Tens of thousands of Indonesians are now working on various international cruise ships as crew members, cooks, restaurant waiters and even captains, Jumhur Hidayat said here on Tuesday."They receive thousands of dollars a month," the head of the Indonesian Manpower Protection and Placement Agency (BNP2TKI) said when dedicating a BNP2TKI office building in Yogyakarta.
Jumhur said the government had been encouraging Indonesian migrant workers (TKI) to seek employment in the formal sectors such as cruise ships as nurses or technicians or in the hotel industry.
He said of six million TKIs abroad only around 38 percent worked in the formal sectors with the rest working working in the informal sectors such as as housemaids. According to him, the TKIs that worked in the cruise ships possessed adequate skills so that they had positions."They have also worked for years," he said. In general, he stated that they initially departed by their own initiative and they later grouped especially after they already worked in the ships.
The TKIs in the ships are mostly from Bali, Makassar, Sumatra and Java. Jumhur said international cruise ships liked TKIs because they were considered good at cooking, polite, not drinking and easy to cooperate with. Indonesia meanwhile would send 450 workers to work as nurses or caregivers in Japan this year, under the cooperation program between the two countries’ governments.
The number is part of the 1000 workers the two countries had agreed to be sent to Japan within two years to work in the sector. Last year the country had already sent 106 workers to that country.
Sumber : Antara
