We are never too old to work, old is gold

Old Is Gold

NASIR Ahmad’s father, Ahmad Ismail or better known by his pseudonym Ahmady Asmara, was a legendary journalist and a sasterawan (man of letters). He used to work for publications like Saudara, Warta Ahad, Majlis and Utusan Zaman back in the 50s and 60s. Among his protege was the late Tan Sri Zainuddin Maidin (Zam).

Like his father, Nasir joined the press. In 1973, he started as a repor­­ter with the Utusan Melayu group. Eighteen years later, he joined Berita Harian.

Upon reaching 55, Nasir worked on a contract basis from 2011 to 2017. He has no major financial commitments and all except one of his four children are married.

In December 2017, he was diagnosed with colon cancer. It was devastating news to him and his family. He survived but his life was never the same again.

His close shave with death taught him many valuable lessons. For one, he can’t remain idle. He gets restless not doing anything.

He joined Grab service last August. It was more like an experiment for him initially. He was hooked. He has been driving ever since. In fact, he is one of Grab’s prized drivers, attaining 5-star ratings many times over. He starts around 10 in the morning and finishes around 9 at night, stopping only for prayers and lunch or quick bites.

Nasir is not alone. On May 2, this newspaper highlighted a growing number of Malaysians working well after 60.

For those who have their pension, they can afford to sit back and enjoy what’s left of their life. But things are not easy for others. They have mouths to feed. In most cases, adult children have their own commitments and parents seldom want to bother them over financial matters.

However, it is not easy to join the job market at that age even with experience and the necessary expertise. Nasir was a journalist; driving for Grab was a totally new experience.

As highlighted by this newspaper, based on a report published by the Institute of Labour Market Information and Analysis (Ilma), the supply of workers of Nasir’s age and above currently outstrips the demand for them.

According to the report, by 2030, the number of aged workers in Malaysia would be about 1.2 million but the demand for such workers would be just slightly a third of that.

If you are at Changi Airport, Singapore, most likely the first people you meet after the immigration officers are the ushers to guide you to the taxis. At most food courts, the elderly are employed to clear the trays or clean the floors.

There are certain jobs young people are not interested in. We see less of them here because the foreigners are doing the job for us.

Singapore, understandably, is giving a lot of attention to senior citizens. The republic is seriously looking into what it “needs to do differently in the coming years” as its population ages. In fact, it is considered one of the most urgent challenges for the government today.

The world population is ageing. According to the latest United Nations’ data, the number of those above 60 years globally is expected to more than double by 2050 and triple by 2100.

In 2017, there were 962 million of them, there will be 2.1 billion in 2050 and 3.1 billion in 2100. Shockingly too, according to the data, people aged 60 or above is growing faster than all younger age groups!

This is not just a problem in advanced countries. Most countries in the world have substantial numbers of ageing population. With better healthcare, humans are living longer.

There are loads of other issues pertaining to people of 60 and above. Moreover, living in the 21st century has its challenges.

There are issues about acceptability and competition with the younger generation, and certainly the need for respectability and dignity. But more importantly is coping with the demands at workplaces.

It is the question of how governments are coping with an ageing population.

One way is to make people work longer. We have done that, raising the retirement age to 60. Should we raise that to 65?

It is not a popular policy especially when younger people believe they will be deprived of the chance to climb up the ladder in public service or in the private sector.

The Global Age Watch Index Report shows high-income countries fare better in managing their ageing population. The enabling environment too for ageing people is much better in richer countries.

Like it or not, people of Nasir’s age are transforming society of today and the future. Just like the UN report on ageing says, ageing population is poised to become one of the most dramatic and significant transformations of the 21st century.

Never take Nasir and people his age for granted!

Johan Jaaffar was a journalist, editor and for some years, chairman of a media company, and is passionate about all things literature and the arts. The views expressed here are entirely his own.

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South Korea's latest big export: Jobless college graduates

South Korea's latest big export: Jobless college graduates - Reuters

Left: A jobseeker stands as he gets into the 2018 Japan Job Fair in Seoul, South Korea. Jobseekers attend the 2018 Japan Job Fair in Seoul, South Korea. (Filepics)

SEOUL: Cho Min-kyong boasts an engineering degree from one of South Korea's top universities, a school design award and a near-perfect score in her English proficiency test.

