3 suggestion for Muhyiddin and Hadi to take PN to the next level
I would like to give PN 3 new ideas to think about, so that it might have something new to offer.
Nehru Sathiamoorthy
Following PN’s defeat in KKB, many people, including Former law minister Datuk Zaid Ibrahim, have been calling on Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin and Tan Sri Abdul Hadi Awang to step down.
In a Facebook post, Zaid said the defeat in KKB serves as a lesson for PN, which he said had ‘nothing to offer’.
“Looking back, PH won big because PN had nothing to offer; absolutely nothing. The leaders are very old, not just in age but in ideas,” Zaid continued.
In response to Zaid’s criticism, I would like to give PN 3 new ideas to think about, so that it might have something new to offer.
The ideas are as below.
1. Increase the share of workers profit as opposed to corporate profit
Even in ultra-capitalist America, if a company makes money, the capitalist and the top management, who are the capitalist’s instrument to control the company, will take just 50 percent, while the remaining 50 percent will go to the workers.
In Malaysia however, the capitalist and the management take 70 percent, while only the 30 percent goes to the worker.
The reason the capitalist and the management are able to take such an enormous cut of the organisation’s profit, which is almost entirely created by the workers, is because the laws enable them to do it.
If PN want people to support it, it should at least promise the workers, who make up the lion share of the country’s population, that it will change the laws and reverse the distribution of wealth.
There is no reason why the capitalist and their instrument of control, the management of the company, should get 70 percent of the organisation’s profits when the workers, who actually create the wealth in the organisation, only get 30 percent.
It is absolutely not true that the capitalist and their instrument of control, the management, are essential for the company to generate value.
Some CEOs of a company, like the late Steve Jobs, might be essential for a company to generate value, but CEOs like Steve Jobs are one in a million. Most CEOs of a company are no more necessary for a company to create wealth than any other worker in the company. That is why when 99.999 percent of CEOs leave a company, their departure will have no impact whatsoever on the company.
It is also not true that capital is a scarce resource that a company should pay an inflated price to secure. If the company is good, money will come looking for it. A good company is a company that is able to generate great value, and a company that is able to generate great value is one that is able to attract talented and motivated workers. To attract talented and motivated workers, 70 percent of the company’s wealth and profit should be reserved for the workers.
It is only third world economies that have low quality companies which produce low value that has to beg capital to come to its shore.
A first world economy, which has high quality companies that produce high value doesn’t have to beg for capital to come to its shore. It is actually capital that will be begging to be allowed into a first world economy.
To change ourselves from being a middle income economy that depends on an exploited and demotivated labour to produce low value products and services so that we can beg foreign investors to come to our shores, and transform ourselves into becoming a high income economy that requires high self-esteem and motivated workers to produce not only high value product and services, but also develop a lifestyle that is so admired by others, that our lifestyle itself will become a source of economy for our nation, we have to become an economy that gives the workers of our company at least 70 percent of the wealth and profit that they create for the company.
To become such an economy, we have to stop following the outdated colonial era economic model, where the government colludes with an exploitative elite to extract wealth by exploiting the country’s resources and the workers, and instead legislate laws that will enable the grounds for motivated and high self-esteem workers to rise.
Reduce the number of foreign workers by 10 percent every year
The only people who profit by foreign workers are the exploitative elite. The rest of Malaysia gains nothing from the influx of foreign workers. Our B40 population might actually be losing out because of the extraordinarily high numbers of foreign workers in the country. Even the foreign workers themselves, who are at best exploited and at worse, oppressed, are suffering in this exploitative economic model that is promulgated by the exploitative elites in the country.
This narrative that the exploitative elites keep pushing, which is that without the foreign workers, their companies will suffer losses, and thus they will not be able to make money and pay taxes to the government, is preposterous.
This is the sort of argument that slave owners in antebellum America used to justify slavery. Just because the exploitative elites only know how to make money by enslaving and exploiting workers, it doesn’t mean that the country must be forced to legalise exploitation or slavery.
If a business can only be in business if it has access to enslaved or exploited workers, it has no business being in business.
If PN wants people to support its quest to become the government of the country, it should commit to reducing foreign workers in Malaysia by a rate of 10 percent every year. At that rate, in 20 years’ time, we will only have around 12 percent of the number of foreign workers we have today.
Considering that the number of undocumented and documented workers in the country might be as high as 10 million people, or 1 in 3 Malaysians, the reduction will cause us to have just around 1.2 million foreign workers in 20 years’ time.
A country the size of Malaysia should have less than a million foreign workers. If we have less than a million foreign workers, then and only then can we claim that the foreign workers that we have are required for the functioning of our economy, not because we are an exploitative economy that exploits desperate people.
It is only when we have less than 1 million foreign workers that we can create the conditions to nurture a high self-esteem and motivated domestic workers, who can be counted on to create a high value economy.
Last but not least, it is when we have less than a million foreign workers, that we can treat everybody in the country like a human being, and cleanse our land of the sins of oppression , discrimination and exploitation against our fellow human beings.
Give the Indians a city to rule
The Malays rule the entire federation. The Chinese rule a state ( Penang). The Sabahans and Sarawakians have their ancestral homeland to rule. Going by this logic, shouldn’t the Indians be given at least a city to rule ?
If Malaysia can create cities like Putrajaya, Cyberjaya or the Forest City, surely it can also create a city for the Indians to rule.
We don’t even have to create a city from existing areas either. We can reclaim land from the sea to build a city where the Indians will have a chance to plant their flag.
I am not saying that a city in the form of a ghetto should be made exclusively for Indians- I am just saying that a city should be allocated to the Indians, where we will be given a discounted price to buy property or land, in the same way that Bumiputera are given discounted price to buy property or land all over the country.
By giving us such a “preferential treatment” in a new city, economic forces will ensure that the number of Indians in that city will be greater than the number of non-Indians, which will then allow the Indians to “rule “the city.
Why should the PN promise Indians a city?
Well, it will serve as a middle ground to accommodate PN’s ideology that the Peninsular belongs to the Malays while granting the Indians the ability to have a place in the federation that they can call their own.
In the old days, vassals were given some form of concessions for bending their knees to their overlords. It is an open secret that the PN Malays are looking for the non-Malays in the country to bend their knees to the Malays. The question however is, what will the Indians get if we were to bend the knees to the Malays? According to ancient laws, if Indians were to submit to the overlordship of the Malays in the peninsula, the Malays should at least reciprocate the Indian’s gesture, by conceding at least a city for them to rule.
