by NUR HANANI AZMAN / pic by TMR FILE

THE Malaysian Rubber Glove Manufacturers Association (Margma) is making an urgent appeal to the government to allow foreign worker intake as soon as possible as there has been a factory worker shortage of 25,000 since 2019.

President Dr Supramaniam Shanmugam said the rubber glove industry is currently facing a critical level of shortage in factory workers that are needed to meet the increasing global demand.

“We have the production capacity, but not enough workers to utilise the production capacity to its optimum. We need to fill this gap of factory worker shortage immediately or lose out on capacity building to fulfil global orders and demand.

“As an urgent remedy, we plead for foreign worker intakes as industry players are prepared to fulfil the terms and requirements for the hiring process, adhering to all other procedures including absorbing costs for necessary RTK and PCR tests, quarantine, sanitising and other standard operating procedures,” he said in a statement yesterday.

Despite the Human Resources Ministry’s local hiring programmes such as JobsMalaysia and PenjanaKerjaya since 2019, the best efforts made by industry players have been met with little success. The take-up rate is way below Margma’s targeted 10,000 local workers.

Supramaniam said operating rubber glove factories at times like these is most challenging, where 2021 and 2022 will go down historically as an unprecedented operating period for most players.

“Some of our foreign workers on leave are still stuck in their home countries and are not able to return to Malaysia while others for whom levy has already been paid, are yet to arrive.

“We have also been actively engaging with embassies who are making the same calls as us,” he added.

Malaysian rubber glove producers are now facing intense competition from China. To maintain the country’s No 1 global position, industry players must first be able to keep up with capacity fulfilment to current customers and not lose them to new competitions, he said.