By M Santhananaban
It is appropriate that we have designated a day – 1 May, Workers’ Day – to celebrate and recognise the vital role of workers in our society.
We have only been doing this in Malaysia for the past five decades.
Before independence and the formation of Malaysia, workers engaged by local authorities, plantations and tin mines were required to live and work in semi-slavery conditions.
Yet two products – rubber and tin – from a puny peninsula put the nation on the world map and sustained us for decades.
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The workers – largely immigrants from British India, a restive China and Indonesia – laid the basic infrastructure of the country and made our country “a glorified commercial undertaking rather than a State”, as stated by Victor Purcell in page 39 of his book Malaya: Communist or Free (Stanford, California, 1955).
Six decades after independence, the plight of workers in the country remains pathetic and precarious.
That perennial pathetic condition is perhaps the main reason for the need for Malaysia to be so dependent on foreign workers. We have several million documented and undocumented foreign workers on wages that no self-respecting Malaysian would work for. We now constantly hear of corruption and profiteering from the recruitment of foreign labour.
Our political leaders and senior bureaucrats advertised, beginning from the late 1980s, our stellar growth rates with little concern for the ugly underbelly of underpaid and harassed foreign workers, who are often discriminated against.
Yet, every major infrastructure project in the country was completed with foreign labour. Anwar Ibrahim is the first prime minister in recent times to openly acknowledge the need to treat these foreign workers decently.
Something is amiss that we can be so indifferent to the low wages paid to workers on the lowest economic rungs.
In contrast, with minimal education and a knowledge of English, Malaysians can take up relatively higher-paying jobs in neighbouring Singapore and other high-income countries.
Perhaps we should reflect on this anomalous state of affairs and question the size of our government with its over 1.6 million civil servants and some 800,000 pension recipients. The issue of pensions for holders of political office who have served for just one term should also be reviewed.
These are issue about which we should all be concerned.
Dato’ M Santhananaban is a retired Malaysian ambassador with 45 years of public sector experience
AGENDA RAKYAT - Lima perkara utama
- Tegakkan maruah serta kualiti kehidupan rakyat
- Galakkan pembangunan saksama, lestari serta tangani krisis alam sekitar
- Raikan kerencaman dan keterangkuman
- Selamatkan demokrasi dan angkatkan keluhuran undang-undang
- Lawan rasuah dan kronisme
