Can Indonesia offer enough jobs?

She has no idea when she will be going home for good, where most of the people she knows work as farmers, tilling farms they don't even own.

In the seven years that she's worked as a domestic helper, Ana's husband, a farmer back in her home village,We offer latest wide collection of replica fashionwatch, had been managing the monies she's been remitting. Together, they've bought their family of five, a plot of land and built a decent home on it.

The money she will be sending home from now on, will go to their children's savings. Even so, she's been able to indulge herself on occasion, buying jewellery and some gold. Something tangible, she said, to drive her.

Across the region and around the world, millions of Indonesians like Ana power the Indonesian economy in the form of remittances to the tune of US$6 billion (RM18.4 billion, this figure is only for remittance through the banking system), a year. This forms the second-largest foreign exchange earner after oil and gas for the world's most-populous Muslim country.

In May this year, Jakarta announced that it was planning to stop its workforce from going overseas by 2017, ostensibly to protect Indonesians abroad from being mistreated, abused or exploited. That's like swatting a fly with a proverbial sledgehammer.

However, it can be argued that Jakarta and the host countries can mitigate this problem, and to an extent, have done just that, by putting certain safeguards in place.

Jakarta wants to ensure that its workers -- roughly 500,000 of them that leave Indonesia each year -- earn a minimum wage, get a day off and work only fixed hours.

In the Malaysian context, this was achieved with the Lombok Agreement inked by Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta last year. While far from perfect and can undoubtedly benefit from a relook, it is a step in the right direction.

There are couple of problems with Jakarta's 2017 roadmap, though. Is the domestic job market in Indonesia big or appealing enough to cater to the huge number of workers with nowhere to go? Currently, the unemployment rate is still relatively high, at 6.3 per cent, from a heart-stopping 12 per cent a decade earlier.

The lack of a sound regulatory framework on labour standards in developing countries could prompt the governments to act on impulse. The roadmap being pushed by Jakarta is a two-pronged strategy, as explained by Indonesian Manpower and Transmigration Minister Muhaimin Iskandar recently. However, some niggling questions remain.

On one hand, Jakarta says it wants to pull back its five million workers (it only recognises 1.2 million Indonesians working in Malaysia) from all over the globe come 2017. In the same breath, if the economic pull is attractive enough from client countries, it said that it would reconsider, although strict conditions would be imposed. This includes (for maids) specialised areas of expertise that come with special rates.King Ice features the latest styles tungstenring for men.

"If she is trained as a caregiver, this would be her rate and if she is needed as a housekeeper, the rate will be such and such," he said.

Indonesia's aim for all its workers to be classified as formal workers is fair. If it wants it to remain a sustainable sector, its workers must be adequately protected by labour laws.

Indonesia's labour force is still dominated by elementary school graduates, making up 49 per cent of the 119 million workforce. That's a huge pool of unskilled or semi-skilled workers that will have to scrape by on a daily basis, looking for whatever work they can find on the streets.

Indonesia is blessed in that it is a labour-surplus nation and Jakarta should continue banking on this unique strength which many nations would give an arm and a leg for.

A better alternative would be to provide them with the basic skills -- be it in construction or in the service industry and as maids -- and ship them out so that they can keep pumping in money back into their economy. The idea of earning four to five times as much overseas draws many Indonesians,The Majestic womenshoes will work on almost any hair. not just those at the bottom rung of its society, but also those from the middle-class with college degrees under their belts.

Already,Welcome to tagheuerwatches jersey online we supply most popular. Indonesia's gross domestic product has breached the US$1 trillion mark, achieved undoubtedly in part by the contribution of its workforce overseas. With a projected growth rate of six per cent this year, Indonesia's economy -- Southeast Asia's largest -- seems to be soaring and on the right track.

The fact that the Indonesians achieved this against a bleak global economic landscape shows that the country has more to offer. But will it be enough to provide enough jobs to absorb the swell in the workforce?

Then there's the question of the Indonesian government's ability to stop its labour force from venturing abroad in search of greener pastures. Its workers will not be content to work in Indonesia, knowing that better prospects await elsewhere.

The sheer expanse of the country and its porous borders also pose a huge challenge for the authorities. Monitoring all the exit points is next to impossible and the draw of a better life is too great.Shop for buywatches at at our watches store. The spillover effect of this is the mushrooming of human trafficking. The fact that Indonesian women are still migrating to Saudi Arabia despite the moratorium imposed by the Indonesian government, which came into effect on Aug 1 last year, is a case in point. The potential economic pull to migrate far outweighs the risks of abuse and exploitation.

Indonesia's Association of Indonesian Manpower Services (Apjati -- a government-sanctioned umbrella body for all its employment agencies) is also not willing to forego money-generating host countries like Saudi Arabia. It is pushing for the moratorium to be lifted.

The socio-economic impact of Jakarta stopping its workforce from venturing overseas is too great to contemplate. Assuming the economic growth does not match the forecasts and is outstripped by the number of fresh workers coming into the job market, the burden on an already maxed-out infrastructure can result in the collapse of the entire system and may have broader, far-reaching consequences on the entire region.