Malaysian development in the hand of foreign labour - Part 1

I actually find this quite disturbing. We have poverty at one hand and not enough local labour on the other. As such we imported lots of foreigners (Indonesians, Bangladeshi, Nepalese, etc) to fill in the labour requirement gap. We have excess engineers and still we are importing ex-pat from Japan, German, United Kingdom, United States, etc.

Foreign labour considered cheap. They are. They can work long hours, expandable, dependable and replaceable in term of numbers. Locals however is more difficult to manage, more expensive and perhaps a bit more nuisance to the employer.

We are seeing foreign labours being utilized in almost all sectors, manufacturing, construction, agricultures and fisheries. The idea of employing these foreign labours is to minimize cost and maximize profits. The necessity of cost minimization is most important when we are dealing with goods (manufacturing) to be exported and we have to be up against the other bigger player such China, India, and Taiwan.

The remaining sectors however have higher returned margin and less bounded to this competitive environment.

Giving the options, it is natural for the employer to go for the cheaper and easier option, thus the foreign. This foreigner however is not cheap forever. Lots of them had realized their role and importance of the participation in our local development and started demanding for more. Simplest example is out maid sectors whereby it is harder to source for Indonesian maid and cost to have a maid kept escalating each year.

Prolonged dependency to the foreign labour will eventually led us to long-term negative impacts. Even if we look at ‘now’ scenario, we already seeing the following:
Depletion of local skilled labour
Huge amount of money transferred to foreigner country of origin – in exchange rate strength, this action is weakening our currency
Less cash being re-circulated back within the country – affecting local economic growth
Crime rate, tuberculosis back into the picture, gang, social value destruction, etc

The key principal to move forward to have more numbers for local labour and lessen the number of foreigners.

*** to be continue…