In a harrowing short story, 'Flight MH72', a Malaysian writer, Krish Ram, narrates the tale of a local housewife in a middle-class neighbourhood of Kuala Lumpur.
She has a live-in Indonesian maid who gets sick. Her husband rushes her to the hospital but the wife is scathing: why waste money on a maid? Later, the husband loses his job, and the wife is unable to find adequate employment, though she holds a masters degree in English from Universiti Malaya, the country's oldest and most prestigious institution.
She ends up swallowing her pride out of necessity, and signs up to become a maid to a middle-class Chinese family (she used to be one herself) in Hong Kong.
It turns out this story, especially as it shows the housewife eventually sliding into the shoes of her maid, is in fact an illustration of Malaysia's current oil-sheikhdom-gone-awry predicament. As I have lived in an emerging oil sheikhdom, namely Brazil (as from this year for the first time, only Venezuela in South America will produce more oil), I find Malaysia's woes of more than passing interest.
It is said that about a quarter of the country's current workforce is made up of foreign nationals. Nonetheless, there are many illegal workers as well, especially, but not only, from Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar (India, Nepal, Cambodia, and Vietnam also come to mind here, as well as the Philippines).
Myanmar happens to be also the source of over 90 percent of Malaysia's registered (and unregistered) United Nations refugees (estimates are of well over 100,000 people), the overwhelming majority of whom (often children included) work to survive.
There is therefore no way of knowing with any certainty how many foreign workers actually live in the country, particularly as borders in Southeast Asia are also notoriously porous. While carrying out research fieldwork in my neighbourhood in Kuala Lumpur, namely Bukit Bintang, where there are sizable communities of Myanmarese and other workers, both legal and illegal, official refugees and aspirants to refugee status, I have learned a good deal about the underbelly of Malaysia's economic miracle.
Except for the undocumented, most of these people usually come to find employment through agents (both local and foreign) who typically gobble up a good deal of money from both workers and employers. Though most of my experience is related to workers in Bukit Bintang, a spell of fieldwork in Malacca has revealed that circumstances there are very similar, with salaries however generally lower than in Kuala Lumpur and other cities.
John’s not here anymore
John (not his real name) works undocumented because he cannot currently afford the fee. He works night shifts, from 4pm to 1am every evening. His workplace is a large, busy and modernised version of a kopitiam or local traditional Chinese coffee shop. On a busy evening, there are hundreds of customers.
As is usual in many Malaysian-run businesses (John's is owned by a local Chinese), there are not enough employees, and especially during busy times, the service is from bad to disastrous. Malaysian customers, however, do not seem to mind.
Apart from not hiring enough people - a very common practice - and paying them less than would be the case if the worker happened to be a Malaysian national (sometimes far less), workers are also almost as a matter of routine ruthlessly exploited in the hands of employers, agents, police and other people.
Last year, there was an advertisement in a local newspaper saying that the national association of mamak restaurant owners had requested the government for a further 40,000 workers to be brought from south India (usually Tamil Nadu), because locals could not stand (sic) the 12-hour daily shifts required by restaurant owners.
John for instance gets only one day off every month at his work. He told me he usually spends it sleeping as he is often very tired. The shop is also his residence: his boss has partitioned a floor above his business where now most of his workers sleep.
Anand, a young Nepalese who works at a venue next door - a middle-class coffee shop where prices are much higher than in the kopitiam, though salaries for foreign workers are nearly as low - also sleeps upstairs. He too seldom gets a day off.
He is locked up alone inside the shop for the night (he has no keys). I wonder how he would get out in case of, say, a fire. Not to mention that in many countries, it would be literally criminal to lock someone up like that.
Also, he does not hold his own passport (a very common practice in Malaysia, though, again, it may be a crime elsewhere). Instead, his employer holds it. Anand is nonetheless afraid of going anywhere, even on his day off, because he has no way of proving to the police that he is legally in the country.
