Leader

NST Leader: Of manpower and vision

If the Human Resources Ministry is right, Malaysia has almost all the foreign workers it wants. There are 1.3 million of them already in the country and close to 550,000 are due to arrive soon.

On paper, that is exactly right. A supply of 1.8 million foreigners equals the demand of 1.8 million workers. Textbook equilibrium, the dismal scientists will say. "Market", the nebulous love of the capitalists, was never so neatly balanced. As always, economics is out of touch with reality. But is the balance exactly right?

The answer is no. What you see is not what you get. In fact, we have been off-balance for a while. Here is why.

We are not particularly good at visioneering. If truth be told, Malaysia gives the impression that former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad is the country's only visionary leader. Perhaps he is. You must give it to him for the Vision 2020 thingy.

We may not agree with what he saw, but he had a vision. Mind you, far isn't very easy to see, but it must be envisioned. It is not hard to see why the future, at least as far Malaysia's manpower requirements go, is so blurry.

People who are supposed to help lead Malaysia's economy, the engine of growth, appear not to be talking to each other. Take the very recent kerfuffle over foreign workers.

The Immigration Department was telling employers to receive their foreign workers in person at the airport or else they would be sent back to their country of origin. Dissatisfied employers, however, screamed for pick-up rules to be clarified.

Meanwhile, the Human Resources Ministry was telling the Immigration Department not to issue a "Not to Land" order.

A silly squabble? Perhaps, but very telling. They just don't talk to each other. Rather, they talk past each other. National problems don't get solved this way.

Most certainly, not our manpower problems. Take the unemployment rate. In July, the latest figure at hand, our unemployment rate was 3.7 per cent. Some may even congratulate those managing the Malaysian economy given the bad peak of 5.3 in May 2020.

Not so fast, we tell them. Just a month before this "low" unemployment rate was churned out, Malaysia was experiencing labour pains of an excruciating kind. Executives, some really senior ones, were "coaxed" into helping to pack boxes for export on the factory floors, a job usually done by foreign workers. Malaysia can't be made to be so desperate.

To be not so desperate, Malaysia must have a manpower master plan. Not any master plan, but one that envisages a few critical scenarios (none of these will be without foreign workers because there will always be a need for some, and look at Singapore), which may be brought about by future events.

The pandemic and the Ukraine invasion are two recent examples. The idea of the plan is to spell out how we can work and live under such scenarios. But a master plan doesn't just happen. Minds must come together to develop one.

For some strange reason that is peculiarly Malaysian, consensus seems as rare as a hen's teeth. Rare or not, we must get there. And those who are put in charge must help us get there.

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