But she had all but given up hope of finding a job when all her 10 applications, including one to Hyundai Motor Co, were rejected in 2016.

Help came unexpectedly from neighboring Japan six months later: Cho got job offers from Nissan Motor Co and two other Japanese companies after a job fair hosted by the South Korean government to match the country's skilled labor with overseas employers.

"It's not that I wasn't good enough. There are just too many job seekers like me, that's why everyone just fails," said the 27-year-old, who now works in Atsugi, an hour southwest of Tokyo, as a car seat engineer for Nissan.

"There are numerous more opportunities outside Korea."

Facing an unprecedented job crunch at home, many young South Koreans are now signing up for government-sponsored programs designed to find overseas positions for a growing number of jobless college graduates in Asia's fourth largest economy.

State-run programs such as K-move, rolled out to connect young Koreans to "quality jobs" in 70 countries, found overseas jobs for 5,783 graduates last year, more than triple the number in 2013, its first year.

(Graphic: Korea's young talents going abroad png - https://tmsnrt.rs/2LwlSUU)

Almost one-third went to Japan, which is undergoing a historic labor shortage with unemployment at a 26-year low, while a quarter went to the United States, where the jobless rate dropped to the lowest in nearly half a century in April.

There are no strings attached. Unlike similar programs in places such as Singapore that come with an obligation to return and work for the government for up to six years, attendees of South Korea's programs are neither required to return, nor work for the state in the future.

"Brain drain isn't the government's immediate worry. Rather, it's more urgent to prevent them from sliding into poverty" even if it means pushing them abroad, said Kim Chul-ju, deputy dean at the Asian Development Bank Institute.

In 2018, South Korea generated the smallest number of jobs since the global financial crisis, only 97,000.

Nearly one in five young Koreans was out of work as of 2013, higher than the average 16 percent among the member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

In March, one in every four Koreans in the 15-29 age group was not employed either by choice or due to the lack of jobs, according to government data.

(Graphic: S.Koreans landing overseas jobs by country 2018 png - https://tmsnrt.rs/2DZCTR9)

LABOR MISMATCH

While India and other countries face similar challenges in creating jobs for skilled labor, the dominance of family-run conglomerates known as chaebol makes South Korea uniquely vulnerable.

The top 10 conglomerates including world-class brands such as Samsung and Hyundai, make up half of South Korea's total market capitalization.

But only 13 percent of the country's workforce is employed by firms with more than 250 employees, the second lowest after Greece in the OECD, and far below the 47 percent in Japan. "The big companies have mastered a business model to survive without boosting hiring," as labor costs rise and firing legacy workers remains difficult, said Kim So-young, an economics professor at Seoul National University.

Yet while increasing numbers of college graduates are moving overseas for work, South Korea is bringing in more foreigners to solve another labor problem – an acute shortage of blue collar workers.

South Korea has the most highly educated youth in the OECD, with three-quarters of high school students going to college, compared with the average of 44.5 percent.

"South Korea is paying the price for its overprotection of top-tier jobs and education fervor that produced a flood of people wanting only that small number of top jobs," said Ban Ga-woon, a labor market researcher at state-run Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education & Training.

Even amid a glut of over-educated and under-employed graduates, most refuse to "get their hands dirty", says Lim Chae-wook, who manages a factory making cable trays that employs 90 people in Ansan, southwest of Seoul. "Locals simply don’t want this job cause they think its degrading, so we're forced to hire a lot of foreign workers," Lim said, pointing to nearly two dozens workers from the Philippines, Vietnam and China working in safety masks behind welding machines.

In the southwestern city of Gwangju, Kim Yong-gu, the chief executive of Kia Motor supplier Hyundai Hitech, says foreign workers are more expensive but he has no choice as he can't find enough locals to fill vacancies.

"We pay for accommodation, meals and other utility costs in order not to lose them to another factory," said Kim. Out of a staff of 70, 13 are Indonesian nationals, who sleep and eat at a building next to his factory.

