Labor Mobility within ASEAN Countries: Policy and Practice

Abstract

The ASEAN Economic Community – AEC was established to help shape the free movement of goods, services, investment capital and skilled labor in the region. A common labor market that the AEC aims to create will create opportunities for skilled workers in the ASEAN region to find suitable jobs, capable of developing their careers, providing a worthy source of income and many other opportunities. However, taking advantage of opportunities from the implementation of the policy of free movement of skilled labor in the ASEAN Economic Community is not easy because countries will have different reactions to protect the legitimate interests of ASEAN countries. This creates barriers to fully implementing commitments to liberalize the movement of skilled labor within the bloc. By statistical, descriptive, historical, and logical methods, the article presents the basic content of ASEAN's regulations on intra-regional labor mobility and presents the reality of workers moving within countries ASEAN and a number of issues raised in the following years.