Daily News

View All News

Indonesia – Ministry for Manpower proposes collaboration with Singapore on training workers

28 November 2014

Indonesia’s Minister for Manpower, Hanif Dhakiri, has announced that the country hopes to work more closely with Singapore to improve the skills set of Indonesians working abroad, reports asianewsnet.net

After meeting his visiting counterpart from Singapore, Tan Chuan-Jin, Mr Dhakiri told reporters: "The protection of foreign workers in Singapore has been good, and we are thankful to Singapore for that.
Going forward, we hope to expand cooperation to improve the competencies of our workers, and on issues like certification." 

He explained: "We have had cases where workers were considered trained but had to go back home because they could not perform the work abroad. This is why we want to beef up our certification process."

According to Indonesia's manpower ministry, there are 23,437 Indonesians working in Singapore, the majority (83%) in the informal sector.

Mr Tan commented: "We do share a lot of common perspectives about how to develop our workforce, how to look after our people better, both within our countries and those of our workers who work abroad... There are different areas of cooperation and collaboration that we look forward to exploring."

Mr Dhakiri’s comments come as Indonesia aims to reduce the number of unskilled workers going abroad as maids, and clamp down on illegal practices and rogue recruitment agencies. He added that, at present, Indonesia has only seven skill certification agencies, which process the 300,000 workers heading overseas for informal jobs a year.