John in Malacca tells me he cannot go back to Myanmar because he is a bad saver, and besides his salary is low (only RM800). John is still undocumented, but he told me he is not worried. He never goes anywhere anyway; also, because his boss now has good relations with the police (no doubt oiled by occasional handouts), the police never come to his workplace any more. He therefore feels safe and is unwilling to look for other employment. A case of better the devil one knows...
The sad end to this story is that, after an absence of a couple of months, I went back to the kopitiam in question, only to find out that John had eventually been caught in an ‘operasi’, or an immigration raid, together with nine other workers, all male and from Myanmar like him. They have been flown back to Myanmar, according to remaining workmates. A couple of new workers have been brought in, as there is of course no way the remaining workers could make up for the loss of 10 staff at the same time. All of them are again from Myanmar.
At the famous tourist joint in the historic core of Malacca where he works, Aung is now on leave in Myanmar for a whole month for the first time in years. He told me just before leaving that he is very happy to go back as he has not seen his small daughter in years.
He is however very keen on ending what amounts to his indenture-ship in Malaysia, together with his wife, and move on to either Singapore or South Korea, where salaries are at least much higher than in Malaysia. If you are going to be ruthlessly exploited, better do it in a grand way.
Thrown into the treadmill
Coming back to the story above of the Malaysian middle-class housewife, who ends up finding herself compelled to seek employment as a maid to a middle-class Hong Kong family, I wonder what bringing both this story and Aung's and John's experiences together can teach us.
Current wisdom has it that a Malaysian housewife is comparatively privileged, as well as safe from the ups and downs of the labour market. Nonetheless, my impression is that both local housewife and foreign workers are ultimately on the same boat.
This may sound hard to believe. However, it is equally hard to avoid this conclusion, if we take into consideration the larger picture, namely, what is going on in Malaysia - and in Asia - right now concerning economic development.
Development as a process is based on value-extraction at all costs; the idea that income is king; the notion that workers need not be protected; and the conviction that the labour market ultimately can always be depended upon to regulate itself.
But development based on such fundamentals seems to be a bankrupt notion, to say the least. Yet it is one that rules development policies and practices all over the world.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has shown in his many works that real development must be based on a variety of complex, and yet intimately, besides empirically connected freedoms. Therefore, he believes that, for instance, a labour market where some workers are offered a modicum of protection, whereas others are not free, cannot really be called a developed society (or even a developing one).
In such a society, a housewife is at the end of the day not protected, as her labour, we must remember, usually goes unpaid because she is supposed to do it for free as she is a married woman and mother. Add to it the fact that foreign workers are routinely thrown into the treadmill, so to speak, and such practices seem a recipe for disaster in the long run, and not only for the housewife and foreign workers.
Again following Amartya Sen, no development worth its name will happen based on lack of freedom in one part of society, as the fate of the housewife in the story above poignantly indicates. This is a very important lesson - ultimately, we cannot be free, however privileged we may be now if we keep others in bondage.
In other words, human freedom is not something that takes hold in the abstract realm of philosophical ideas: as Amartya Sen points out, it is empirically speaking a very complex web of connected freedoms, and therefore any instance of lack of freedom in one part of society will eventually trigger lack of freedom in any other part.
In this sense, Amartya Sen cogently reminds us time and again that the economy is a human construct, deeply rooted in human societies, not a realm based on extra-human laws, only fully understood by number-crunching wizards and their employers.
The problem here is therefore the creation and continuance of an exploitative society of rent-seekers, both big and small, ranging from the business tycoon to the kopitiam owner - and why not, also the housewife in her role as an employer. Everybody loses in the end in such a society, as Amartya Sen never tires of pointing out, even the rent-seekers.
In fact, the story of the housewife is a poignant reminder of this - if you give support to somebody's bondage, you risk becoming non-free yourself at some point. This is not necessarily divine retribution: as Amartya Sen shows in detail, it is actually an empirically observable, quantifiable and recurring fact.
In this sense, observing Malaysia and its woes can be a wonderful case study.
FRED ROSEN has been gallivanting around Southeast Asia for quite some time now. He is interested in foreign communities in Malaysia's large cities. He has also been writing about Malacca, both in the present and the past, as well as other ancient port cities in the Indian Ocean.
