The Involvement of Local Skilled Labour in Malaysia’s Construction Industry

Abstract

In the 80s, Malaysia was one of the fastest developing countries with the introduction and development of mega-projects in the region. As reported by (Ibrahim et al., 2010), the construction industry plays an important role in the country's transition and its goal of becoming a developed country. It is expected that the Economic Transformation Program (ETP), the 11th Malaysia Plan (11 MP), and the 12th Malaysia Plan (12 MP), will transform Malaysia into one of the world's high-income nations. According to Olanrewaju et al. (2017), over the next 10 years, the country will need over one million construction workers. Olanrewaju et al. (2017) added that one of the Malaysian construction industry's biggest challenges is the lack of skilled labour. Mustafa Kamal et al. (2012) stated that the construction industry in Malaysia is still struggling with many problems and is associated with low quality, low productivity, unskilled labour, project delays, poor maintenance, non-conducting, and high on-site accident rates. The government aims to be a world-class, creative and knowledgeable solution provider for the Malaysian construction industry. To achieve the aim, the government, together with the CIDB, has made many efforts to upgrade the level of knowledge and skills among the construction players (Construction Industry Development Board Malaysia 2021). In the construction industry, 93% of registered foreign labourers with CIDB are unskilled labourers (Hisyam 2015). This was echoed by Hamzah et al. (2020) and Mohd Fateh et al. (2020), since most foreign labour comes from other countries, such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, and is mostly unskilled labour. Many of them come from their county and only have basic construction knowledge. This issue has resulted directly in the lack of building expert labour in this country as work from these small nations has exposure to limited knowledge. The recruitment of low-salary foreign labour may ease the expenditure of the contractor, but it will not ensure the quality or even benefit of the Malaysian people.The rapid development of the construction industry causes the demand for labour to increase, and the lack of local participation cannot meet the demand. Labour is one of the most constrained challenges faced by the Malaysian construction industry as the nation relies too heavily on a large foreign labour workforce (Najib et al., 2019). In the Malaysian construction industry, skilled labourers such as bricklayers, carpenters, painters, electricians, welders, plumbers, plant operators, among others, form a large part of the site labour force whose input determines, to a great extent, the quality of the industry's product. The common problems of low-skilled labour participation in construction have been traced to the unfair salary of labour, poor safety in construction sites, lack of clear-cut career paths, diminishing skilled labour training programs, and delays in the schedule of work on-site (Hussain, Xuetong, and Hussain 2020). Lingard (2013) reported that around 60-90% o...

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