Over-work and the generation gap

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M'sians working more and carrying home more work

Monday Starters - By Soo Ewe Jin

ACCORDING to a global survey by Regus, Malaysians are not only clocking more hours at work but bringing their office load back home as well.

I can already see many of you, especially young workers in consultancy firms, nodding your heads in agreement. And today is only Monday.

The article on the survey findings, written by my colleague Yuen Mei Keng and published in this newspaper last Wednesday, was aptly headlined “Malaysians too hardworking”.

Regus is the world’s largest provider of workplace solutions so it obviously has the credentials to carry out the survey which involved some 12,000 business people in 85 countries.

The findings of interest to us – 47% of Malaysian workers take tasks home to finish at the end of the day for more than three times a week, compared to 43% globally; 15% regularly work for more than 11 hours a day, compared with 10% globally.

William Willems, regional vice-president for Regus Australia, New Zealand and South-East Asia, says the study found “a clear blurring” of the line separating work and home.

 

File picture shows Mohd Rasul (centre), who is handicapped from birth, showing his skill working with computer using his toes. The computer was donated by superstar Anita Sarawak. Looking on were Hamidah (right) and Mohd Ramli (left). - Starpic by ROSHIDI ABU SAMAH.

“The long-term effects of such over-work could be damaging to both workers’ health and overall productivity.

“This is because workers may drive themselves too hard and become disaffected, depressed and even physically ill.”

Sounds rather ominous but I doubt if anyone is going to lobby the Government for policy changes so that people don’t work so hard.



After all, many are fighting to raise the retirement age in the private sector to 60, the same as that in the Government sector.

The Regus report should be seen in the right perspective of how different generations view work because of different circumstances.

Our problem has always been that the earlier generations control the workplace environment and are not as sympathetic about the realities of today.

I must confess that when young people seek my advice, I still cannot resist telling them that I started on a salary of RM135 and had to work, for many years, on the graveyard shift. Although I feel they need to experience pain before pleasure and appreciate the value of hard work, it often does not come across like that from their perspective.

They probably see me as the old foggie who did not have any form of social life back then, so spending all my waking hours in the office was the only thing to do.

But we need to understand that the world has changed so much from the time of the baby boomers to the current Generation Y.

Advances in technology, which allow the workforce to stay connected without being together physically, may, in some industries, make even the standard 9 to 5 routine in the office outdated.

Being hardworking is a positive trait for all good workers but if we are working too hard, and chalking unnecessary extra hours that cause severe strain on our home life, then maybe something is not right.

I am glad that we are beginning to see many enlightened bosses who value a proper work-life balance for their workers but they are still in the minority.

I have a dear friend who works in a rather high position in a multinational who told me that whenever she was at headquarters in Europe, she is reminded that no one is allowed to work beyond office hours unless a written request is submitted.

“They shut down the office after 5 so you had better have a strong case to want the lights and air-conditioner on,” she said.

No wonder she is so happy that she has been posted to headquarters permanently.

Her Facebook sharing is full of her travel stories and picnics in the park that I sometimes wonder if she is even working at all.

Deputy executive editor Soo Ewe Jin will remember 11.11.11 as the day he missed a most meaningful reunion in Penang of Old Frees from his year who came from near and far to catch up with one another.

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PRM, the Seladang's Resurgence in Malaysian politics?

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No bowing out for the seladang

One Man's Meat By Philip Golingai

PRM, the only left-wing party in the country, is looking for a resurgence in the coming general election

A DIE-HARD Parti Rakyat Malaysia (PRM) supporter trudged up a long flight of stairs to the party headquarters on the third floor of a shoplot in Petaling Jaya.

I could literally hear the 57-year-old man’s knee creaking as he spiritedly - one step at a time - advanced towards where PRM was celebrating its 56th birthday on Friday.

On the way up, he talked about the days in the 1960s when, as a boy, he put up PRM posters during the election campaign against the “kapal layar” (the sailboat logo of the Alliance, predecessor to Barisan Nasional).

Quiet celebration: Joining Rohana in cutting the PRM anniversary cake are (from left) treasurer Teh Soon Ming, secretary-general R.N. Rajah and central working committee member Zulkarnain Abdullah at the party headquarters in Petaling Jaya last Friday.

“It was during the Vietnam War era when anti-Americanism was the rage and support for the party was at its height,” he recalled.

PRM won the parliamentary seats of Kuala Lumpur and Johor Baru in the 1959 general election.

At 11am sharp on 11.11.11, PRM president Rohana Ariffin and her comrades cut a cake with the party’s logo - the head of a seladang (the Malayan gaur), witnessed by about 50 people, including two party members who were ISA detainees.

After the party, I spoke to Rohana, a retired associate professor of Universiti Sains Malaysia.

A bit wary of attending a party with leftist leanings as it is the season to attack all things linked to Socialism, I asked the president to explain her party.
 
