Indonesia’s Creative Industries

Home to the art form of batik, varying musical and performance styles; Indonesia’s rich cultural diversity and heritage provide fertile ground for a thriving creative industry. Long time cottage industries of art and crafts have the scope to become internationally sought after commodities, illustrated by the sudden growth in Indonesia’s contemporary art market. Such creativity is extending into other industries such as advertising, fashion, music production and publishing contributing a total of 7.2% of GDP and 9% of export value in 2010. The potential of the creative industry is a core priority of the government through the Ministy of Trade, with the target of 8% of GDP for 2011 as well as increasing total export value to 12% by 2015.

The creative industry is highly diverse split broadly over 14 industry categories including advertising, fashion, design, music and software development. Fashion remains the dominant subsector of the creative industry in Indonesia in terms of contribution to GDP at 63.3% for 2010 followed by crafts at 33.2%. The sector is made up of thousands of SMEs at an estimated 6.74% of total companies in Indonesia and is a major source of new entrepreneurism among the country’s youth. Contribution to exports increased by over 35% from 2006 to 2010 (Ministry of Trade) which is impressive considering its relative novelty as a commercial subsector.

The government has been notably active in promoting Indonesia’s creative talents and export potential. Under the Ministry of Trade, 2009 was designated as the ‘Year of the Creative Industry’ with the organisation of exhibitions throughout the country and abroad to showcase local companies and products. Such enthusiasm was also reflected in concrete action under Presidential Instruction No. 6/2009 requiring 24 governmental bodies to formulate programs for developing the sector. For 2011, the trend continues with 50 billion RP allocated by the Ministry of Trade for promotion and overseas skills training. State owned banks are also being directed to lend more to entrepreneurs in the creative fields. The future development of ‘creative cities’ that would create clusters in specific creative subsectors is a further move by the ministry to develop Indonesia’s human resource potential. Such cities are being created alongside the British Arts Council and are expected by 2014 as part of the Creative Economy Blueprint and will be found initially in Bandung, Semarang, Yogyakarta and Bali. They will play a key role in facilitating the transition from being hubs for heavy industry to that of knowledge based economies of scale.

Indonesia’s creative industries hold great potential and government initiatives are building strong foundations for the sector. Immediate strengths lie in traditional areas of production such as batik which is reflected in the fashion industry as well as furniture such as rattan and teak. Yet, the rise of the digital age in areas such as advertising, music and software is seeing a gradual shift in the dominance of subsectors within the industry. The coming years will see greater personalisation in the digital market to meet consumer as well as business needs as internet penetration increases rapidly. The next steps will be to make the creative industry sustainable and will require a substantial shift on the part of the government in intellectual property rights to protect its entrepreneurs.

Industrialization

Industrialization is central to economic development and improved prospects for human well-being. The benefits of industrial production can be seen in all aspects of life from the range of consumer goods available, to the efficiency of transportation systems, to the astounding advances made in computers and communications technology.

The positive economic and social results of industrial growth have been accompanied by serious environmental degradation, however, as well as growing threats to health from occupational hazards. To some extent, these problems are analogous to those of early industrial Europe. In the 19th Century, the shift from a rural, agrarian society to an urban, industrial society initially involved widespread social and economic disruption, unemployment, homelessness, pollution, and increased exposure to health hazards both at work and at home. Many of these same problems characterize cities in the developing world today.

Despite the similarities between earlier European industrialization and current changes in the developing world, important differences exist in the scale and pace of industrial growth. The earlier Industrial Revolution spanned nearly 200 years; recently, countries like Thailand and Indonesia have been undergoing similar changes in just a couple of decades. As part of this growth, industrial wastes are growing in quantity and becoming more varied, more toxic, and more difficult to dispose of or degrade. Densities in cities where much of the industrial production is located far surpass those in developed countries, so the number of people exposed to pollutants is potentially much greater.

Furthermore, a substantial share of industrial growth in developing countries revolves around the transformation of raw materials into industrial products such as steel, paper, and chemicals. A wide range of pollutants is associated with these industries. In contrast, much of economic growth in developed countries is now in the service sector  and communication, which are inherently less polluting.

