Faisal Basri Called Unemployment Many Join Rizieq Shihab, Why?

Rizieq Shihab. (Irfan Meidianto / VOI)

JAKARTA - Institute for Development of Economics (Indef) Senior Economist (Indef) Faisal Basri said, many unemployed young people chose to join the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) Grand Imam Rizieq Shihab.

The reason, said Faisal, was that the government was misdiagnosed in encouraging job creation. Where the government is actually building labor-intensive industries in the country. In fact, this is not true.

Furthermore, he said that the majority of the unemployed were young people with high levels of education. Most of them are high school graduates (SMA), diploma, to bachelor degree. Even the number reached 20.5 percent.

"Young people, 15-24 years of age who are unemployed are not suitable for labor-intensive activities. The period of undergraduate or graduate diploma in motorcycle taxi or in the garment industry. Finally, because it does not suit the conditions, educated young people join Rizieq Shihab," he said, in a virtual discussion , Thursday, November 26th.

Moreover, said Faisal, the government appears to be pursuing low wage politics. This is reflected in the provincial minimum wage (UMP) in 2021 which is set the same as 2020.

Faisal assessed that it is time for Indonesia to leave the politics of low wages. This is because the socio-political impact is very large. According to him, diagnosing the problem is very important.

"So we encourage labor-intensive activities through MSMEs, industrialization in rural areas and so on. If we still invite labor-intensive industries, we always lose to Bangladesh, Paskistan and our neighboring countries. That's the 80s," he said.

For information, the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) noted that the number of unemployed people in Indonesia reached 9.77 million people in August 2020. This figure is up 2.67 million people compared to the same period last year.

This caused the open unemployment rate (TPT) in August 2020 to jump to 7.07 percent. This realization increased from the position in August 2019 which was 5.23 percent. The highest TPT was recorded in DKI Jakarta, namely 10.95 percent. Meanwhile, the lowest TPT was in West Sulawesi at 3.32 percent.

Overall, the number of working age population affected by the Covid-19 pandemic in August 2020 is 29.12 million people. As for the details, the number of unemployed due to COVID-19 was 2.56 million people, not the workforce due to COVID-19 as many as 0.76 million people.

While there were 1.77 million people who did not work because of COVID-19, and 24.03 million people worked with a reduction in working hours due to COVID-19.