The agricultural sector in Indonesia plays a strategic role in both economic development and employment. However, this sector has problems, especially concerning its declining workforce and aging workers. This is largely associated with the low attractiveness of the agricultural sector in absorbing labor. The younger age group prefers to seek non-agricultural employment by migrating to urban areas. This paper aims to analyze the youth mobility, job choice and the implications for agricultural workers. The data for analysis are data from the Indonesian National Labor Force Survey, 2019, by the Central Bureau of Statistics. The result of the descriptive and inferential analysis shows that the probability of youth migrating is higher than for older age groups. On the other hand, the probability of youth finding work in manufacturing and services is greater than in the agriculture sector. This carries implications for an increase in the workforce aged 60 and over, which has escalated from 7.6% in 1971 to 21.2% in 2020. Therefore, it is necessary to develop the agricultural sector so that it is attractive to the younger generation in Indonesia, especially to increase productivity and the use of digital technology for agriculture.
The pandemic of COVID-19 destabilizes contemporary social relations. It has many impacts and one of them is a stigma against the infected persons. Stigma usually pictures discriminate behavior toward victims of some diseases such as leprosy or HIV-AIDS and also marginalized groups such as class, age, gender. Most victims of stigma are individuals and communities or nations perceived as lower class than the rest of the population. On the contrary, the pandemic of COVID-19 shows different discrimination as it stigmatizes behavior toward most of the infected people including the well-off people, who struggle toward the virus, more especially doctors, nurses, and other medical assistants. By using personal experiences as a family with COVID-19 and the existing publications including media that cover the issue of the stigma, this article discusses the disrupted social relationships. Stigma emerged particularly in the process of burying the corpse of COVID-19 infected persons where some people of the local communities refuse the corpse to be buried in their area. In an extreme case, some people even dig out the dead bodies. These facts blow social relationships that doctors and other health assistants who are usually categorized as honored persons and in which our culture gives them homage to corpses as something should be treated respectfully. Individuals and communities' members fight to erase the stigmas at the national, and local levels. Governments at the national and local levels have to renovate hotels and other facilitates to give save houses for the infected COVID-19 as quarantine places.
The studies of environmental migration are still limited in Indonesia. Within the limited literature in the Indonesian context, Research Center for Population LIPI has conducted studies on environmental migration in 2015-2016 and the abandonment of shrimp pond due to migration in 2013 in Delta Mahakam, East Kalimantan. Using Livelihood Trajectories (LT) approach, this paper aims to examine the people’s adaptation in Delta Mahakam related to environmental migration. The LT approach gives more understanding of the adaptation process that leads to migration decision-making. By applying a qualitative approach using interviews and focus group discussion (FGD), data are collected related to the changes of landscape livelihood and the adaptation to respond to it. The interviews and FGD conducted with farmers, fishers, aquaculture farmers who move or stay and with formal/informal leaders and patron. In the case of Delta Mahakam, migration becomes a strategy for adaptation. The decision to migrate is not an instant decision-making process but as a part of trajectories to sustain their livelihood.
Around 60,5% of workers in Indonesia rely on the informal sector, and in mid of 2020 almost half of them were in urban areas. The urban informal sector workers commonly are in small enterprises with low productivity, low liquidity, and negligible capital accumulation. They engage in street vending, home-based work, waste picking, domestic jobs, and other short-term contracts, and they do not enjoy workers’ benefis and social protection programs, thus they are vulnerable to shock, including Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic does not only bring negative impact on the health sector, but it has also triggered an economic downturn. In terms of urban informal sector activities, various social policies (PSBB, Java-Bali PPKM, Emergency PPKM and Micro PPKM) sharply reduce the economic opportunities for informal economy workers who rely to a large extent on the personal contact with customers. Job losses and decreased income have been experienced by the majority of informal sector workers. This condition has to be overcome with various strategies to be able to maintain the continuity of their economic activities. This article discusses the strategies of urban informal sector workers to maintain sustainable livelihoods during the COVID-19 pandemic. The strategy carried out is focused on the use of social networks. The data used for writing this article is sourced from primary data. Data was collected using a qualitative approach in Bekasi Timur sub-district, Bekasi City, West Java Province. In addition, the article also uses the existing data related to the issued being studied.
Highly educated people are mainly concentrated in big cities or metropolitan areas. However, some of them choose to move to less developed regions. Using information from in-depth interviews of 15 highly educated migrants that recently moved to Sorong City, a small city in easternmost Indonesia, this study examines the narratives behind their spatial movements. The findings show that promising career development is a critical factor in their migration decision-making process. Although most of them faced difficulties with the limited living amenities in Sorong city, the migrants managed to improve their employability and accelerate their social mobility. However, some migrants expressed their intentions to remigrate from the city in the future. This situation indicates the lack of migrants’ social integration and the challenges in the human capital accumulation in the region.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.