“The socialist party - as far as we know it in Malaysia - believes in the democratic process of being elected into power and not through armed revolution,” said the 60-something who was wearing a red bandana.

“If you ask what socialist ideology is, it believes that all production of the country should be for the consumption of the rakyat first and not so much for profit.

“You can make a certain amount of profit but the rakyat’s interest comes first, especially that of the working class.”

PRM is one of Malaysia’s oldest political parties. It was founded as Parti Rakyat on Nov 11, 1955 by Ahmad Boestamam, Dr Burhanuddin Al Helmy and Ishak Mohamad.

“The party was strong in the 1960s and 1970s. But since it was the only legitimate left-wing party in the country at that time, the Government came down hard on people with socialist ideologies,” said Rohana.



“When you look at the evolution of the party, most PRM leaders (such as Boestamam, Kassim Ahmad and Syed Husin Ali) have been detained in prison.”

In 2003, PRM was thought to have been dissolved when it merged with Parti Keadilan Nasional to form Parti Keadilan Rakyat.

“At that time, the party leadership was quite ‘tired’ because society would not accept us as they saw PRM as left-wing and there was a popular movement which was Keadilan, so they decided to merge.”

However, like the seladang, PRM stubbornly refused to become extinct.

“The only problem with the merger was that we should have had a last delegates’ meeting to dissolve the party in an honourable manner,” Rohana recalled.

But in the haste to merge, the leadership “forgot” to do so.

In 2005, die-hard supporters convened a national congress and “resurrected” the party as it was never de-registered.

During the interview with Rohana, PRM supporters would quietly slip RM10 or RM50 to the party president as they bid goodbye to her.

“This is our culture,” she explained. “We are a very poor party and we rely on financial support from our members. Usually what we do is pay with our own money for an event we organise and then our members will give donations.”

It is heart-warming for Rohana to see die-hard supporters climb the steps to attend the party’s event.

“For example, there was a 70-something member who came from Sungai Tembiling (in Pahang) by boat and bus and he told me, ‘Parti Rakyat is my party and I will never change’,” Rohana related.

“And even among the young the spirit is there. Our party is rejuvenated by the young who are interested in left-wing politics.”

The young, she said, were fed up with the infighting in Parliament between the Government and the Opposition.

“There is no compromise or middle ground in any issue that the two coalitions can’t see the trees for the forest.”

The party is seeking relevance in the next election.

It is targeting to contest in seats like Selayang, Balik Pulau and Petaling Jaya Selatan.

The seladang, which can’t be put to pasture, is hoping left-wing politics will make a resurgence.

Judicial diversity creates confidence

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Comment By Roger Tan

Judicial diversity and meritocracy should go hand in hand. A judiciary that does not reflect society’s diversity will ultimately lose the confidence of that society.

ENGLAND’S senior judiciary has often been described as “pale, male and stale” – that is a white, male-dominated bench.

This is understandable because despite many calls over the years for more diversity in judicial appointments, women and ethnic minorities are still sorely under-represented in the highest echelons of England’s judiciary.

Today, Lady Brenda Hale still remains the sole woman justice out of 12 places in the highest court of the United Kingdom, now known as the Supreme Court. First appointed to the House of Lords as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary (Law Lord) on Jan 12, 2004, she was reappointed to the new Supreme Court when it replaced the House of Lords in 2009.

In October this year, Rabinder Singh became the first Sikh, a non-white, to be appointed a High Court judge of England and Wales. There is no law lord from an ethnic minority. This year two more white men, Jonathan Sumption, QC and Lord Justice Wilson, were appointed to the Supreme Court.

Holding court: Former Chief Justice Tan Sri Zaki Azmi (front row, second from left) chairing a meeting of judges from Kuala Lumpur and Shah Alam. The Judicial Appointments Commission should always encourage a diverse judiciary which is more representative of the make-up of our country. — Bernama
 

The President of the Supreme Court, Lord Phillips, did remark recently that he would like the Supreme Court to be 50/50 men and women from the point of perception, but he stressed that it was more important to consider judicial selections based on merit.

Lord Hope, the Deputy President, was more hopeful, however. “It’s a great mistake to rush it forward and say that diversity must prevail over merit. The system depends on skilled people who can actually do the job and we can’t afford to have passengers here, just in the name of diversity,” he said.

But is this insistence on merit reasonable when actually it is a non-issue? Or is it simply an excuse not to effect judicial diversity speedily? If so, then perhaps the very definition of what is merit should be re-examined.

In fact, leading the call for more women and ethnic minority judges in the courts is none other than Hale herself. She said she was rather tired of being repeatedly told that change was “a matter of time”, but change never came.

Recently, Hale told the House of Lords constitution committee that “the lack of diversity on the bench is a constitutional issue”.

On Nov 3, the Guardian newspaper reported Hale as arguing before the committee that judges would approach issues differently based on their background, and that a lack of diversity could also change the substantive results of cases (“Resistance to diversity among judges is misguided”).

