While Malaysians are encouraged to take up jobs previously held by migrant workers, there is a mismatch between local workers’ skills and the low wages that were paid for such jobs, experts say.
Malaysian Trades Union Congress secretary-general J Solomon said the union supports Human Resource Minister M. Saravanan’s call for locals to be given the opportunity to take on jobs held by foreigners, especially in the wake of the sharp spike in unemployment due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but the wage factor remains a hindrance.
“Malaysians should be paid a living wage and not the pittance that employers were paying their migrant workers. Many Malaysians were put off by their low wages that were paid to the migrant workers,” he told FocusM.
Khazanah Research Institute (KRI) deputy director of research Christopher Choong told FocusM that getting locals to take over migrants’ jobs was not an ideal solution to the unemployment problem as locals were not suitable substitutes for migrant workers.
“It is important to ensure that our locals get jobs, and I think the proposal to take up foreign worker jobs may address this in some localised and specific settings. However, I don’t think this can be the answer to our larger problem of unemployment triggered by Covid-19. Our research shows that local workers and foreign workers in Malaysia are imperfect substitutes as they occupy different skill space in the labour market.
“We should plan in the medium term how to redirect our locals to take up jobs that match their skill levels as part of our economic recovery effort. In any case, whether they are done by locals or foreign workers, we need to make sure that low-skilled jobs are decent in terms of wages, social protection and occupational health. This helps to equalise the labour costs between locals and foreign workers, providing a better basis to reduce our dependence on foreign workers in selected sectors,” said Choong.
Meanwhile, Parti Sosialis Malaysia chairman Dr Jeyakumar Devaraj criticised the act of removing migrant workers from their jobs, saying the move was unethical and unfair.
“They (migrant workers) had come to the country to work under a contract and to remove them without adequate compensation to be replaced by local workers was unethical,” Jeyakumar told FocusM.
He echoed Solomon and Choong’s comments that local workers were not motivated to take on jobs being done by migrant workers due to the low wages and poor working conditions.
“Wages are just too low to entice locals from taking on migrant jobs,” he said.
The Department of Statistics Malaysia had earlier projected that around 800,000 Malaysians had lost their jobs in April, which translates to an all-time high unemployment rate of 5%. Malaysian Institute of Economic Research in a report said it had predicted that around two million Malaysians would lose their jobs by the end of 2020. – June 16, 2020
