Malaysian development in the hand of foreign labour - Part 2

To have more local force and depleting foreign labour count need a serious consideration from both potential employer and employee.


Employer will face the most difficulties on undermining the fact that more effort needed to attract local labours. Needless to say, there are also financial obligations on proper wages and associated benefits. Furthermore, the employer will also face operation inconsistency risk with staff absents.


On the other hand, potential local employee having issues on the wages earning. Since the locals need the money here and make a permanent living here, similar salary standard for foreign workers deemed unfit to sustain living requirement. If the basic remuneration offered at RM700 a month, even poverty line set at RM1000 a month has not been exceeded.


By this simple fact, we know that our country is facing a serious problem, employment taken by cheaper foreigners, there are local unemployment rate to be resolve and employed local workers still within poverty bracket.


This is when government intervention is highly needed. We can’t afford to allow our job allocation taken by foreigners, huge cash outflow from country and high numbers of local in poverty bracket and unemployed.


The big question raised, is our economy be able to be sustained without this foreigners? To answer this, we can’t singularize all the sectors as one. One sector behave differently that the others.


Manufacturing sector have the severest impact. Since we are exporting lots of goods and up against other competitive exporter such Thailand, China, Taiwan and India, the survival key is to keep the cost at minimum. Still, with the foreign labour, we are barely competing with them. Tun Mahathir had commented on this, and I truly agree that we need to come up with other selling point to foreign investors to invest in our manufacturing sector such integrity and quality. Integrity prevent fund leakage and quality spells premium. Higher branding premium made sellable price higher and the gap would be able to compensate higher cost of labour.

Construction sector would also be affected. However, the effect is much reduced. Malaysian construction sectors offer a very good profit margin. To attract locals means more pay and these companies should be able to live with smaller margin.
If the government could protect a lot of concessionaire, national car, national airline, and other corporate bodies, I don’t see any reason why the government can’t impose something to protect the local job. We are very good at subsidies, incentive and exemptions; this is one of the aspects that those words can be put to good use