Newcomers get jobs easily despite municipal policy
Newcomers get jobs easily despite municipal policy
JAKARTA (JP): Rumadi, 25, had only been in Jakarta for two days when he got a job as a construction worker. He receives Rp 7,000 (US$3.04) per day, excluding food and transportation allowances, which is not bad for someone with no more than an elementary school education.
Sutriyono, also 25, arrived a week before he started earning Rp 60,000 a month for helping his relative, Sutini, at her food stall in the Pondok Indah area. Sutriyono is an elementary school dropout.
Both Rumadi and Sutriyono are lucky. They found it easy to get work in the capital although they were newcomers without the proper documents.
"No, I don't have any of the documents required by the administration, not even a paper on changing residence from my village head. Nobody could guarantee me a job here," Rumadi said.
"I got this job through my friend because he is also working on this project," Rumadi said.
There are many other newcomers who have no sponsors. The unskilled women who are passed on to people wanting housemaids by supplier agencies are examples.
Mustapha of the Karya Setiawan agency on Jl. Jend. Suprapto, East Jakarta, said that most of the newcomers seeking work don't have the necessary documents other than identification cards.
"It is the brokers who arranged their trips from their hometowns to Jakarta. I have nothing to do with that," he said.
He has placed at least 30 newcomers as housemaids all over the city since Idul Fitri holidays last month.
There are 110 agencies in the city, if each agency has placed 30 new servants since the Idul Fitri holidays that means at least 3,300 unsponsored newcomers have found work in the capital.
This reality undermines the administration's efforts to curb the influx of newcomers.
The administration has been working hard to discourage unskilled people from moving to Jakarta to seek work by enforcing a decree stipulating that newcomers must have certain documents in order to stay in the capital with its population of 19 million people.
It was estimated that 300,000 newcomers would enter Jakarta after the Idul Fitri holidays.
Recently the authorities have netted a large number of newcomers lacking Jakarta IDs and the necessary documents from their places of origin. They have been sent back to their hometowns.
The authorities will continue such operations until April.
Outrageous
In 1994, the administration predicted that about 314,900 newcomers would arrive in the city after the Idul Fitri holidays. Last year it listed 330,000 possible new people and 300,000 possible new job seekers this year.
An official at the city population agency said the predictions were made based on the expected difference between the number of people who left the city seven days before Idul Fitri holidays and the number of people who come into the city within a week after the holidays.
"Such figures are outrageous because the real growth of the city's population growth from 1980 to 1990 was only 200,000 people per year," the official, who refused to be named, told The Jakarta Post.
The City Statistics Office lists the number of newcomers in Jakarta from 1990 to 1994 as under 100,000 people. In 1990 the number of newcomers was 87,140 people, 81,885 in 1991, 97,439 in 1992, 70,660 in 1993 and 70,439 in 1994.
Soesila said that the figures announced every year are only predictions, and that there is no exact count on newcomers.
"It is difficult to get the exact number because there's no way we can count them unless we conduct extensive research," Soesila told.
Soesila Darmoadji, a city administration spokesman, said the governor himself had predicted that the number would be no more than 200,000 people this year.
Soesila said the municipality is not overly concerned about counting the number of newcomers. The most important thing is to return those who are lacking documents to their hometowns. (yns/03/04)