Our politicians have pea sized brains. Mahathir who is known as a “Man in a hurry” wanted to see as many Malay professionals, millionaires and billionaires in the shortest time possible. Thus he dig the grave for the country.
He screwed up the education system of the country, brought down the standards of the public exams and universities so that he can see thousands and thousands of graduates. Who cares about the quality? What he wanted is only numbers. He wanted to see Malay millionaires and thus used the government coffers to feed some UMNO cronies to make them rich and stand as tall as the Chinese businessman but what he forgot is the fact that this type of millionnaire would not last long and would not help the poorer segment of the society. That’s why the widest income disparity are among the Malays currently.
By bringing down the standards of our universities(we have one of the highest number of universities per capita of population in the world), we are producing thousands of unemployable graduates. If you look at the article below which was published in The Malaysian Insider today, you can see clearly what is happening in reality. Yes, we are producing thousands but they got no brains!!!! period! What is the failure rate in our universities? Any Guess? If the lecturer fails the student, the lecturer gets booted out!
These graduates got no interest at the first place in what they have just studied as, they were just told to do the particular course by the powers to be. Secondly, they lack good command of english which prevents them from applying for a job in the private sector. Many of them do not even know how to write a resume for job application!.
At the end they apply for government job and end up as a teacher in schools. That’s why the education standards are dropping! Now, we even have fresh graduates being appointed as lecturer in both public and private universities. What experience do they have to teach the students especially in fields like engineering, nursing, law etc etc.
It is going into a vicious cycle. Unemployable graduates with no merit getting into teaching profession in both schools and universities which in turn will continue to produce underqualified and unemployable graduates. This vicious cycle will continue till the country goes down the drain and finally picks itself up or probably never!
How do you expect to pay high salary when you do not have enough brains to do simple job. I heard our engineers can’t even do simple calculation, so don’t expect to be paid high!
Doctors/nurses are next in line for this madness. Please read the article on “Doctor’s too many” in my earlier post.
By Sheridan Mahavera
BANGI, March 30 — Wanted Urgently: Electronic engineers for Bangi-based multi-national corporation manufacturing capacitors. Starting salary: RM2,500. Benefits: full medical, housing and personal loans, and a RM200 monthly transport allowance.
Sounds like a plum job for our engineering graduates right? The employer in question, Nichicon (Malaysia) sdn Bhd, doesn’t think it was attractive enough.
Its human resources manager Mohd Taufik Abdullah claims despite advertising everywhere and postings on job sites, the company could not get even one Malaysian to fill the 10 posts available.
“In the end, we were forced to hire Filipino engineers through an agent we knew.
“Yes, we hear it all the time too, that universities and colleges produce thousands of engineers a year. But where were they when we were looking for them?” asks Mohd Taufik.
That industries are addicted to foreigners to do the menial, repetitive, tiring, dirty, hazardous but critical jobs is not a new thing. But highly-paid and skilled posts like engineers?
And it’s not just engineers, says Mohd Taufik and his colleague Noor Azman Abdullah of Hosiden Electronics (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd.
Factories in the Bangi area, where most of the big-name electronic factories in Selangor are based, are having problems hiring local clerks, technicians and junior executives.
This is not the tip of the iceberg. This is the iceberg, claims factories and the associations who represent them in Selangor, Malaysia’s most industrialised state.
The government froze new permits for foreign workers in September 2009. It was partly to cure this addiction to foreigners and to protect retrenched Malaysian workers during the economic recession.
But companies say that there are no locals to hire and the freeze is severely crippling them.
To merely say this is a problem that needs a solution is to underestimate the dimensions of the issue. In a way, the addiction to foreigners is intertwined with how the Malaysian economy has grown over the past two decades.
More accurately, the dependency is a result of the tremendous explosion of the middle-class in the 70s and the highly-qualified generation of the 80s and 90s that was born to that strata of society.
The continued need for foreigners has also spawned a cancerous network of agents, corrupt officials and unscrupulous manufacturers that seem to operate behind the formal economy and which feeds its existence.
And if this manpower imbalance is not dealt with really, really soon, it will tighten the snares around Selangor and the rest of Malaysia, and prevent it from ever escaping the middle-income trap.
“It’s not just our graduates who are leaving”
The companies are already leaving, declares Selangor Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers chairman Tan Sri Alfred James.
“At the end of last year, an electronics giant in Bangi could not get the 1,000 workers it requested. They went straight to the government but the minister they met couldn’t help them. In the end, they packed up and left.
“They had wanted to expand their base in Malaysia. They have been here for decades and had established themselves yet they couldn’t expand because they couldn’t get workers,” says James.
The shortage over the past several months after the permit freeze have been the most acute. Though there is a freeze, companies can only apply for foreigners if they can demonstrate that they have tried and failed to hire locals.
According to an FMM survey in September 2009, 94 companies in the state reported that they had a total of 11,580 vacancies for unskilled posts. Of those, 4,991 were in the electrical and electronics sector.
James claims that in the beginning of this year there were up to 13,000 vacancies.
Though the government said that about 100,000 permits had been approved to fill this critical shortage, James says that it is not enough.
