MALAYSIA’s rehabilitation for its addiction towards cheap foreign labour is now long overdue.
Covid-19 has come to disrupt the supply since last year and the withdrawal symptoms have already started to crop up.
The road to addiction may have very well started in the 1980s during Malaysia’s journey of industrialisation and economic growth where the temporary solution to meet the severe labour shortage was foreign workers.
The Medan Agreement was inked in 1984 for plantation and domestic workers while the later part of the 1980s would see the green light given to recruit workers from the Philippines, Thailand and Bangladesh. It was not really a problem, or at least those who tread the corridors of power did not seem to think it was, until Malaysia tried to climb the high-income ladder.