Does Malaysia need foreign workers ? Since 1970, foreign workers gave contribution to our country development, especially for infrastructure development and manufacturing industry. Further, SME contributed GDP for 38.2% with a value added of RM512.8 billion in 2020.
Till today, many SME (small and medium enterprise) operation depend on foreign labor. The reasons why SME depend on foreign labor are: –
- Sales turnover of the company is not capable to automate the production line.
- Nature of the production line or small scale industries are difficult to be automated, liked harvesting work at oil palm estate.
- Maintanance for the automation production line is costly when machine repairing need specialist from overseas.
- The locals are not interested with 3D (Dirty, Dangerous & Difficult) work because they have better options to make living, liked GRAB driver.
- Due to family issues, the locals unable to commit with fixed and long working hours because operation line will run more than 8 or 24 hours a day.
Therefore, we can’t deny that industries in Malaysia are shortage of labor. For that, we need a better plan for hiring foreign workers while protecting the locals benefit. Actually, Malaysia will implement multi-tier levy system on coming Jan 2021, liked Singapore.
Due to shortage of labor, some foriegn workers are forced to work more than 10 hours. Hence, we are in a hurry to have a better enforcement policy to solve the biggest sector of human tracfficking, forced labor in Malaysia . Then, foreign workers welfare will also be protected when the hiring process is legal.