Don't Give Up

https://blog.ihg.com/traveling-to-jakarta

” Don’t ever give up. There’s so many thing that you can do to make you survive. This is thing that i learn from Pak Dasuki’ life. Pak Dasuki used to be a factory worker in the past, but he lost his job suddenly and then try to help his wife to sell Gado-gado & Nasi Uduk. These food was really popular in Indonesia for middle to below community level. Although it still not much for his family, but he and his wife together sell the food for their life. And it explaine clearly for me that we must not giv up with our circumstances and always keep forward to survive in this life.”

At first glance, in the unclear transitional zone where Jakarta merges into the industrial satellite city of Tangerang, the contrast between formal sector and informal sector businesses seems striking. On one hand there are industrial estates: huge manufacturing facilities enclosed by high, barbed wire fences that produce branded goods for international markets. Nike and Adidas sports shoes, Coca-Cola and Nestle all have facilities here. Blue uniform workers, hard hats in hand, stream in and out on precise round-the-clock shifts. For city planners and developers, these facilities represent an ideal model for integrating Indonesia into the global economy: straight lines, planned development, and standard procedures.

The informal sector, comprised of a mess of ojeg (rental motorcycle) drivers, small food stalls, cigarette and newspaper sellers, and push-cart vendors, represents the other hand. Those who work in this sector do so in a highly unregulated environment, usually without license and within the marginal spaces of the city in order to take opportunistic advantage of local markets. For most development planners, this is the Indonesia that the formal sector should replace or eliminate.

https://ru.pinterest.com/pin/660199626597601926/

Pak Dasuki’s story demonstrates that the two sectors are strongly interrelated. While jobs in the formal sector can offer minimum wages and certain defined benefits such as health insurance and pension schemes, they are in limited supply. Thus, with greater Jakarta’s, high unemployment rate and absence of government sponsored unemployment benefits, running an informal sector small business is a natural fall back position for the formally unemployed. For many workers, the informal sector is Indonesia’s social safety net.

Pak Dasuki and his wife, Della, are part of that informal sector. He describes his trajectory from the formal to the informal sector, first as a computer teacher, then as a machinist who lost his job with United Can Company (which produces packaging for multi-national brands as Coca-Cola) and then selling gado-gado (steamed vegetable, tofu and tempe dish with peanut sauce) and nasi uduk (coconut rice dish) from an improvised stall at the front of his house.

“When I came to Jakarta, I didn’t have any connections to get an office job. For a while, I taught computers at junior high school as an honorary teacher. Back then, computers were still using DOS, Windows 3.1. It’s all changed since then. I haven’t kept up with it. I was never officially appointed to a position by the government, so I only got paid an hourly rate. Often, I only made about Rp 40,000 (US$ 4,4) a month. When I did get a job as a machine operator, it had nothing to do with computers. It’s not a skilled job – I only got on-the-job training for three months.

“When I came to Jakarta in 1992, I had my high school certificate and a diploma in computer science. Back then, it was much easier to get a job. Even with only primary education, you could get a job in a factory. Now, there are far more people with high school certificates and far fewer jobs available. Even for unskilled jobs, factories demand a high school certificate. There are so many people looking for jobs that the factories can pick and choose. Also, I’m 33 years old now: for Indonesian factories, that’s too old, unless you have some special skill that they need. For unskilled factory jobs, they don’t usually want to employ people over the age of 22, or 25 at the most. If you lose your job, it’s very hard to get another one. And it’s even harder if you are known to be a trouble maker, like me.

