Apjati) criticized the establishment of the Labor Export Agency (BKPTKI) during a hearing with House of Representatives's Commission V for labor on Tuesday. It said the agency had been established with a view to taking over the role which labor export companies currently play in providing the necessary documents to workers who are going overseas.
The association questioned what business would be left for existing labor export companies. The new government agency was supposed to become operational on Sept. 1 but has yet to start work.
The new agency is intended to give a "one-stop service" to workers who require visas, passports, insurance and bank credits before leaving the country to work abroad. The idea surfaced under previous ministers but came to nothing.
Fahmi said that the new agency had been established to simplify the complicated procedures which workers currently have to go through to get all the required documents.
"With the one-stop service, workers can get the required documents within one or two days at a much reduced cost," he said.
Workers usually pay around Rp 600,000 to labor export companies for the required documents. Approximately 1 million Indonesians are currently working abroad, with an average annual remittance of US$3.5 billion.
Fahmi reiterated that the government would continue to boost labor exports to ease unemployment in the country.
Extortion
Meanwhile, Anthon Sihombing, Apjati's secretary general, called on authorities to stop extorting money from workers at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport.
In the Tuesday hearing he said that last week a female worker who wanted to go back to her home village in Sukabumi, West Java, was charged Rp 36 million. It was not clear what the payment was for. Anthon said that the female worker recovered the money after reporting the case to police in the airport.
He said security personnel and employees of the immigration office, the tax and excise directorate general and the state- owned PT Damri bus company all extorted money from workers entering and leaving the country.
Anthon called on the ministry to lift Damri's monopoly on transporting Indonesian workers who return from overseas back to their home villages in West, Central and East Java.
"Besides charging high ticket prices, money is frequently extorted from workers on their way home," he said.
Meanwhile, Yudo Swasono, chief of the center for research and development at the ministry, said the government was planning to carry out two more nationwide labor-intensive projects worth Rp 3 trillion to help jobless people through the economic crisis.
He said that Rp 2 trillion would be used to finance a labor- intensive project for unskilled job seekers while the remaining Rp 1 trillion would be used to finance business units for skilled job seekers.
"The manpower ministry is designing the projects and they should get under way in the next two months," he said, adding the projects were expected to employ around 1.5 million workers. (rms)