Seasonal employment of agricultural workers in West Java and the special region of Yogyakarta : a comparative study

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the problem of seasonal employment of agricultural workers in two Indonesian provinces, West Java and Yogyakarta. Seasonal employment of agricultural workers is a common problem in countries like Indonesia, which depends upon agriculture. During the slack season there are fewer jobs available in rural areas, and this situation forces many agricultural workers to look for other jobs. In the following discussion the term "seasonal workers" means those persons 10 years of age and over who were working in agriculture in the last season, but who were no longer working in agriculture or who were outside the labour force (including those whose work status was unknown) in the week preceding the enumeration. Thus the term "seasonal workers" here also includes those normally working in other occupations who work in agriculture only during the busy season. In the following discussion, however, the Census subset does not allow the separate analysis of the latter group due to the difficulty of identifying them. This thesis consists of five chapters. The organization of this thesis is as follows: Chapter 1 is concerned with the labour force concept, and with the 1971 Indonesian Census and other data sources. The chapter briefly describes the scope and objectives of the study. Chapter 2 begins by broadly describing seasonal employment in agriculture in Indonesia. The examination of seasonal employment in Java is used to provide a foundation for the further analysis of seasonal employment in both West Java and Yogyakarta. It is important to investigate the characteristics of seasonal workers to determine if similarities with the general population exist, especially concerning sex and age composition, marital status, economic activity, relationship to the head of household, and education. A discussion of this comparison is presented in Chapter 3. One purpose of this study is to investigate the movement of seasonal workers between agriculture and the non-agricultural sector. The distribution of seasonal workers by industry and by occupation in both West Java and Yogyakarta is the main emphasis of the analysis in Chapter 4. A brief discussion concerning the economic and social conditions is also provided in this chapter, because in fact these conditions have influenced the distribution of seasonal workers by industry and by occupation in these two provinces. In order to get a more concrete picture of the variation of this distribution a regency-level discussion is provided in the last section of Chapter 4. Finally, some findings and conclusions of this analysis together with recommendations for further research are presented in Chapter 5.