“[Currently, at our stall], I cook up about six liters of rice a day. I’m open from morning until night. Sometimes, on Saturday night, if it’s busy, we stay open all night. We get a lot of trade in the morning, when people have a plate of nasi uduk for breakfast. Gado-gado is popular later in the day. We usually take in about Rp 100,000 (US$ 11) per day, of which about Rp 15,000 to Rp 20,000 (US$ 1,65 – 2,2) per day is profit. In a good month, we might make Rp 600,000 (US$ 66). I’m lucky: we don’t have to pay any rent. My wife’s parents own a house on the main road. It’s a good location, with a lot of people going past. That’s one of our biggest assets. If we had a house down a back lane, we wouldn’t get half the number of customers we do now. The warung you are sitting in used to be the front room of our house. We knocked down the front wall, and turned the sitting room into a food stall.”

http://scribol.com/anthropology-and-history/people/jakartas-extraordinary-railway-track-slum/

Dasuki says that he and his wife earn enough from their warung to cover their basic needs, but highlights their inefficient use of labor.

“Well, for a start, the salary of a worker doing my old job is about Rp 1 million (US$ 110) a month, now. That’s a lot more than both of us earn together from the warung. But if I could get a job, my wife could easily run the warung by herself. That way, we’d have a double income, from the warung as well as my wages!”

He stresses that this situation is an unfortunate second-best alternative. He constantly describes himself as ‘unemployed’, ‘without work’ or ‘looking for a job’. He does not consider his business a ‘real’ job and continued to seek formal employment—but is not hopeful of his chances. He expands on his earlier reference to himself as a ‘trouble maker’, explaining that while many workers in his industry are retrenched due to downsizing, he was specifically singled out for sanctions due to his legal activities as a union organizer. Thirteen other labor activists from the same union were also fired at the same time for similar activities, despite legislation guaranteeing workers the right to conduct and organize union activities in the workplace.

“I was handing out the GSBI (Federation of Independent Trade Union) bulletin at work. It’s an information sheet to explain workers’ rights. It was compulsory for factories to enroll their workers in the national social insurance scheme, to provide pensions, health and other benefits for the workers and their families, but the employer wasn’t providing it. It works on a subscription basis, with contributions from both the employee and the employer. The bulletin explained that. Even though we handed it out outside working hours, the employers’ said we were stirring up trouble. I was suspended for six months, and then sacked.

“On paper, the situation for workers in the formal sector has improved a lot since the New Order period. Workers have a number of rights: rights to a minimum wage, maternity leave, pensions, health benefits and so on. In theory, workers are allowed to register trade unions and organize in the workplace. But the factories often don’t comply with the regulations. They usually comply with minimum wage regulations, because workers know about that, but they don’t comply with many of the other stipulations of the labor laws. Of course, they aren’t going to regulate themselves. They will only comply if there is pressure to make them comply. And that pressure will only come from unionized labor. That’s why the factories are so scared of the unions, particularly the smaller, more radical ones. But with the high rate of unemployment, the bargaining power of workers has declined. They may well now be worse off than they were during Soeharto’s time.”

http://www.poorworld.net/Bilder_Indonesien/Bilder_Jakarta_3.htm

Dasuki highlights that not only have contractions in the formal sector weakened the bargaining power of organized labor, it has also had a direct negative impact on the business prospects of small traders in the informal sector. He knows four close associates, all labor activists, who were fired for their union activities and who have since become small time traders and food vendors. Hence, as formal wage earning opportunities decrease, overall consumer spending declines and more and more former wage earners enter street vending.

“If I look at the street I live in, there are more people trying to sell food than there are to eat it. And yeah, a lot of the vendors used to work in the factories before they got retrenched. It’s getting worse, too. [But] what else can you do? You can’t just sit around doing nothing! At least if you sell food, you can earn enough to eat.”

When Dasuki is asked if he now regrets his involvement in the labor movement and its resulting job loss, he is silent for a split second and then responds forcefully:

“No, I don’t regret it! I was sacked, but in the end, we won. The factory I used to work for did end up enrolling the workers in the social insurance scheme. It was worth fighting for. Lots of other people who didn’t have anything to do with the union have been sacked, too, so there’s no guarantee that I’d still have my job anyway. It was worth fighting for our rights.”