She has a live-in Indonesian maid who gets sick. Her husband rushes her to the hospital but the wife is scathing: why waste money on a maid? Later, the husband loses his job, and the wife is unable to find adequate employment, though she holds a masters degree in English from Universiti Malaya, the country's oldest and most prestigious institution.
She ends up swallowing her pride out of necessity, and signs up to become a maid to a middle-class Chinese family (she used to be one herself) in Hong Kong.
It turns out this story, especially as it shows the housewife eventually sliding into the shoes of her maid, is in fact an illustration of Malaysia's current oil-sheikhdom-gone-awry predicament. As I have lived in an emerging oil sheikhdom, namely Brazil (as from this year for the first time, only Venezuela in South America will produce more oil), I find Malaysia's woes of more than passing interest.
It is said that about a quarter of the country's current workforce is made up of foreign nationals. Nonetheless, there are many illegal workers as well, especially, but not only, from Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar (India, Nepal, Cambodia, and Vietnam also come to mind here, as well as the Philippines).Myanmar happens to be also the source of over 90 percent of Malaysia's registered (and unregistered) United Nations refugees (estimates are of well over 100,000 people), the overwhelming majority of whom (often children included) work to survive.
There is therefore no way of knowing with any certainty how many foreign workers actually live in the country, particularly as borders in Southeast Asia are also notoriously porous. While carrying out research fieldwork in my neighbourhood in Kuala Lumpur, namely Bukit Bintang, where there are sizable communities of Myanmarese and other workers, both legal and illegal, official refugees and aspirants to refugee status, I have learned a good deal about the underbelly of Malaysia's economic miracle.
Except for the undocumented, most of these people usually come to find employment through agents (both local and foreign) who typically gobble up a good deal of money from both workers and employers. Though most of my experience is related to workers in Bukit Bintang, a spell of fieldwork in Malacca has revealed that circumstances there are very similar, with salaries however generally lower than in Kuala Lumpur and other cities.
John’s not here anymore
John (not his real name) works undocumented because he cannot currently afford the fee. He works night shifts, from 4pm to 1am every evening. His workplace is a large, busy and modernised version of a kopitiam or local traditional Chinese coffee shop. On a busy evening, there are hundreds of customers.
As is usual in many Malaysian-run businesses (John's is owned by a local Chinese), there are not enough employees, and especially during busy times, the service is from bad to disastrous. Malaysian customers, however, do not seem to mind.
Apart from not hiring enough people - a very common practice - and paying them less than would be the case if the worker happened to be a Malaysian national (sometimes far less), workers are also almost as a matter of routine ruthlessly exploited in the hands of employers, agents, police and other people.
Last year, there was an advertisement in a local newspaper saying that the national association of mamak restaurant owners had requested the government for a further 40,000 workers to be brought from south India (usually Tamil Nadu), because locals could not stand (sic) the 12-hour daily shifts required by restaurant owners.
John for instance gets only one day off every month at his work. He told me he usually spends it sleeping as he is often very tired. The shop is also his residence: his boss has partitioned a floor above his business where now most of his workers sleep.
Anand, a young Nepalese who works at a venue next door - a middle-class coffee shop where prices are much higher than in the kopitiam, though salaries for foreign workers are nearly as low - also sleeps upstairs. He too seldom gets a day off.
He is locked up alone inside the shop for the night (he has no keys). I wonder how he would get out in case of, say, a fire. Not to mention that in many countries, it would be literally criminal to lock someone up like that.
Also, he does not hold his own passport (a very common practice in Malaysia, though, again, it may be a crime elsewhere). Instead, his employer holds it. Anand is nonetheless afraid of going anywhere, even on his day off, because he has no way of proving to the police that he is legally in the country.
John in Malacca tells me he cannot go back to Myanmar because he is a bad saver, and besides his salary is low (only RM800). John is still undocumented, but he told me he is not worried. He never goes anywhere anyway; also, because his boss now has good relations with the police (no doubt oiled by occasional handouts), the police never come to his workplace any more. He therefore feels safe and is unwilling to look for other employment. A case of better the devil one knows...
