KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 26 — Despite the high demand here, recruitment agencies have been forced to switch their business or close shop due to the dwindling supply of workers from neighbouring Asian nations, Singapore’s Straits Times (ST) reported today.
The exorbitant cost of recruiting workers from Indonesia and the Philippines, a Cambodian ban on its people working as domestic helpers and language barriers with Sri Lankans and Vietnamese have hobbled the industry’s growth, the republic’s newspaper reported.
“My colleagues are opening spas and restaurants to stay in business,” Fiona Low, a 20-year veteran at the Sri Nadin maid recruiting agency here, told ST.
There are fewer than 200 active maid recruitment agencies now, according to data from the Malaysian Association of Foreign Maids Agencies, compared to 380 in service before June 2009, when Jakarta imposed a ban on sending its people here to work as maids.
And Malaysia’s domestic helper industry, which used to rake in an annual turnover of RM300 million, has shrunk to nearly half its yearly value at RM160 million, the paper reported, citing data from the Malaysia National Association of Employment Agencies.
Part of the reason appears to less than attractive salaries available here, compared to the pay offered by employers elsewhere, especially in the Far East.
For Indonesians, it is more lucrative to work as a maid in Hong Kong and Taiwan where the average monthly wage is the equivalent of RM2,292, or in Singapore where they draw an average of RM1,200.
By contrast, the average monthly salary for Indonesian maids in Malaysia remain at around RM700, despite the RM900 floor wage policy set by Putrajaya after Jakarta lifted the ban in 2011.
Indonesian maids had formed nearly 90 per cent of the industry’s workers before the 2009 moratorium here and remain the most popular supplier of domestic workers to Malaysia due to similar language and other cultural habits.
Last year, 238,000 Indonesians left home to work as maids abroad compared to some 451,000 in 2010, ST reported in a separate article.
As Indonesia’s economy improves, fewer seem inclined to seek job prospects abroad in menial labour, the paper reported.
“The pay is greater overseas but living costs are also higher.
“More and more people prefer to stay and work with less risk and near families,” Indonesia’s Manpower and Transmigration Ministry spokesman Suhartono was quoted as saying.
The Indonesian government is also working to provide its people with formal training in skilled jobs such as nursing to raise their job prospects at home, in a bid to halt sending them abroad to work as maids by 2017, ST reported.
But the decline in Malaysia’s lucrative foreign maid trade has also been felt in Indonesia, the Singapore paper reported.
“We are trying to figure out exactly what caused this,” Rusjdi Basalamah, who owns an agency in Indonesia that sends maids abroad, told the daily.
“Tough regulations — more red tape — and better economies in the (maids’) stronghold regions could be among the reasons.”
Closer to home, Malaysians have been compelled to turn to childcare care centres and part-time cleaners to run their households as foreign live-in maids opt out of the country.
As a result, part-time cleaning services and childcare centres have experienced a boom even after Indonesia lifted its moratorium on maids.
Citing Norman Chin, who owns Ray K Cleaning Services in Petaling Jaya, ST reported the company had expanded its number of cleaners to 40 in a year from 10 previously.
Childcare centres here, which numbered 245 in 2008, according to ST’s data, have grown to 2,045 last year.
The federal government has also budgeted RM15 million in incentives to set up at least 1,000 more such centres this year to cut dependence on hiring foreign maids to care for Malaysian children.
“Definitely lower maid hiring is helping the industry to grow,” Radziah Daud, head of the National Association of Early Childhood Care and Education, told ST.
“But parents must also be willing to pay as demand for centres grows,” she was quoted as saying.
