There is no reason why the whole country or the state should be locked down for the sake of being popular and politically correct.
— Tan Sri Mohd Sheriff Mohd Kassim, former secretary general of Treasury, Ministry of Finance
I was having a discussion over lunch today with my good friend Datuk Seri Azman Ujang, former CEO and Chairman of Bernama, and a fellow Sarawakian, on why Malaysia’s productivity is falling and we both agreed that the government has very much a hand in this.
Let’s start with public holidays.
If it is not enough that Malaysia probably has the most number of public holidays in the world, we have this really really weird thing where when a holiday falls on a Sunday, the next Monday becomes a holiday. Where did we get this ridiculous concept from? If it falls on a Sunday, it falls on a Sunday la.
We have holidays on Agung’s birthday which does not even fall on his actual birthday, we have nine sultans’ birthdays to take days off and watch TV.
And then we have the ‘out-of-the-blue’ holidays when some party wins an election, some team wins a football game… how is this helpful? Somebody somewhere high up in government being happy or sad should have no consequences on the businesses that work hard to pay salaries and keep production running.
Declaring holidays to be popular is so lame when you don’t have to worry about the repercussions of declaring holidays, isn’t it ?
If you are not worried about the bottom line of profits and losses, or worry about balance sheets, or worry about not having enough money to pay salaries at the end of the month — you can declare anything at the expense of the other man and be popular.
And that is what happens with governments declaring sudden and excessive public holidays.
They are not wealth creators and do not understand the difficulty in being one. Creating wealth from scratch, managing people and business, paying taxes that the government demands on the dot (or you get fined or jailed) is difficult enough for smaller businesses, so it is time the government starts to care about the employers and not just the employees.
We did not elect a government to make itself popular on account of making life hard for the employers . Getting votes is not a priority to 99 per cent of the population who contribute wealth to the 1 per cent that run the country. And running the country is an administrative element, to complement the businesses and the people, not to make decisions for the wealth generators and hold them hostage for decisions the government decides on the spur of a moment.
For example, manufacturing companies have to keep production running every day no matter what as they have to export goods to the rest of the world.
So when there are too many public holidays or worse sudden public holidays announced where there is no time to strategise, they still need to call their people back to work and pay them triple as per the law, and this detrimental to productivity.
On the other hand, public holidays to civil servants just means they stay at home and the government takes a day off, at the expense of business owners.
Manufacturing and service industries do not have that luxury. Especially if they are mid range, and running on thin cash flows, which is a common problem that becomes a nightmare, with sudden unplanned interruptions. The last thing the government should do is to add to the burden of a group of people who are holding up the economy.
The government also makes it very expensive and difficult to bring in foreign workers. And yet the government is dependant on these very companies that suffer from a lack of proper workers for taxes.
Why are the levys so expensive? Who is benefitting from these high levies? Why can’t a emoployer decide who he is going to hire and from where? The first choice will definitely go to Malaysians because you don’t need to house and feed Malaysian blue collar workers and to pay exorbitantly to bring them in.
But if they still look outside Malaysia to get foreign workers then its not the job of the government to penalise the companies and demand they hire local workers. It is the job of the government to understand why we are having a workforce that is not up to mark and rectify it.
Running a country is not just about fining everybody productive for not complying with rules you set. Or forcing everybody’s hands to follow regulations that makes life harder while extracting income from their hard labour.
The government should be more understanding about how they can work with the employers hand in hand to help them. Businesses are the strong horse that pulls the cart. You cannot keep shooting the horse and then expect it to pull your cart.
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
