Malaysiais one of Asia's top importers of foreign labour, owing to Malaysians'reluctance to work in low-wage jobs. Malaysia has approximately 4 million foreign workers, only half of them are lawfully present in the Southeast Asian country. Malaysia, as a relatively prosperous country in the region, attracts people from impoverished such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Myanmar looking for stability, better economic opportunities, or a route to access other countries such as Australia.
In2010, there were around 2.2 million legal foreign workers in Malaysia. They account up morethan 20% of the country's 10.5 million-strong workforce. They are primarilyemployed in the agricultural field and plantation, manufacturing, construction, and service industries, particularly in the hotel and restaurant industry. Foreign workers were frequently willing to take lesser wages than Malaysians. There is no minimum wage in the country during that time. Foreigners are typically lured in by a corporation that offers them a job or by foreign worker recruitment company that guarantees them work.
Malaysiaexperienced labour shortages during the boom years of the 1980s and 1990s.There were barely 8 million individuals working in the country. Many overseas firms complained about a lack of trained staff. Malaysia had an estimated 1.8 million foreign employees in 1997. Around 1.2 million of these were lawful, while the remaining 800,000 were illegal. Indonesia accounted for around three-fourths of the foreign labourers. Others came from the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Pakistan, and Burma, among other places.
Foreignworkers perform tasks such as rubber tree tapping, bricklaying, maids, barbers,and tea pickers. Many of Malaysia's notable buildings and infrastructure projects were constructed on the backs of foreign labourers, the bulk of whom were Indonesians earning around RM50 per day in the 1990s, roughly four times what they could make at home.
According to Reuters, Malaysia has a chronic labour shortage and relies mainly onunskilled or semi-skilled labourers from Indonesia, which is only a ferry rideaway. For Malaysians, the government's successful drive to enhance education and modernise the economy has meant that fewer individuals are ready to do the arduous manual labour that has underpinned the national resources.
