RI professionals `not ready for competition'

Rendi A. Witular, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The government should not open the country's labor market to foreign professionals and managers because locals are not ready to compete with foreigners, analysts have said.

"We're a hundred years behind the developed nations," Didiek J. Rachbini, the rector of Mercu Buana University, told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.

He said that opening the doors to foreign professionals would put many of the country's managers, doctors and lawyers out of work, causing even greater unemployment here.

He was commenting on an earlier report in this paper that the government was facing strong pressure from some 16 nations to liberalize the domestic labor market as required under the World Trade Organization (WTO) scheme, agreed in Doha, Qatar, in 2001.

Developed countries, such as the U.S., Japan, Australia, Singapore and even developing ones, such as China and India, were demanding the government to revoke existing rulings that limit the entry of foreign managers and professional workers to work here. This would also mean that Indonesian professionals and managers would also be allowed to seek jobs in those countries.

The government is negotiating for a delay in the liberalization drive until 2005.

But Didiek said that it would be impossible to boost the quality and skills of local managers and professionals in such a short period.

He said that if the government had to allow foreign workers to work here, Indonesia had to also be allowed to export laborers, such as truck drivers, construction workers and others, to work in the U.S. and other developed nations.

This group of workers is seen to have a greater chance in beating out competition in overseas labor markets.

"We should not be dictated to by foreign governments," he said, adding that the current WTO arrangement was unfair.

During the late 1990s, many university graduates in Indonesia went on to business schools to earn a master of business administration, but it turned out that their qualifications could not match their foreign peers, experts said. Many local professionals also lack in quality and skills, they said.

The head of the research center at the Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration, Dyah Paramawartiningsih, said that it could take half a century before high-level workers were able to compete with their counterparts from developed nations.

"The capabilities of our professional workers and managers are very low. There must be something wrong with our education system, which surely needs to be reformed," said Dyah.

She said that as an example, many university graduates here, and even those holding PhDs, could not speak English properly and were not computer literate.

Keeping this in mind, the coordinator of the Indonesian lobby team for labor liberalization at the WTO forum, Adolf Warrouw, told the Post that his team had also decided to lobby several countries to open their doors to laborers from Indonesia.

But Warrouw was quick to add that it would be difficult to obtain these concessions from developed nations.

"The 16 countries are only interested in professionals, but nevertheless, we will try our best," he said.