Changing labour relations in Malaysia 1970s–1990s
Amarjit Kaur (University of New England) published this article in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2000, examining the twin transformations of Malaysia’s labour market between the 1970s and 1990s: the feminization of the domestic workforce and the rapid shift from net labour exporter to net labour importer. Her overarching thesis is that both processes are interlocking links in a single chain of capitalist development, in which women—local and migrant—have been relegated to the position of Malaysia’s cheapest and most abundant resource available to international capital (pp. 1–2, 8).
Summary
Kaur traces Malaysia’s structural transformation from a predominantly resource-based economy (agriculture at 32 per cent of GDP in 1970) to an industrialized one (manufacturing at 27 per cent by 1990), arguing that this shift produced a profound increase in women’s paid labour force participation, rising from 29.9 per cent in 1957 to 47.2 per cent in 1996 (pp. 2, 5). She identifies three drivers: post-independence immigration restrictions that opened jobs to domestic workers, the New Economic Policy’s expansion of education and positive discrimination for Malays, and export-oriented industrialization that recruited women on the basis of economic rationality—cheap, docile, and available (p. 4). The manufacturing sectors that absorbed this labour, particularly electronics and textiles, were characterized by patriarchal management, short contracts, insecurity of tenure, and the systematic exclusion of independent trade unions, with in-house unions only permitted in electronics from 1988 (pp. 6–7).
The second major transition Kaur documents is the rapid migration shift between 1987 and 1993, during which Malaysia moved from being a net exporter of skilled and semi-skilled workers (principally to Singapore, the Middle East, and the West) to a net importer of unskilled labour, reaching approximately two million foreign workers—roughly a quarter of the total labour force (pp. 8–9). This inflow was concentrated in construction (30 per cent), agriculture and forestry (30 per cent), and non-governmental services including domestic work (30 per cent), with Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Bangladesh as the principal sending countries (p. 9). The gendered character of this migration is pronounced: Indonesian female migrants outnumbered males by more than two to one in documented flows, and Filipino migrants were overwhelmingly women employed as domestic helpers (pp. 10–11).
Kaur’s analytical framework insists that the colonial legacy of an ethnic and gendered division of labour has not been erased but reconfigured. While the identification of race with occupation has been largely eroded by state policy, the gendered division of labour remains very much alive, with women channeled into unskilled and semi-skilled roles, denied training opportunities, and rendered a secondary workforce (p. 8). The ‘new’ migrant labour reproduces this pattern at an international scale, as local women ‘graduate’ to other gender-bearing jobs while migrant women absorb the most stigmatized and exploitative positions (pp. 11–12).
Key Findings
- Total employment grew from 4.0 million in 1970 to 6.1 million in 1990 and an estimated 8.39 million by 1996, with an average annual labour force growth rate of 2.33 per cent over 1970–1990 (p. 2).
- Just over 95 per cent of new jobs created in manufacturing between 1980 and 1986/7 were taken up by women, and during the 1970s the average annual growth rate of women in manufacturing was 16.6 per cent (pp. 5–6).
- Between 1983 and 1985, more than half the workers retrenched in the manufacturing sector were women, principally from electronics and textiles, demonstrating their status as the most vulnerable to economic downturns (p. 6).
- By the mid-1990s, approximately two million foreign workers constituted 9.5 per cent of Malaysia’s total population of 21 million and a quarter of the 8 million labour force, with only 750,000 being documented/registered (p. 9).
- Indonesian emigration to Malaysia grew from 12 workers in Plan I (1969–74) to 156,312 in Plan V (1989–94), while total Indonesian emigration rose from 5,624 to 652,272 over the same period (Table 2, p. 10).
- In the issuance of temporary work passes in Peninsular Malaysia (July 1992–December 1995), Indonesians accounted for 64.96 per cent of all passes, followed by Bangladeshis at 20.96 per cent and Filipinos at 7.09 per cent (Table 3, p. 12).
Conclusion
Kaur’s definitive historical takeaway is that Malaysia’s development model has produced a dual exploitation of women’s labour—first through the domestic feminization of the industrial workforce under conditions of patriarchal control and union exclusion, and second through the international feminization of migrant labour in the most stigmatized service occupations. The state’s industrialization strategy, its immigration control apparatus, and its promotion of in-house unionism have collectively secured conditions for the domination of labour, ensuring that both local and migrant women remain in exploitative relationships that serve the logic of capital rather than the interests of workers (pp. 7–8, 11–12).
Context
- The article draws on unpublished immigration data from the Bahagian Sistem Maklumat dan Rekod, Jabatan Imigresen Malaysia, as cited in Azizah Kassim’s 1997 study in Indonesia and the Malay World (pp. 12–13).
- Kaur’s earlier publications on Indian plantation workers, coal miners, and railway workers in Malaya (1980–1957) inform her analysis of the colonial ethnic division of labour that structured the pre-independence labour market (n. 3, p. 2).