KUALA LUMPUR: Local restaurants desperately need at least 30,000 workers to stay in business, said the Malaysian Employers Federation (MEF).
MEF estimated that 1,500 restaurants had folded since the start of this year due to the double blow of labour shortage and soaring prices of essential items.
MEF president Datuk Dr Syed Hussain Syed Husman said some restaurants had implemented automated services to ease the labour crunch.
"These include the use of a QR code menu, in which customers order meals by scanning a QR code on each table, eliminating the need for a server.
"Some restaurants and cafés are also using robots to serve food to guests at their tables.
"However, using robots is very costly, with prices ranging from RM50,000 to RM60,000 per unit.
"This is not an ideal solution, especially for small- and medium- scale enterprises.
"Restaurants cannot do away with the human touch because manpower is required to load food onto the robot as well as to carry out cleaning," he told the New Straits Times.
Syed Hussain said the number of new foreign workers that entered the country was relatively small although the government had lifted the freeze on hiring foreign workers in the middle of February. He called on the government to speed up the approval process for applications to recruit new foreign workers.
The government, he said, should also iron out differences with source countries to expedite the process.
"While waiting for the arrival of new workers, the government should consider allowing prisoners on parole, refugees and vagrants to work in restaurants.
"The government should also review our recalibration programme and approve more illegal immigrants as legal workers.
"They could easily fill the labour shortage in our eateries," he said.
Malaysian Muslim Restaurant Owners Association (Presma) president Datuk Jawahar Ali Taib Khan said 2,000 mamak restaurants had closed since the pandemic hit two years ago. Some restaurant operators, he said, had shut at least half of their branches to cope with the manpower shortage.
"It is becoming difficult to source foreign workers because most of them prefer to work in Middle Eastern countries.
"Due to the labour shortage, some employers tend to pinch workers from other restaurants through agents by promising higher pay and incentives.
"Consequently, many workers have run away from their legal employers to work on other premises," he said.
Jawahar said offering better perks to attract local workers had not augured well for restaurant operators.
"Training locals has proven futile because after learning the skills, they leave for jobs in Singapore for higher pay," he said.