This rapid industrial growth has made water pollution, air pollution, and hazardous wastes pressing environmental problems in many areas of the developing world. Industrial emissions combine with vehicle exhausts to cause air pollution, while concentrations of heavy metals and ammonia loads are often high enough to cause major fish kills downriver from industrial areas. The lack of hazardous waste facilities compounds the problem, with industrial wastes often discarded on fallow or public lands, in rivers, or in sewers designed to carry only municipal wastes.

The future scale of environmental and health problems from industrialization in developing countries will depend greatly on policy actions taken today. If current production practices remain the norm, air pollution and toxic effluents from industrial production are likely to increase rapidly. If, however, choices are made to invest in more efficient and less-polluting technologies, many of industrialization’s negative impacts on health could be avoided. The potential the developing countries have to leap-frog to cleaner production is enormous, given gains in technology as well as the levels of private capital now flowing into these countries. Decisions regarding the location sites of those industries, the technologies used, and the type of precautions for occupational safety could have a tremendous impact on the future health of the people who live and work there.

Human Resources Industry Focus

 Dramatic changes in the way we work have brought about many innovations in the personnel and human resources industry, including the advent of flexible and temporary staffing agencies and the emergence of professional employer organizations.

With the downsizing and outsourcing from many large employers, highly qualified professionals often find themselves out of work, seeking assistance from employment services and staffing agencies. In fact, in recent decades, the traditional employment agency has really transformed into the flexible staffing agency, with benefits for employers and employees alike

Business can benefit from the experience of others, particularly well-educated professionals who are willing to trade off steady salaries and solid benefits for the ability to spend more time with their families and choose when and where they want to work. Companies prefer flexible staffing as well, which allows them to take more time to make permanent hiring decisions, at the same time giving them an excellent pool of workers from which to recruit on a temporary — or even permanent basis.

As businesses have expanded their staffing needs, employment agencies have had to expand the types of workers available. The staffing industry now provides a wide variety of services to clients, including light industrial and clerical staffing, information technology staffing, healthcare staffing, executive staffing and financial management staffing.

Flexible staffing has gained in popularity for a number of reasons. With the advent of technology that enhances productivity and creates more intense competition, businesses are forced to become more frugal and profit-motivated. Flexible staffing is cost-effective.

Secondly, temporary staffing allows management to change its employment levels as it sees fit to respond to peak times and special projects. The savings enables firms to increase the benefits and compensation offered to permanent staff in order to attract the most highly skilled and qualified individuals.

In addition, the days of employees working for the same company for their entire career are past. Today's workers are exploratory, trying out one career and then another before settling on a permanent path. Many appreciate the freedom to change positions that flexible staffing allows.

The high cost of hiring, training and transitioning full-time, permanent employees has forced businesses to examine flexible staffing to accommodate part-time and seasonal work demands while maintaining a minimal permanent employee core.

Finally, flexible staffing allows businesses to shift some of the cost of employee benefits to the staffing company, which can gain the advantage of volume purchasing.

As human resource and employment law has become more complex and the associated paperwork more time-consuming, many business owners have turned to professional employer organizations, or PEOs, for assistance in everything from payroll to workers' compensation to tracking vacation hours. Other services often provided by PEOs include the preparation of W-2 forms, healthcare benefit plans, certificates of insurance, retirement plans, insurance options, college savings plans and employee assistance programs.

"Green Manufacturing" Lead Machine Tool Industry's Future Development

China machine tool industry association of machine tool industry just released "1025" development program will include remanufacturing, green manufacturing engineering into the main scope of work. "Green manufacturing" is minimize the negative impact on environment and make such as raw materials, energy efficiency in the use of modern manufacturing mode of the highest. Machine tool product is to high performance, high efficiency, and save resources, low energy consumption and low pollution, at the same time processing process to friendly and pleasant change. Therefore, we should start with the design of the product start, material selection, the production and use of the process until the discarded product recycling, and formed a "green" entire process.

