Govt not serious in boosting overseas employment: Experts

Ridwan Max Sijabat, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Labor export agents called on the government to be more proactive in seeking job opportunities overseas in a bid to help increase the number of the country's migrant workers and ease the unemployment problem at home.

Evaluating the performance of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's one-year-old administration here on Tuesday, the Indonesian Association of Labor Supplying Companies (Apjati) said it was disappointed with the government's slow response in expanding the labor export market to developed countries, which provide better labor protection and better pay.

"Thus far, Indonesia has been dependent on much on its old labor market in the informal sector in Malaysia and the Middle Eastern countries, meaning next to no significant increases in migrant job opportunities over the last few years," Apjati Chairman Husein Alaydrus said.

Indonesia has exported around 600,000 workers annually and the number of Indonesian migrant workers has reached 2.4 million, most of them employed as domestic servants. The sector contributes around US$3.5 billion annually in foreign exchange revenue to Indonesia.

Husein said that the country could not expand labor exportation unless the government sought out bilateral agreements with hiring countries and conducted market surveys on their labor demand.

Law No. 39/2004 on labor protection requires the government to make bilateral agreements on labor protection before supplying workers to other countries.

Husein said the demand for Indonesian workers in the United States, Britain, the Netherlands and Australia was actually very high, but the government had not yet made bilateral agreements with those countries.

He said that this year alone, the developed countries were looking to hire some 900,000 nurses and more than 2.5 million ship crew members with a monthly wages between US$500 and $1,200 per worker.

Bomer Pasaribu, executive director of the Center for Labor Studies, said the time had come for Indonesia to start supplying workers in the formal sector abroad.

"Besides increasing the number workers it sends to developed countries, we must start improving the quality of our workers to meet the requirements of the foreign market in the formal sector. All workers, including those wanting to work overseas, must have certified competence," he said, citing that almost 70 percent of Indonesian workers working overseas had no skills and were employed as maids with a gross monthly wages averaging $200.

He added that Indonesia could double its foreign exchange revenue if it began sending out properly skilled workers such as the Philippines has successfully been able to do.

The Philippines earns an average of $16 billion annually in foreign exchange revenue from a total of around six million workers in numerous foreign countries.

Bomer, also a former manpower minister, added that the government should promote the labor export sector as a strategic way to ease the worsening unemployment problem in the country.

He predicted that unemployment would become a serious problem in the next three months since more employers were expected to lay off large groups of workers as a consequence of the recent fuel price hikes and soaring prices of raw materials.

In January, 2005, the number of the jobless was more than 11 million, while the number of people working less than 35 hours a week was 43 million, out of a workforce of approximately 100 million.

Meanwhile, Director General For Labor Exportation at the Manpower and Transmigration Ministry I Gusti Made Arka said on Monday that the government had already signed bilateral agreements with Japan and South Korea to diversify Indonesia's overseas employment destinations.

"We have sent more than 4,600 semi-skilled workers to South Korea and we are preparing 10,000 nurses to be employed in hospitals and retirement homes in Japan," he said.

He also said the government was optimistic that it could send a total of 750,000 workers this year, but most would be employed in the informal sector in the Middle East, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.