[Kabar-indonesia] JP: Youth unemployment to get worse over next decade

[Joyo at aol.com]

also: Bandung to clamp down on migrants

The Jakarta Post
Wednesday, November 1, 2006

Youth unemployment to get worse over next decade

Ridwan Max Sijabat , The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Social scientists warned Tuesday that Indonesia's social
problems will get worse over the next 10 years because the
bulk of the 11 million unemployed will be aged between 15
and 24 years old.

They said such a situation could spur political instability
in line with widespread poverty and other social ills.

Payaman Simanjuntak, a professor of labor economics at the
Krisnadwipayana University in Jakarta, said that a recent
survey conducted by the National Labor Training Board showed
that 64 percent, or almost seven million, of the 11 million
unemployed in Indonesia were high school graduates or
dropouts aged between 15 and 24.

"These young and poor people mainly work in the informal
sector because they do not have the skills needed for the
formal sector. They will mature and get married in the next
decade. They will remain poor and be unable to afford to
send their children to school," he told the Jakarta Post .

The International Labor Organization reported Monday that
globally the number of jobless people aged between 15 and 24
has risen sharply and warned that the low rate of global
economic growth was failing the young.

Payaman predicted that Indonesia's unemployment rate could
increase to 20 percent of its roughly 150 million person
workforce by 2015, while the number of poor families,
currently estimated at 19.2 million, could double.

"There will be no significant changes in the country's human
development index and foreign professionals will grab the
domestic labor market."

Payaman, formerly the director general for industrial
relations at the Manpower and Transmigration Ministry,
criticized the government for only focusing on formal
education programs.

"Formal education will only reduce the number of elementary
school dropouts and produce incompetent, unskilled high
school graduates, and we will have no alternative but to
focus on exporting maids and semiskilled workers," he said.

Bomer Pasaribu of the Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB)
said open unemployment and underemployment accounted for 40
percent of the current 106 million working people in
Indonesia.

"Besides allocating part of the education budget to finance
training programs, the government should feed the people and
cure the sick," he said.
He said the government needed to focus on intensifying soft
loans for small- and middle-scale enterprises and
revitalizing the agricultural and forestry sectors to absorb
unskilled job seekers.

Both men were of the opinion that Indonesia's main problems
were its double-digit unemployment rate, worsening poverty,
poor human resources quality, low productivity and low-
performing government officials.

Bomer, a former manpower minister, is also executive
director of the Center for Labor Development Studies (CLDS).
He said a foreign investment program would not help solve
the unemployment problem in the short term. He cited a
recent CLDS survey that found that corruption was the
largest cause of unemployment, at 21 percent. Bad
infrastructure was to blame for 19 percent of unemployment
and a complicated bureaucracy for 15 percent, with tax
rulings (11 percent), poor human resources quality (9
percent) and labor regulations (4 percent) rounding out the
list.

Quoting the 2005 World Bank Report, he said that Indonesia
was ranked 115 out of 155 countries for foreign investment,
while neighbor Singapore was ranked second.

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The Jakarta Post
Wednesday, November 1, 2006

Bandung to clamp down on migrants

Yuli Tri Suwarni, The Jakarta Post, Bandung

Bandung Mayor Dada Rosada plans to get tough on poor people
migrating to the West Java provincial capital who do not
have local identity cards.

Dada said Tuesday he would give the newcomers two options --
pay fines from Rp 50,000 (US$5.26) to Rp 250,000 or return
to their hometowns.

"Starting tomorrow (Wednesday) we will launch a crackdown on
(migrants) in stages, in line with city regulations on
citizenship," Dada said.

Bylaws stipulate that migrants without any identity cards or
those who possess cards from other regions but cannot state
a clear purpose for visiting the city risk being fined.

The municipality will also uphold regulations on city
security, order and beautification, Dada said.

Those targeted by these bylaws will include beggars and
vagrants, who will be subject to fines of up to Rp 250,000,
while others erecting tents in city parks or under bridges
will be fined Rp 1 million, the mayor said.

City manpower office head Nana Sukmana said about 60,000
people arrived in Bandung every year to seek work.

"Most of the newcomers are senior high school graduates
without any skills. This has not helped the city's program
on job creation," Nana said. The number of jobless people in
the city last year rose to 291,000, with 60,000 vacancies
filled; around 20,000 of those fulltime jobs, he said.

Bandung citizenship office head Herry Nur Haya predicted the
number of new migrants to the city would reach 130,000 this
year, about the same as 2005.

"Urbanization is not an easy issue to deal with. But usually
the newcomers will go home by themselves if they fail to get
jobs," he said.

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Joyo Indonesia News Service
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