She added that in “disputed points you need a diversity of perspectives and life experiences to get the possible results”, particularly how the gender of justices would matter in cases such as child-birth and rape.

In fact, this argument that diversity enriches judicial decision-making and that the outcome of a case is often influenced by a judge’s background is not new.

In 1981, Professor J.A. Griffiths wrote in The Politics of Judiciary that English judges were neither entirely objective nor neutral in their decisions because their decisions often reflected their own political outlook and attitude.



For Malaysia, the above issues are even more relevant as ours is a multi-racial, multi-religious and polyglot society.

So how does Malaysia fare with judicial diversity? Is ours a more representative bench?

The table shows the racial composition and gender of the judges in our superior courts.

As the table shows, there is a fair number of women and non-Malay judges at the High Court level, but not in the appellate courts.

In fact, since Merdeka, only one white, two Chinese, one Indian and one woman were appointed to head the High Court of Malaya. They were, respectively, Tun James Beveridge Thomson (1957-1963); Tan Sri Ong Hock Thye (1968-1973) and Tan Sri Gunn Chit Tuan (1992-1994); Tan Sri Sarwan Singh Gill (1974-1979); and Tan Sri Siti Norma Yaakob (2004-2006).

Further, the members of our Judicial Appointments Commission comprise six Malays, one Chinese, one Indian and one east Malaysia bumiputra, and only one of the nine members is a woman.

To my mind, the situation could be due to a dearth of non-Malays in the Judicial and Legal Services, but overall women still outnumber men in this sector.

Currently, in respect of Sessions Court judges, there are 119 Malays (56 are women), two Chinese (women), five Indians (three are women), nine east Malaysia bumiputras (four are women) and one Others (a woman).

For Magistrates, there are 139 Malays (84 are women), two Chinese (men), one Indian (woman) and four east Malaysia bumiputras (all men).

However, there are probably more non-Malays serving in the Attorney General’s Chambers. But if other judicial officers such as deputy and assistant registrars are added, women would almost double men.

This is not a new phenomenon as, in the last two years, women have doubled the number of men entering the legal profession.

Of course, non-Malay law graduates prefer to enter the legal profession rather than join the Judicial and Legal Services with the view, whether rightly or wrongly, that private practice is more lucrative.

In fact, with the revised remuneration scheme, the current basic pay of a magistrate who is a fresh law graduate is RM1989.45 (with additional perks worth about RM1,000 depending on the location where the magistrate serves). This, of course, is far better off than his predecessor in earlier days, like in the early 1980s when a magistrate’s basic pay was only about RM1,050.

In any event, if the reason for under-representation in the appellate judiciary by non-Malays is due to a lack of meritorious candidates in the Judicial and Legal Services, then resort should be had to the pool of meritorious candidates among senior members of the Bar just like in the case of Jonathan Sumption, QC who recently made history by being the first lawyer to be elevated directly to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.

Having said that, let no one mistake me as advocating a quota system or positive discrimination on the grounds of gender, race and religion in judicial appointments because that would go against Article 8(2) of the Federal Constitution.

I am also mindful of the views expressed by some women judges themselves, such as the former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Justice Claire L’Heureux-Dubé. She argued that it was not enough to have simply more women or minorities on the bench. “What we need”, as she was quoted by Australian judge, Justice McHugh, “is a change in attitudes, not simply a change in chromosomes.”

I disagree. If there exists a total absence or a huge disproportionate presence of women and minorities at appellate courts, something must be wrong somewhere.

It is my considered opinion that the Judicial Appointments Commission should always encourage a diverse judiciary which is more representative of the make-up of our country.

We must also correct any perception that our judges, who are the arbiters of civil laws, are not fair and independent especially when they adjudicate upon sensitive issues such as race and religion.

It follows that who we appoint to the seat of justice is a matter of life and death. As one of America’s finest trial lawyers, Gerry Spence, put it so trenchantly: “Who are these judges who wield such power over us, a power reserved for God?

Who are these mere humans with the power to wrest children from their mothers and to condemn men to death or cage them like beasts in penitentiaries? Who possesses the power to strip us of our professions, our possessions, our very lives?

“They make law. They may take away your wife or your good name or your freedom or your fortune or your life. They are omnipotent.

And the question is: To whom have we so carelessly granted that power? Are they the kind who would understand you, who from their experiences would know something of the fears and struggles you have faced? Will they care about you or about justice?”

It is, therefore, my honest view that judicial diversity and meritocracy should go hand in hand because a judiciary which does not reflect the society’s diversity will ultimately lose the confidence of that society.

In other words, the strength of any judiciary is primarily dependent on public confidence even if seated on the bench are monolithic judges who are most meritorious.

This is achievable if there is the political will, and one only need to look at how successfully Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did in bringing diversity to the American judiciary.

The writer is a senior lawyer and a former member of the Malaysian Bar Council.

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