The Presidential and Vice Presidential campaigns are ongoing, leading up to the elections scheduled on 14th February 2024. In this light, several topics have been voiced out, one of them being the effort to tighten foreign workers’ access in Indonesia.
The presidential and vice-presidential candidate pair Anies Baswedan-Muhaimin Iskandar has prepared a series of programs if elected in the 2024 presidential election. One of the promised agendas is related to employment.
They aim to limit and reduce the excessive use of foreign workers, alongside ensuring every government project involves the local workforce with a labour-intensive approach to programming.
In their vision and mission document, presidential candidate number one wrote: “Creating a minimum of 15 million new jobs in 2025-2029.” Furthermore, they aim to reduce the proportion of informal sector workers from 60.12 percent in February 2023 to 50 percent in 2029 and encourage the business sector to recruit and stimulate more local workforce.
Presidential candidate number two, Prabowo Subianto-Gibran Rakabuming, are also aiming to tighten the supervision of foreign workers targeting those already in Indonesia and those who will enter.
The Head of the Prabowo-Gibran National Campaign Team for the Advanced Indonesia Coalition, Rosan Perkasa Roeslani, stated that labour issues would be the main focus of the Prabowo-Gibran government if they received the mandate of the people to become President and Vice President for the 2024-2029 period.
“Subianto will tighten the entry of foreign workers through the formation of a Foreign Worker Supervision Task Force to protect domestic workers,” he explained.
Indonesia is predicted to only have 13 years to get out of the middle-income trap. For work that can be done by Indonesian workers, it is hoped that there will be no need to recruit foreign workers to ensure no more Indonesian children will have difficulty finding work.
“Job opportunities will be created as widely as possible by prioritising local workers to reduce the unemployment rate,” said Roeslani. “Continuous infrastructure development, increased quality employment opportunities, encouragement of entrepreneurship, development of creative industries, and development of agro-maritime industry in production centres through the active role of cooperatives are part of the agenda.”