Researchers predict crisis of employment
JAKARTA (JP): Adequately paying jobs in Greater Jakarta will decrease due to less demand for manufacturing workers, a smaller possibility of higher wages compared to living expenses and the wrong approach to the informal sector, researchers say.
The garment industry, the target of many migrant workers, will decline, said Indrasari Tjandraningsih of the Bandung-based Akatiga social research center.
On the other hand, more sophisticated industries like the electronics sector are unlikely to pay higher wages than they are paying now, she said.
Another researcher from the Center of Policy Implementation Studies, Isono Sadoko, also said underemployment will become "more serious".
"I am referring to more people working for low earnings, rather than unemployment," said Isono, who was involved in a study on the city's informal sector from the 1980s to the early 1990s.
More people will also have to work at several jobs at once to be able to feed their families, he said.
The researchers were commenting on recent warnings of urban employment crisis from the International Labor Organization.
According to the organization's report titled "The Future of Urban Employment" the year 2000 will see larger numbers of urban poor, reaching approximately one billion worldwide.
Tjandraningsih said many business owners in the textile and garment sector are looking to other countries like China and Vietnam for more competitive production costs, such as cheaper labor.
Recent strikes by industrial workers here voiced demands that employers pay at least the minimum daily amount of Rp 5,200 (US$2.21).
"The manufacturing sector will unlikely absorb more than a third of the labor force," Tjandraningsih said.
The researchers said separately this would mean the informal sector, which may even bring higher earnings, would still draw most job-seekers in Greater Jakarta.
Figures from the city's population agency from 1990 to 1994 show an average of more than 81,000 new migrants per year.
However, Isono said employment statistics may miss the activities of many former kampong residents who have moved to the city's outskirts.
Mubyarto, second assistant to the chairman of the National Development Planning Board, said he could not say whether the on- going program for poor villages would eventually curb the flow of job-seekers to cities.
Called the Aid Program for the Least Developed Villages, including 11 subdistricts in Jakarta, the program has at least shown that loans have been used well and have created additional employment within villages, he said.
Mubyarto said the program, launched in 1993, strives to make the poor independent through loans, which averaged Rp 220,500 per family in the 1994/1995 fiscal year.
The program also aims to away with the term "informal sector", which some perceive to mean that those involved must become formal. This idea entails the largely impossible need for more resources like capital, Mubyarto said.
"The correct term is 'people's economy'," he said, which implies continuous support of earning activities to eradicate poverty.
Isono also said urban planners tend to see the informal sector as something temporary before those involved shift to formal economy.
He said this is indicated by meager sums of assistance, the provision of only temporary stalls, and difficulty in acquiring credit. This explains the constraints to improvement of the urban poor, he said.
Measures such as a city rule stating that shopping centers must provide space for small traders, "are yet to prove to be consistent", Isono said. (anr)