NO HAPPY ENDING FOR EVERYONE

For those who escaped Korea's tough job market, not all has been rosy.


Several people who found overseas jobs with government help say they ended up taking menial work, such as dishwashing in Taiwan and meat processing in rural Australia, or were misinformed about pay and conditions.

Lee Sun-hyung, a 30-year old athletics major, used K-move to go to Sydney to work as a swim coach in 2017 but earned less than $A600 ($419) a month, one-third what her government handlers told her in Seoul.

"It wasn't what I had hoped for. I could not even afford to pay rent," said Lee, who ended up cleaning windows at a fashion store part-time before she returned home broke less than a year later.

Officials say they are making a "black list" of employers and improving the vetting process to prevent recurrence of such cases. The labor ministry also established a "support and reporting center" to better respond to problems.

Many on the programs lose touch once they go overseas. Almost 90 percent of the graduates who went abroad with the government's help between 2013-2016 didn't respond to the labor ministry's requests about their whereabouts or changed their contact details, a 2017 survey showed.

Still, the grim job market at home is driving more Koreans to the program every year. The government has also increased relevant budget to support rising demand - from 57.4 billion won ($48.9 million) in 2015 to 76.8 billion won in 2018, data released by lawmaker Kim Jung-hoon shows.

"The government isn't scaling up this project to the extent we would worry about brain drain," said Huh Chang, head of the development finance bureau at South Korea's finance ministry, which co-manages state-run vocational training programs with the labor ministry. Rather, the focus was on meeting growing demand for overseas experience given so many graduates are outside the workforce, Huh added.

A hopeful scenario would be for the economy to one day make use of the resources these graduates bring home as experienced returnees, Huh said.

For 28-year-old K-move alumni Lee Jae-young, that feels like a distant prospect.

"The one year abroad added a line in my resume, but that was about it," said Lee, who returned to Korea in February after working as a cook at the JW Marriott hotel in Texas. "I'm back home and still looking for a job." - Reuters

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‘Money/cash is King’ comes back to bite Pakatan

Politicians using cash to buy power and votes has created a culture in Malaysia in which people have started valuing money more than truth, hard work and honesty. 

THE enduring potency of the ringgit caused by former Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s “Cash is King” regime came in for much ridicule in the last election campaign, much to the chagrin of the perpetrator of this philosophy.

In all his speeches and media interviews in the last two years before 2018’s 14th General Election, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad never failed to hammer home the point that Najib told him this when he asked why he was giving out cash hand-outs in so many forms to the people, and very freely too.

His intended message to the voters was that Najib used this tactic to “buy” votes, as Malaysians will eventually be beholden and grateful to the man who dishes out cash. Whether those receiving it deserved it or not did not matter, everyone wanted the money and many did not care where it came from.

For a long time, money and power worked like a firewall around Najib and his Cabinet, which made him believe cash was indeed king as they blithely went about plundering the nation.

It has been established or is being established at Najib’s on-going corruption trial involving the alleged siphoning of funds from SRC International Sdn Bhd, that money was freely dished out for political support, popularity and reverence, among others.

Mahathir’s campaign was direct and simple, that it was borrowed money and stolen funds from the people that was being given out, and this campaign strategy worked. It thus showed that anti-corruption is an easy sell and proved that most Malaysian voters did care about abstract ethical issues like corruption.

Unbelievably, even many of the beneficiaries of Najib’s largesse had obviously voted against Barisan Nasional while some others became turncoats shamelessly, leaving the flagging party.

But one year after dismantling the Cash is King mantra, it somehow appears to be coming back to bite Dr Mahathir and the Pakatan Harapan leadership. The new mantra among many Malaysians now is that they don’t seem to have enough money all the time.

True, the cost of living never came down substantially after the abolition of the GST (goods and services tax), but we cannot deny that it did lower shopping bills in places like hypermarkets as there was no SST (sales and services tax) levied at such outlets.

