Robertson's actual job is Vocational Training and Education Advisor. He says he is doing labour conciliation because no one else is doing it. I suspect that he and his colleagues know that if no one was providing a place for arbitration on labour issues, people would take matters into their own hands. If that sounds threatening, it is. Robertson says there are a couple of problems with this arrangement.
Nobody knows what to do next.
The other problem is that he is being distracted from the job he was hired to do which is to develop vocational training and education policy and strategies. So at the moment, there are none. Statistics on employment have only just begun to be recorded. They won't even know how many people there are in East Timor until people enrol to vote in the elections late in 2001. So as you might expect, there is no accurate way to estimate the unemployment rate is.