Unemployment splits top officials
Ridwan Max Sijabat, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The government has dismissed unemployment data and projections from the National Development Planning Board (Bappenas) as inaccurate and misleading, saying it had launched various programs to cope with the unemployment time bomb.
Minister of Manpower and Transmigration Jacob Nuwa Wea insisted that the government could not accept the data on unemployment released recently by the BPS and predictions made by Bappenas, which he said had discredited the government and could heighten public unrest.
"President Megawati never listens to the BPS's data on unemployment or Bappenas forecasts on the labor market in the coming years as they are out of touch with reality. It's as if the government has done nothing to cope with the unemployment problem," he told The Jakarta Post.
The BPS data was inaccurate and misleading as the surveys were conducted randomly and using the wrong methodology," he added without elaborating.
The two agencies are not directly accountable to the government.
Bappenas recently published its 2005 government work plan (RKP) with a prediction that the number of fully unemployed would increase to 11.2 million in 2005 from 10.8 million in 2004 and 9.1 million in 2003, while the number of disguised unemployed, that is, people who worked less than 35 hours per week, would rise to almost 49 million in 2005 from 42 million in 2004 and 38.5 million in 2003.
The unemployment rate has been growing by two percent, or between two million and three million annually, with many of them being high school and university graduates.
The BPS also predicted that the work force would increase to 95.5 million in 2005 from the current 91 million. Forty-four percent, or 42 million, of the work force was employed by the agricultural sector, 13 percent by manufacturing with the remaining 42 percent being accounted for by other sectors and the unemployed.
Minister Nuwa Wea said the government had instead asked regental and municipal administrations to collect their own data on unemployment, and to design strategies to help create jobs.
The minister, accompanied by two directors general from his ministry, said that according to data collected by the Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration, the number of the jobless this year was only 9.6 million, with the figure up to January 2003 being 9.1 million, and the remaining 500,000 being those of the 2.5 million new job seekers in 2003 who could not find work.
"Last year, the government successfully ensured a livelihood for almost 2 million job seekers. Of this two million, more than 400,000 were enrolled in the resettlement program at home, more than one million were sent overseas or found employment in manufacturing, and the remaining 600,000 found employment in the informal sector," he said, adding that the government had intensified its resettlement and entrepreneurship programs, as well as its lobbying of developed countries to attract foreign investors to Indonesia.
Foreign investment rose by 212 percent in January this year while domestic investment was up by 108 percent. "These new investments are expected to give jobs to around 10,000 workers," he added.
Nuwa Wea conceded that the government had failed to attract many foreign investors to Indonesia, saying this was due to security disturbances, the absence of legal certainty and rampant illegal fees in the regions.
"But, the situation in Indonesia has improved since the first semester of 2003, and the government is reviewing the regional autonomy law. More investors are expected to come to Indonesia in the coming months," he said.