13 February 2015, The Jakarta Post
Manpower 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.
[….]
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.