THE pool of local workers is insufficient for Top Glove Corp Bhd’s manpower requirements, which would in turn worsen the global glove shortage, according to company CEO Lim Wee Chai.
This follows his call for the lift of the freeze on foreign worker intakes until December to give priority to locals to fill up job vacancies. The freeze was announced by Human Resources Minister M Saravanan on June 22.
“There is an insufficient pool of local workers to fulfil the extent of our factory manpower requirements, which continues to increase in line with our aggressive expansion,” said Lim to FocusM.
He also added that the hiring of local workers instead of foreign workers is also challenging as locals are generally not keen on certain jobs.
However, Lim noted that the long-term plan for the company is to increase automation and digitalisation, which would enable Top Glove to reduce its dependency on manual labour and general workers.
“With automation, the number of workers required will be reduced and we will recruit more skilled local workers as well as more engineers, who are able to perform higher value tasks and enable us to level up our productivity and efficiency,” said Lim.
On July 15, Top Glove saw two of its subsidiaries, Top Glove Sdn Bhd and TG Medical Sdn Bhd, slapped with a detention order by the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). This was allegedly due to foreign labour issues, which the company claimed it has already resolved.
At the market’s noon close, Top Glove’s shares were last done at RM22.76, rallying 15.53% by RM3.06, with 39.7 million shares traded. – July 17, 2020
