A little diversion

Today, I want to divert somewhat to a topic that has been unsettling me for a while... so bear with me.

I recently read an article by the founder of a company that provided mentoring programmes on how SMEs could compete with MNCs on grounds other than wages by treating their employees better. Beyond wages, he felt that recognition and having a genuine interest in your employee were factors that would help retain staff.

Coincidentally, I am serving notice to a firm that I have been working for from home for three years that I could count with the number of fingers on one hand how often I received my salary on time. Naturally, I started nodding my head away when I read the article. When I came to the part on how the writer offered to pay for an employee’s wife’s cancer treatment, I practically wanted to work for the guy for the rest of my life! Ok, maybe some parts.

So today, I read about how business and industry leaders were talking about how they now have to look at alternative sources of labour with the tight labour market and all. Five years back, nobody was even talking about hiring students as anything significant, what more housewives and the elderly.

I remember during the 1997 financial crisis aftermath how I got rejected from even being a tutor at a neighbourhood tuition centre because I wear a headscarf. (They said I’ll scare the kids). There was even one company who said they’ll hire me but I have to lose the scarf on my head. Maybe now I might actually have a better chance of getting hired if I applied for a job.

But, wait a minute- they say housewives, elderly and students- nothing about hijab wearing Muslim women. It doesn’t help that we are now being accused of disrupting social harmony. Darn, there goes my chance. Despite single digit unemployment, I don’t think I’ll have a chance even if I make a mid-career switch to nursing and insist on wearing my headscarf.

Then again, if I was an employer looking at costs and benefits of the business, this is one source of labour I cannot ignore. If employees do look beyond wages, I can actually compete with my competitors by trying to meet potential employee needs instead of trying to bid higher and higher wages and bursting my budget.

So, let’s say I am a private hospital short of nurses, I can advertise saying that I welcome nurses of all backgrounds and religious orientations- after all we now have the non-discriminatory job ads rule and must consider hiring Fairly- just like the ones they had in Canada after efforts to ban public employees from wearing religious symbols.

I am however more positive now than ten years before that change is possible. Not because we can now have access to money that was rightly the right of every child in this country anyway, but because we are now a global country with businesses trying to survive in an economy that leaves its local companies open to the global corporate jungle. Simply, it is a matter of survival that we tap on the second largest population in this country (of which most Muslims come from) to the best possible.

I am now able to see women in headscarves in multi-national retail stores with more advanced HR practices and gladly even a local one. There must be more out there that I don’t know of. What can be more frontline than retail? We know the difficulty in having companies accept us for what we are and when we are given the chance, we try even harder to live up to expectations.

As more and more MNCs continue to set up shop in our shores, with much help from various agencies after all, we hope their inclusive HR practices could rub off on local firms struggling with trying to hire locals now that they can’t bring in that many foreigners.

I also believe that the new generation of leaders in SMEs, whether family-run or start-ups are more globalised citizens than those who came before them. Just look at food companies who have turned to the Halal market; they recognize the economic potential and are willing to make changes.

In the long-run, however, we cannot wait too long to be more inclusive about whom we hire. It does not help that the education systems makes everyone look the same, masking the social reality of this country. We should start making our schools more global schools, in community and practice, to keep up with the rest of the world.

Exposing students to who their neighbours really are in practice and in beliefs early in life would help create better understanding and avoid the discomfort of having someone “different” from the majority in a company’s social fabric. This is an archaic concept that should be discarded.

As for me, I have already found another part-time-job at home to help supplement the family income. I was the only Malay-Muslim woman at the office when I came for the interview and was not really hopeful of my chances when I saw this. Turns out they wanted to hire me after all- I have been writing for them for almost half a year now.

I told you there’s hope.