The sad end to this story is that, after an absence of a couple of months, I went back to the kopitiam in question, only to find out that John had eventually been caught in an ‘operasi’, or an immigration raid, together with nine other workers, all male and from Myanmar like him. They have been flown back to Myanmar, according to remaining workmates. A couple of new workers have been brought in, as there is of course no way the remaining workers could make up for the loss of 10 staff at the same time. All of them are again from Myanmar.At the famous tourist joint in the historic core of Malacca where he works, Aung is now on leave in Myanmar for a whole month for the first time in years. He told me just before leaving that he is very happy to go back as he has not seen his small daughter in years.
He is however very keen on ending what amounts to his indenture-ship in Malaysia, together with his wife, and move on to either Singapore or South Korea, where salaries are at least much higher than in Malaysia. If you are going to be ruthlessly exploited, better do it in a grand way.
Thrown into the treadmill
Coming back to the story above of the Malaysian middle-class housewife, who ends up finding herself compelled to seek employment as a maid to a middle-class Hong Kong family, I wonder what bringing both this story and Aung's and John's experiences together can teach us.
Current wisdom has it that a Malaysian housewife is comparatively privileged, as well as safe from the ups and downs of the labour market. Nonetheless, my impression is that both local housewife and foreign workers are ultimately on the same boat.
This may sound hard to believe. However, it is equally hard to avoid this conclusion, if we take into consideration the larger picture, namely, what is going on in Malaysia - and in Asia - right now concerning economic development.
Development as a process is based on value-extraction at all costs; the idea that income is king; the notion that workers need not be protected; and the conviction that the labour market ultimately can always be depended upon to regulate itself.
But development based on such fundamentals seems to be a bankrupt notion, to say the least. Yet it is one that rules development policies and practices all over the world.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has shown in his many works that real development must be based on a variety of complex, and yet intimately, besides empirically connected freedoms. Therefore, he believes that, for instance, a labour market where some workers are offered a modicum of protection, whereas others are not free, cannot really be called a developed society (or even a developing one).
In such a society, a housewife is at the end of the day not protected, as her labour, we must remember, usually goes unpaid because she is supposed to do it for free as she is a married woman and mother. Add to it the fact that foreign workers are routinely thrown into the treadmill, so to speak, and such practices seem a recipe for disaster in the long run, and not only for the housewife and foreign workers.Again following Amartya Sen, no development worth its name will happen based on lack of freedom in one part of society, as the fate of the housewife in the story above poignantly indicates. This is a very important lesson - ultimately, we cannot be free, however privileged we may be now if we keep others in bondage.
In other words, human freedom is not something that takes hold in the abstract realm of philosophical ideas: as Amartya Sen points out, it is empirically speaking a very complex web of connected freedoms, and therefore any instance of lack of freedom in one part of society will eventually trigger lack of freedom in any other part.
In this sense, Amartya Sen cogently reminds us time and again that the economy is a human construct, deeply rooted in human societies, not a realm based on extra-human laws, only fully understood by number-crunching wizards and their employers.
The problem here is therefore the creation and continuance of an exploitative society of rent-seekers, both big and small, ranging from the business tycoon to the kopitiam owner - and why not, also the housewife in her role as an employer. Everybody loses in the end in such a society, as Amartya Sen never tires of pointing out, even the rent-seekers.
In fact, the story of the housewife is a poignant reminder of this - if you give support to somebody's bondage, you risk becoming non-free yourself at some point. This is not necessarily divine retribution: as Amartya Sen shows in detail, it is actually an empirically observable, quantifiable and recurring fact.
In this sense, observing Malaysia and its woes can be a wonderful case study.
FRED ROSEN has been gallivanting around Southeast Asia for quite some time now. He is interested in foreign communities in Malaysia's large cities. He has also been writing about Malacca, both in the present and the past, as well as other ancient port cities in the Indian Ocean.
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