Malaysia’s addiction to foreign labour

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia is attempting to curb its addiction to foreign labour, which has brought 2.3 million workers to its shores, but critics say the campaign is causing havoc at home and abroad.
The relatively prosperous Southeast Asian nation relies heavily on men and women from Indonesia, Bangladesh, India and elsewhere to clean homes, construct buildings and gather crops.
But as one of Asia’s largest importers of labour, the government had become increasingly alarmed over the ramifications of having such a big foreign presence in a population of just 27 million.
Migrant workers had been accused of everything from depressing wages to causing crime waves. Plantation industries minister Peter Chin said recently they were “colonising” Malaysia’s vast agricultural estates.
“People do tend to take the easy option because you have a large reservoir of foreign workers. They might even dump local workers in favour of foreign workers. And that’s not good for us,” deputy prime minister Najib Razak said.
“You’re attracting industries that depend on low wages. So we are reviewing that, we are reducing the number of foreign workers,” he told AFP in a recent interview.
The government had already announced a ban on foreigners working in “frontline” roles in hotels and airports, and now reportedly plans to cut the migrant workforce to 1.8 million by next year, and 1.5 million by 2015.
However, the campaign to reduce imported labour has been criticised as unplanned, disastrous for industries that depend on it, and insulting to the countries where the workers come from.
The deputy premier said Malaysia was in a “transition period” as it tried to shift from a low-wage model aimed at being competitive against regional neighbours, to a high-wage, knowledge-based economy.
Political commentators applaud the goal, but say there was no plan to carry out the transition which in any case would take a decade or more to achieve. – AFP