“It’s 100,000 workers for the whole of Malaysia. The 13,000 we need is only for the industrial sector in Selangor. It does not count the services sector, the restaurants, the small shops that need workers. “
James contends that there is a lag time between getting permit approvals and actually getting the workers into the factories — a process that can take up to a year.
The companies in the survey claimed that they needed foreigners because locals “shied away or did not stay long” in “3D jobs” — dirty, dangerous and demeaning.
Another reason for not hiring locals was the “high rate of absenteeism and turnover.”
More electronics giants have threatened to move their operations out of Malaysia if the government cannot help them ease their worker shortages.
Electronic and electrical firms are especially important to Selangor as amongst all the state’s industries, they contribute the most to its Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Industries on a whole contribute about 37.3 per cent to Selangor’s GDP.
“This is a major reason deterring new investments,” claims James. “We’ve had companies who want to open up in Malaysia but who have turned back when they saw the manpower problems.”
The same old tune
Veteran union organiser G. Rajasekaran has heard all of this before and scoffs at them.
“There are 400,000 school leavers every year.,100,000 of them will pursue tertiary education and that leaves 300,000 people entering the job market.
“These are SPM-qualified kids and they are coming to Penang, Johor and the Klang valley for jobs. If you pay them enough they will work in your factory,” insists G. Rajasekaran, secretary-general of Malaysian Trade Union Congress, the umbrella body for all private sector unions.
His point is seen in the wages of 24 of 94 companies in the Selangor FMM survey:
More than half (17) offered a basic salary of between RM400 to RM700 per month. Two of them offered only RM20 to RM50 a day in wages. One company offered between RM800 to RM900 a month and another was prepared to pay RM1,000 a month.
“The government had set the minimum pension for retirees at RM720 per month. The reasoning is that no one can live on less.
“So if it is acknowledged that this is the minimum someone needs to live on, why are these factories only paying an average salary of RM500?”
Though companies claim that with various allowances and overtime, workers can take home close to RM900, Rajasekaran counters that these extras pay for the cost of going to work. The transport allowance, for instance, evaporates like the petrol fumes.
In reality, can you reasonably get someone to live on RM600 a month in the Klang Valley, Penang or Johor since these are where the industries are, asks Rajasekaran.
Which is why he repeats MTUC’s clarion call for the government to set the minimum wage at RM900 a month to suit Malaysia’s cost of living. Thailand and Vietnam, for instance, where some of these companies are threatening to relocate to, have minimum wage rates.
However, Selangor FMM’s James counters this by saying that there is no guarantee that raising wages would get locals to work.
The problem with a minimum wage, James argues, is that it will make employers band together and not raise salaries.
“You must let wages be market-driven,” he says.
The price of more shopping malls
Noor Azman has clocked in close to 30 years as a human resource manager in a few international manufacturers and believes that this is all a cycle.
“When I started out in the 80s, every kid from the kampung and Felda schemes came to Selangor to work in the factories. And then it became harder to hire them in the early 90s and we started sourcing workers from countries poorer than us.
“Our kids on the other hand are now factory workers, cooks and waiters in Singapore and the UK because wages there are higher.”
In other words, we are the “Indons and Banglas” of the UK. And it’s really not hard to figure out how this happened.
Another senior manager of an electronics firm does not say it out right but it would be hard for his company — a component manufacturer for all manner of electronics like remote controls, phones, computers and refrigerators — to raise wages.
The mean salary of production operators he says had been raised to RM650 to better entice locals. But a higher salary would eat into the company’s operating costs and crimp its ability to compete with rivals.
In other words, there is a connection between our love for cheap electronics and Malaysia’s low wages for unskilled labour.
This is not just a Selangor or even a Malaysian problem.
A December 2004 report in BusinessWeek magazine highlighted how US manufacturers of state-of-the-art products such as precision machine tools and circuit boards for military equipment, were literally dying from Chinese imports.
The American businesses interviewed in the report said their Chinese rivals were able to make their products at 30 to 50 per cent less because Chinese workers were paid less than Americans.
The more “developed” Malaysia becomes and the more college and university graduates it produces, the more the country will need foreign workers, Selangor FMM’s James says.
It’s no accident that the country started importing more and more foreigners in the early 90s — when affordable private colleges blossomed everywhere and swallowed the masses of youths born to the New Economic Policy generation.
“Every child wants to study and this creates a vacuum in terms of labour,” says James. The vacuum is not just in factories but seen in the “sales assistant wanted” posters in the numerous shopping malls sprouting all over the country.
“Who is going to fill these jobs? The reality is that there may not be enough Malaysians.
“And if we do not want foreign workers then we must make do with fewer malls, fewer restaurants, fewer hypermarkets and fewer luxuries.”
They may hope we would demonstrate or march to the police station and make reports (the police have better things to do) and give the group added gravitas. 
Malaysians are aware of their surroundings – abuses of power, select Malays selfishly milking the NEP, endemic corruption, public institutions compromising their neutrality by becoming political stooges, no accountability in government bodies and politicians.
Education and a strong stable family life must be foremost in policy changes to make a difference. But politicians have messed up our education system. Government must create opportunities. We need investments, both locally and from abroad, but Malaysia’s negative image precludes that.
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