Inappropriate Pre-Employment Cards For Hotel And Restaurant Employees

JAKARTA - The Indonesian Hotel and Restaurant Association (PHRI) stated that the Pre-Employment Card program was not well targeted for employees of the hotel sector who were affected by the corona virus or COVID-19. This is because one of the things that participants in the pre-employment card program will get is training, while hotel employees have received it from the company.

PHRI Chairman Hariyadi Sukamdani said, rather than training with a budget of IDR 1 million per participant, hotel and restaurant employees need more social security networks.

"We are also the sector with the most number of certified employees. So we don't want to deny training," he said in a video conference with journalists, in Jakarta, Thursday, April 16.

Hariyadi said, PHRI did not reject the Pre-employment Card program, it was just that the program was deemed not necessarily in accordance with the conditions of employees in every economic sector.

PHRI also hopes that the incentives provided by the Pre-employment Card program can be entirely in cash. The reason is that the provision of cash can reduce the burden on employees who are being laid off or are affected by layoffs.

"I think this is very important in the current conditions, the existence of a social safety net," he said.

According to Hariyadi, the Pre-Work Card program is intended for new workers and not for workers who have been transferred or for layoff workers who will be retrained. In fact, what should be a concern is the old workers because they already have support costs for their families.

PHRI, said Hariyadi, hopes that in principle this Pre-Work Card can be transformed from competency into a social safety net.

"We deliberately asked for data from hotels and restaurants to make it clean. Two days ago, the Coordinating Minister (Airlangga) had a chance to Whatsapp with me and gave me the latest data that 4.8 million people had entered. I'm not sure the 4.8 million people who entered the data had already entered. clean, "he said.

Even so, there were 69,978 employees in the hotel and restaurant sector who applied for a Pre-Employment Card. Whereas based on data, there are at least 138 thousand employees.

As is known, pre-employment card participants will get an incentive of IDR 600,000 per month for four months. The use of these incentives was also exempted, not only for job training needs.

Community enthusiasm is very high for the Pre-employment Card program. The reason is, since its release on March 20, 2020, the official website www.prakerja.go.id has been visited by 2.4 million unique visitors to this day. The high enthusiasm of the community has also caused the official website server to crash frequently.

Based on data from the Coordinating Ministry for the Economy, especially yesterday, at the opening of the first stage of registration, there were more than 1.1 million new visitors. Meanwhile, registration will close on the fourth week of November. For the first batch, registration is open until Thursday 16 April 2020, at 16.00 WIB.