RON 95 petrol, which is currently used by most motorists, is capped at RM2.08 a litre which is about 40 sen lower than the actual price it would have been if the old managed float system based on global crude oil prices was in place

Not very tangible for the average Malaysian, right? Do they even care to understand the intangibles that they are benefiting from as a result of several new policies and taxes? No! Looks like Malaysians are not prepared to ask what they can do for the country, it is always what the country must do for them.

Nearly every person I meet seems to have just one thing to say: nothing has come down. All prices have remained the same while some have only gone up. And that Pakatan has not delivered or is slow in keeping its promises.

And strangely, I have been noticing a pattern where those providing certain home services like courier and telecommunication technicians actually volunteer to say that times were better under the Barisan government as they had more money to spend.

“It is very difficult now, we have less money to spend compared to last time when BN was in power. Pakatan Harapan is not keeping its promises,” a Pos Laju staff told a friend of mine without being asked.

I’m one who views surveys by certain groups and parties, especially the random ones, warily as the respondents do not necessarily reflect the actual feelings on the ground. So I make it a point to talk to strangers about this subject whether in public stations or while in a queue waiting to pay something.

What I notice is that while people may be a tad bit sympathetic when I tell them they have to give Pakatan more time because of certain extenuating circumstances, generally, they are unhappy.

The bottom line of their unhappiness now is all about cash. They are receiving less money from the government, never mind what they were enjoying in the past was stolen or borrowed money.

This group of people don’t seem to be outraged, which we all should naturally be, at past leaders who had virtually abused their power to rob the nation’s coffers, a fact which has emerged or is being exposed in many key institutions.

They claim that the BR1M (Bantuan Rakyat 1Malaysia) payments are now lower and many recipients have also been removed from the list as they do not qualify under the minimum household income requirement. So what is wrong with that? Why do you want money that does not belong to you or you don’t deserve?

Yes, it’s true that the Bantuan Sara Hidup (BSH, as BR1M is now called) has been reduced by RM200 to RM1,000 but Pakatan has made sure that only really needy Malaysians get such welfare aid, as it had been greatly abused in the past.

And to make sure those really in need receive more help, the government is giving out an additional RM100 for each child below 18 years of age whose guardians are BSH recipients, for a maximum of four children. And if the child is disabled, it is for a lifetime, no age limit. So if a BSH recipient has four children below 18, he or she gets a total of RM1,420. This is higher than before.

Malaysia has thrived because of a culture of opportunity that encourages hard work in the private sector. Of course, the social restructuring policy, which was aimed at giving a hand to the have-nots to give them a lift, played a role.

But this should not go on forever, the number must reduce eventually as those benefiting should finally be able to help their families to grow away from this dependency.

The growth of this form of welfare state funded by projected or borrowed income -- or worse still, by funds siphoned from government coffers -- is turning Malaysia into a land where many expect, and see no stigma attached, to receive regular financial support.

I find this a growing and dangerous trend, when undeserving Malaysians sit back idly and wait for these cash hand-outs as an entitlement instead of a privilege. And what’s more distressing is to see politicians feeding this cancer as a way of continuing to stay in power.

The actual meaning of the phrase “Cash is King”, as most of us know, is a term reflecting the belief that cash money is more valuable than any other form of investment tool for businesses. For individuals, it is meant to be a fund which is easily accessible for urgent expenditures or purchases.

It is not a phrase that politicians or others use to indicate that they can buy power and votes so that they are able to be in absolute control of the nation for as long as they want. Unfortunately, though, many have done this and it has created a culture in Malaysia in which the people have started valuing money more than truth, hard work and honesty.

Cash is not king when it is stolen from others or, worse still, from public funds placed under your trust or control. That is called cashing in. It is surely not king if it is obtained by unfair trade practices or it is beyond a fair deal.

In this context, something that Dr Mahathir said about two years before the last election shortly after he decided to re-enter politics stands out in my mind. He had said: “You see the collapse of moral values in Malaysia is terrible. In the future we are going to be like those countries where bribery is a part of daily life -- you can’t do anything without bribery.”

This is what he is trying to dismantle after he came back into politics at the age of 93, so we should give our wholehearted support to him and Pakatan for a better and cleaner Malaysia for all.

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