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Minister sees off workers departing for Japan
Manpower Minister Hanif Dakhiri bid farewell on Friday to 111 Indonesian workers who will undertake apprenticeships at 45 manufacturing and construction companies in Japan
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anpower Minister Hanif Dakhiri bid farewell on Friday to 111 Indonesian workers who will undertake apprenticeships at 45 manufacturing and construction companies in Japan.
'The three-year apprenticeship is a program designed to improve Indonesian workers' competence,' he said when seeing off the workers at the Cevest Labor Training Center in Bekasi, West Java, on Friday.
Program participants underwent job training and Japanese language lessons for several months at the training center before their departure.
The minister said that with the program, workers would have the chance to improve their skills and would be able to secure better jobs and develop their careers in the country after the program ended.
The apprenticeship program, which was organized by the Manpower Ministry in cooperation with the International Manpower Development Organization Japan (IM Japan), is viewed more as a labor recruitment mechanism that benefits both Indonesia and Japan because participants are treated not as interns but as workers on low salaries.
Due to the banning of employing expatriates, many small- and middle-scale Japanese firms use the apprenticeship program to recruit Asian workers to do low-paid jobs that Japanese workers will not do.
In the meantime, the Indonesian government uses the program to generate new job opportunities to help cope with unemployment at home.
Since 1993, the government has supplied 35,426 workers to Japan through the program.
In the past few years, the government has also supplied nurses to work for relatively low pay in hospitals and nursing homes as many Japanese people are not interested in such work. (rms)
