News in Brief

Maternity leave costs employer RM1.57b

Looks like maternity leave is a liability for the employers, and at RM1.57 billion annually it sees.

Media reports quoted a study undertaken by the Malaysian Employers Federation which said Malaysian employers spent that amount annually in providing 60 days of maternity leave to each female employee who had a baby.

Apparently, each confinement cost them RM7,500, with RM3,000 in wages and RM4,500 in overtime allowances.

Furthermore there is a good chance that the cost would escalate to RM2 billion, if the maternity leaves were to be increased, as was the case in Singapore!

Foreign Workers To Go First

Employers in financial difficulties who has to succumb to the need to lay off the employees, are urged to drop the foreign workers first.

This was urged by the Ministry of Human Resource, as its minister Datuk Dr. Subramaniam said as Malaysians try to weather the economic crisis, employers must give job priorities to locals instead of foreign workers.

He added that investigations also revealed that some employers practiced two salary schemes, one for local employees and another for foreign workers, probably to deceive the authorities.

"We have found out that some employers paid local workers through the normal process but had outsourced the salary payment for foreign workers to agents," he said.

Malaysia short of engineers

Like medical practitioners, looks like Malaysia is also in shortage of engineers, which needs around 200,000 by 2020.

Institute of Engineers Malaysia (IEM) president Prof Datuk Chuah Hean Teik confirmed this, saying that it will impede the country’s development.

He said there was a need to train more engineers before the situation became critical, adding that the country would need about 200,000 engineers by 2020.

Currently, there are only 60,000 engineers in the country, Prof Chuah said.

“We should plan ahead and not wait until there is an acute shortage,” he added.

World Bank: Malaysia's economy to contract 3%

The good news is, there will still be growth for Malaysian economy, with the bad news being that it would shrink around 3%

According to reports, the Word Bank pointed that the once high flying region – which also includes Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia and The Phillipines – are likely to grow at the average of 5.3% this year, down from 8% last year, and 11.4% in 2007

Plunging exports - the region's lifeblood - are causing widespread factory closures, rising unemployment and wage cuts across the region, it said.

"A sustainable recovery will ultimately depend on developments in the advanced economies," it’s report noted.

Better protection for workers making Socso claims

Good news for workers claiming disability pension under the Social Security Organisation (Socso), the Human Resources Ministry is pushing for changes for better protection.

Minister Datuk Dr S. Subramaniam was quoted in the media as saying that aspects of the Employees Social Security Act would be looked into, particularly to make the disability pension scheme clearer so that applicants know exactly what it was about and how their problem could be managed.

Among the issues to be sorted out, he said, was lowering the percentage of permanent disability for a worker to be eligible for the scheme from 60% to 40%.