Core Obligations For Mncs

Multinational corporations ( MNCs) need to revise the focus of their corporate obligations in the countries where they operate. One important area is the need to emphasize the urgency for the implementation of a minimum wage policy in the country where they have a manufacturing or service-providing facility. When there is no minimum wage policy, local employers prefer to hire legal or illegal immigrant workers and pay them subsistence wages. Sometimes the employers subcontract such dubious hiring to equally unscrupulous syndicates. These syndicates* offer both legal hirees and illegal ones. On top of that they often fleece their recruits, imposing all sorts of fees and deductions and more often than not, leave them in the lurch when there is either a business downturn, police crackdown or just plain non-existence of promised job openings. Such human misery and injustice has a domino effect on the society where these things take place. Retrenched foreign workers often take to a life of crime and in turn they become the target of the local police who often end their lives at the business end of a .38 revolver. Local residents also develop an unnatural but still understandable phobia about these foreign workers. Another equally important consideration is whether MNCs should operate or continue to operate in countries where there is an unofficial policy that human resource directors or managers must belong to a certain religion. Such a policy has resulted in factories having employees that overwhelmingly belong to a certain religion or ethnicity. This is ridiculous if not outright illegal. One more thing to focus on is the need to examine the overall security pertaining to the factory or plant that belongs to the MNCs. Lately, MNCs in SE Asia have been victims to robberies, hijackings and pilfering. Police generally sieze all workers who happen to be around during such incidents, whether they were innocent or otherwise. Assaults and mistreatment are not unusual. Should MNCs compensate or protect every innocent employee ? Should they continue to remain or even extend their operations ? Perhaps they need to re-examine their corporate obligations. * In west Malaysia alone, there are over 200 of these setups. [ the star pg45 17 July 2008 ]