A working system overloaded with ‘lollies’

THE working system in Malaysia is well known. There are 365 days in a year. After deducting a total of 104 days for weekends, 15 days for public holidays and 20 days for paid leaves, you are left with a staggering 7.5 months.

Salary-wise, however, we are actually paid at least 13 months of wages. Counting roughly, we are actually paid an equivalent of 1.7 times of our monthly wage.

Not only this, whenever there is a celebration, we also expect extra pocket money. Even though our national debt has reached RM630.5 billion, which accounts for 54.5 per cent of our GDP, the National Treasury still pays RM500 financial assistance to millions of public servants every year.

In states such as Negri Sembilan, Terengganu and Penang, their state governments are renowned for issuing various types of bonuses.

Selangor Menteri Besar Azmin Ali even announced a special bonus for the state civil servants, which adds up to more than a month of their monthly wage.

This said, can our performance level really live up to the situation where everyone is queuing to be rewarded? The past chief executive officer of the Malaysia Airlines (MAS), Christoph Mueller, told the German media something surprising.

He said: “The state-owned airline’s 20,000 employees were doing nothing.”

He once visited the hangar and found staff sleeping. Looking at the situation, he laid off 6,000 people.

What Mueller said was, indeed, true. After reading the 584-page MH370 interim report, released by the international investigation team carefully, you may realise that during the night we lost contact of the aircraft at 2123:18 UTC, there was a strange conversation: “Aaaa … never mind lah, I wake up my supervisor and ask him to check again… to go to the room and check what the last contact all this thing lah [sic].” (Page 106).

During such an important flight, a highly paid executive was reportedly sleeping. How would he oversee how his underlings were working? Even if he woke up, being drowsy, how would he verify any accident? In the report, it was stated even the battery for the Underwater Locator Beacon (ULB) of the emergency black box had expired as at December 2012 but incredibly, it had not been updated. If layoffs could not wake up the leadership front of the airline, then nothing could solve this problem.

Moreover, the procurement practices of MAS over the years have also raised questions on ‘overpaid’ cases – from little things like pens to big things like aircraft worth millions of dollars.

When the government declared the reformation of MAS, it was probably just a show. No rectification was intended. How would this be tolerated or accepted in the eyes of such an outstanding German chief executive officer?

Mueller came and went – he said his greetings gently and left quietly. The workers, on the other hand, were still asleep and did not see him off.