According to MARGMA President Dr. Supramaniam Shanmugam, the rubber glove industry is seriously in need of workers as it currently is short of 25,000 staff force.
In view of this situation, the association representing rubber glove manufacturers is seeking the Governments assistance to allow the intake of foreign workers soonest possible.
“The Rubber Glove Industry is currently facing a critical level of shortage in factory workers that is needed to meet the increasing global demand in 2021-2022. 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 workers shortage immediately lest, we lose out on capacity building to fulfil global orders and demand. As an urgent remedy, we urge the Government to allow intake of foreign workers as industry players are prepared to fulfil terms and requirements for the hiring process, adhering to all other procedures including absorbing costs for necessary RTK, PCR Tests , quarantine and Sanitising SOPs.”, said Dr Supramaniam.
In spite of running local hiring programmes since 2019 with MoHR via JobsMalaysia and PenjanaKerjaya to recruit local workers, 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.
The Malaysian Rubber Glove Industry has been maintaining about the same workforce size of about 72,000 employees since 2013. However, year on year, the quantity of gloves produced and exported has been a healthy 10 to 15% increase. This is principally due to the heavy investment into automation that has successfully reduced the number of workers needed to produce the gloves. Case in point, in 2009, it took 10 workers to produce a million gloves /month : now, it takes only 1.7 workers, to produce the same. Likewise, production line yields has increased from 3000 pcs/hr to a current levels of 45,000 pcs/hr over the past 15 years. Automation in the RGI has reached 85% level. The last mile automation, being the most difficult, is work in progress.
“This is the final automation stage in rubber glove manufacturing making up about 15% of the production process. As the industry move toward IR4.0, there will also be multiplier effect for more employment opportunities for Malaysians in high skilled categories such as electronics & electrical engineers, mechanical engineers and mechatronics engineers.
Malaysian rubber glove producers are now facing intense competition from China. In order to maintain Malaysia’s World No.1 position, industry players must first be able to keep up with capacity fulfilment to current customers and not lose them to new competitions.
The association is hopeful on allowing intake of foreign workers as an urgent remedy but assures the committed to hire locals is still priority.
