Employee engagement is the emotional commitment the employee has to the organisation and its goals.
– Kevin Kruse, American historian
Last week, I wrote about changing the education system to encourage apprenticeship amongst industries as an option to a university degree. I argued that this not only is free for the students, but that it also gets them industry ready, saves them time, gives them a chance to experience a myriad of work opportunities and helps them become very valuable to potential employers. And it’s free – they don’t have to be burdened by student loans.
This week I will talk about the second anchor of our labour problems – a government system that gives the impression that they are here to protect employees from ‘bad employers’ with lopsided labour laws that protect employees and not employers.
Our labour laws seem to be very lopsided against the employers, especially small and medium businesses that get affected most by labour shortage. This is strange for a nation that unequivocally claims that businesses are the strong horse that pulls the cart. If so, let’s not break the horse’s back, with a multitude of policies that makes it hard for businesses to keep up with the demands of a highly competitive market.
As I have mentioned last week, fresh graduates are already most of the time, not prepared to do a job right for months, due to a misaligned education system. As small businesses struggle to hand hold employees and teach them basic fundamentals while paying them, they are then faced with a continuous stream of people just coming and going through jobs and companies like a thoroughfare.
They take a job, they ‘try’ it for a bit, and then they leave. Wasting the employers’ time and manpower training this person and of course wasting money spent on them.
Most will wait until they collect salary and then just run. It is a disgusting habit, and it should not be allowed, because if it is, we are teaching young people to have no accountability and absolutely no professionalism.
It is not just bad for the domestic market; it is worse for foreign direct investments. A foreign company would rather invest billions in a country or state that has smart, disciplined workforce who are consistent in what they want and what they can give.
Employers have no other option but to go to labour court and this takes time.
The government and the Ministry of Human Resources need to address this, and address it fast. There should be a system where serial job hoppers who leave without giving notice, after taking salaries are blacklisted.
If we can have a Glassdoor for employers where disgruntled employees who cannot keep a job go to complain and complain because they are under the cloak of anonymity (a horrendous blackmail system that should be outlawed by the government because this is practically extortion of money from employers to remove comments. Also, why keep the names anonymous? If someone wants to complain, then put the name if it is a legitimate complaint, yes?) then we should have a similar system where employees who cheat their companies in various ways are listed with reasons why their names are there by companies.
This is then fair. But as I said, the system is lopsided, and so it’s always the onus on the company to pay to look for good hires, act as a university and train them while paying them a salary, then deal with disgruntled staff who justify their incompetence by slandering companies in various channels, who then shame or guilt companies to pay them to remove it, and then have these people take salaries and run, leaving the companies in a lurch.
The poor companies have to deal with all this and pay tax to the government from whatever is left in just staffing itself, let alone the challenges of the business per se, which should be the highest priority the companies should be focusing on.
The government needs to address all of the above instead of giving numerous holidays to appease the citizens at the expense of the poor companies already suffering from the malaise of poor productivity.
We cannot keep lynching the small and medium businesses, expecting them to perform like a public listed company and paying no heed at all to their struggles. They do in fact make up 90 per cent of the GDP, and a healthy SME is an indication of a healthy middle class. And a healthy middle class is a sign of a prospering nation.
Join me next week as I talk about the third and fourth anchors of A Labour Problem – families who mollycoddle their children and mainstream narratives that are detrimental to a productive labour force.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune. Feedback can reach the writer at beatrice@ibrasiagroup.com