The global environment factors called green manufacturing

·         China's national condition decision must implement green manufacturing

China will adhere to the green environmental protection, the independent innovation of industrial development way, insist to advocate green development strategy, and constantly improve the ecological development, information flow utilization efficiency, the process of production, intensive and pollution emission is minimal. In order to respond positively to the call of "1025", environmental pollution now will products or rejected, or be to heavy sanctions, a low carbon economy, green manufacturing technology research and application, grasp the future direction of economic development has become the foundation of international market into people. Domestic machine tool enterprise have been acting up, low carbon manufacturing, green environmental protection idea into the future development of the enterprise of planning.

·         Resources and cost control demand of green manufacturing

From the resources and cost control to see, machine tool industry itself, and also the existence of the strong look forward to manufacturing, machine tool industry upstream steel, iron ore, coke, etc because steelmaking raw material are a non-renewable natural resources, and China's major iron ore for steel mills rely on foreign three big mining giant, in recent years by rising unemployment iron ore, steel prices, downstream machine enterprise cost remains high, therefore, the machine manufacturing is not only beneficial to the environment again, also benefit to the enterprise cost reduction.

 To manufacture and manufacturing new products, compared to 60% for saving energy, saving 70%, save costs 50%, almost do not produce solid waste, air pollutant emissions more than 80%. Remanufacturing is good to form "resources waste product-- product--to manufacture products," the circulation economic model, can make full use of resources, and protect the ecological environment. On the other hand, China's rapid growth has social machine tools, and manufacturing industry has a huge potential for development. In a large equipment to scrap requirements will be eliminated, the retirement of new equipment was still in a large increase. Development and manufacture industry help to form the new economic growth point, providing society with a large number of employment opportunities.

·         Machine tool "green manufacturing" in action

At present domestic there have been many universities and research institutions in the field of green manufacturing, and have achieved some results. Such as chongqing machine group and chongqing university, forming a machine tool to manufacture and comprehensive promotion complete set technology, complete waste of more than 500 sets of machine tool to manufacturing, remanufacturing function of machine and the main technical indexes reach or exceed the machine tool, the resources, the utilization ratio of 80% or so, the noise is reduced by 10% or more, environment pollution emissions by more than 90%.

Problems In The Employment Industry

Finding a job is such a difficult task, especially in today’s modern society. While every country is moving towards globalization, the employment industry seems to be more competitive. Employment analysts say that there are many jobs available but individuals lack the competencies to obtain the job. Another scenario which is observed about employment nowadays, is that there are too many individuals acquiring education in the medical field such as nursing, caregiver, medical assistant, therapists and others. Although there is a high demand of job opening for these courses, not all graduates and board passers land into the same field of work. The main reason is that the requirements and pre-requisites to be hired is very difficult because of the expenses and fees that need to be paid.

In choosing a career, you must always consider that it is not only in the medical field that you can improve the quality of your life. There are also courses, both short-term and long-term, that can offer you quality and high-paying jobs. If you are not successful in finding a job related to your field, probably additional education can be the solution. There are plenty of technical courses that can be studied for a short period of time. Obtaining a certificate from these courses can already employ you to a decent blue-collar job. With proper training and education, you will surely work efficiently your given field. Blue-collar jobs such as meat processing, steel works, dressmaking, auto-mechanic and other factory jobs are currently on a high demand. Blue-collar jobs are known to give high compensation especially on graveyard shifts.

While these opportunities are available, consider having additional education in the technical field and get a job right after finishing the course. With this, you will no longer experience the difficulty of job hunting. Job hunting can take so much time, money and effort. The time used can sometimes be wasted because there are too many applicants for just one vacant position. It is really true that the employment industry is very competitive. The hardships is getting a job is experienced by thousands of degree holders all over the world.

Trade skill jobs are not only open for undergraduates and graduates These are also open for people who are currently employed. There are certain situations where employed individuals are seeking for greener pastures. Thus, working for trade skill companies abroad can improve their quality of life. You do not to spend much time, money in effort in trade skills education. As soon as you finish the course, you will be placed at the right company and that you can apply your skills and training learned. Appropriate training can produce quality performance in the job.

You must always accept the reality that finding a job is not an easy process and no job in the world is an easy task. There are risks that can be involved, however the training and education that you acquired, will surely lead you a long way. As long as you possess a positive attitude in performing your job, you can achieve your goals well and live a quality life with your family in any place in the world.

Surya Saputra Simarmata (115060700111095)