Govt not serious in boosting overseas employment: Experts

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.