Street vendors boxed in on all sides

They are the bane of city authorities and thugs attack and exploit them despite our dependency on them.

These are none other than the capital’s myriad, ubiquitous street vendors.

Vendors have long been seen as second-class citizens, facing pressure from all sides despite their massively important contribution to the city’s economy.

A report by the Central Statistic Agency released in February this year said 35 percent of Jakarta’s 4.21 million workers were employed in the informal sector in casual jobs such as selling on sidewalks.

The informal sector is also credited with helping the city emerge relatively unscathed through the global financial downturn, as most workers who were unemployed simply started up small businesses.

But because of the city administration’s blatant pandering to big business, there is no clear policy to develop the sector, leaving small businesses unrecognized and making the life of people like Burhanuddin miserable.

Burhanuddin has worked as a street vendor selling children’s clothes for almost 17 years at the Cipulir wholesale market in South Jakarta, but ever since he started, every single day has been a challenge as he is forced to pay protection money to local thugs.

“I tried to report them to the market operators but they didn’t respond at all,” he said, adding that he believed the authorities were also in on the racket and received a cut from the thugs.

Sadly, Burhanuddin is not the only victim of oppression from these thugs.

Some of the gangs of thugs are even organized, with members rallying around motives of security concerns.

“I don’t mind being forced to give them money as long as they can assure me that my business is free from disruption,” said Anggun, who runs a store selling infant products at the same market, where forced evictions of the vendors are a frequent sight.

The city administration’s negligence toward the informal sector has been blamed for allowing criminal extortion rackets and thugs to mushroom in the city, urban analysts believe.

“It is the task of the city administration to protect small businesses, including from extortion by other parties,” said University of Indonesia economist Sonny Harry Harmadi (not Sonny Harry Harmanto as previously written).

But the reality is a lot bleaker for small business owners, as in a perverse twist, it is actually city administration officials who frequently oppress them.

Instead of allocating vendors enough space to run their businesses, the administration frequently sends public order officers to threaten street vendors, repossess their carts and demand money to release the goods or allow vendors to escape the raids.

When questioned on this, the head of the Jakarta Cooperatives and Small and Medium Enterprises Agency, Reynalda Madjid, blamed the insufficient budget the city allocated to his office.

“The money we receive is not enough to cater for the amount of people who come to the city to start up [small] businesses,” he said.

The city administration allocated only Rp 64 billion (US$7.1 million) to the agency this year, an amount critics say was nowhere near enough to help develop the 1.12 million small businesses the agency tracked.

However, urban economist Nining Indroyono Susilo claims that more money was not a blanket solution.

What the informal sector needs is permits and space. Given this, the businesses will run themselves, she said.