West to press for trade rights link, Latief says
West to press for trade rights link, Latief says
JAKARTA (JP): Minister of Manpower Abdul Latief yesterday warned that industrialized countries will continue to try to link human rights issues with trade through their bilateral relations with developing countries.
Having failed to link the two multilaterally through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, Latief said industrialized countries, feeling the brunt of stiffer trade competition, will try to impose those conditions bilaterally.
Besides human rights, they will try to link trade with labor situation in the developing countries, he said after briefing President Soeharto about manpower conditions in the country.
Latief said Indonesia, as a member of the governing body of the International Labor Organization, along with other developing countries, succeeded in foiling the West's plan to link trade with human rights at the ILO meeting in November.
"The issue is no longer discussed (in ILO)," he said.
Based on Indonesia's monitoring of the situation, the industrialized countries appear unwilling to sit still on the matter. They are expected to try to insert the conditions in the bilateral trade agreements that they have with developing countries.
He cited the generalized system of preferences as an example of a trade instrument likely to be used in pressuring the developing countries. The facility grants duty free treatment to certain exports from developing countries.
Latief said he would have to rush back to Geneva soon to attend another meeting of the ILO governing body because some" old labor issues" in Indonesia have been raised again.
He did not specify the issues or the countries that are raising the matters, but stressed he did not expect any trouble because they had already been dealt with before with great success.
Indonesia's labor policies have been scrutinized by other ILO members in the past, especially those regarding the workers' freedom of association and welfare.
Latief pointed out yesterday that in the last one-and-a-half years Indonesia has raised the minimum wage levels of its workers by 40 percent. The government has also issued regulations to improve the welfare of workers.
The minister also reported to the President about the results of a recent national conference of his ministry, which identified unemployment as the biggest problem in the manpower sector.
As part of the efforts to resolve this problem, the government will launch the National Manpower Planning program this September. It is expected to help pinpoint and illustrate the gravity of the unemployment problems in each province.
One of the provinces with the biggest unemployment problem is East Timor, where there are currently around 18,000 youths with no work, some 11,000 of them in Dili, Latief said.
Latief, who recently visited the region, said the East Timor problem is one of coordination more than anything else.
The minister also reported to Soeharto about his visit to Malaysia early this week to observe the problems related to the presence of hundreds of thousands of Indonesian workers, mostly illegally employed, there. (emb)