KINIBIZ In 1985, former finance minister Tan Siew Sin said that deporting the roughly 20,000 illegal foreign workers in plantations “was the surest way of ruining the nation’s economy”.

Tan was the head of Malayan Agricultural Producers Association at the time, also an owner of a plantation business. Fast forward 30 years later, the problem has gotten worse - we now count possibly more than four million foreign workers in total, both legal and illegal.

This issue appears as an area that the 11th Malaysia Plan (11MP), tabled in May 2015, seeks to tackle. Its economic agenda aimed to create 1.5 million jobs by 2020, eyeing improvements in productivity and reduced dependency on low-skilled foreign workers.

The latter specifically addresses a long-running issue - access to cheap foreign labour has kept some sectors labour intensive in nature while depressing wages. Particularly singled out in the 11MP were manufacturing, agriculture and construction sectors which employ a large proportion of existing foreign labour.

For the construction sector specifically, however, questions arise on whether the government is really walking the talk on the matter.

In the larger picture, the continued reliance on cheap foreign labour, both legal and illegal, presents an obstacle in the country’s aspirations to shift towards a knowledge-based economy powered by high-skilled labour.

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