The cabinet has agreed in principle to create a mechanism to provide advanced alimony payments for non-Muslim women who are in the process of getting divorced and not being given alimony by their estranged husbands, said Human Resources Minister Dr S Subramaniam today.

dr s subramaniam interview 210308 05He said the Women, Family and Community Development Ministry has been entrusted to come up with a mechanism soon.

"We will talk to Minister Shahrizat Abdul Jalil to create an appropriate mechanism to assist them financially," he told reporters.

Last week, Subramaniam said he will seek the cabinet's approval and cooperation of the Women, Family and Community Development Ministry to obtain an allocation to help the non-Muslim women.

Early this month, the cabinet approved a RM15 million allocation as alimony advance for Muslim women whose ex-husbands failed to comply with the Syariah Court's maintenance order and the money would be recovered from the ex-husbands.

Foreign workers recruitment policy relaxed

Meanwhile, Subramaniam said the government has relaxed temporarily its strict foreign workers’ recruitment policy when it approved 100,000 new applications within the past five months following appeals from many manufacturing companies.

However, he said the government remained committed in reducing the number of foreign workers in the country, except it would now have to done gradually.

The minister said the number of foreign workers has been reduced from 2.2 million to about 1.6 million since the beginning of the reduction exercise early last year.

"We will have to do it (reduce the numbers) gradually because the demand from companies to hire foreign workers have been increasing after their production has picked up following the economic recovery," he said when asked if the government’s target of reducing the number of foreign workers could be achieved by year-end.

Subramaniam said the 100,000 new applications for foreign workers were approved from last October to this month in four industries namely electronics, plastics, furniture and gloves.

He said the government decided to approve the new applications as a short-term measure to overcome shortage of workers since locals were still not interested in taking up the job offered by companies.

Last month, Subramaniam had said that his ministry has appealed to companies to offer higher salaries to locals to woo them and the response had been good. However, it was reported that not many companies were willing to give higher salaries.

The minister also said his ministry was preparing to amend certain Acts and regulations as well as the curriculum and training scope of its industrial training institutes to be in line with the new economic model to be announced by the prime minister soon.

He said the Acts were the Employment, Trades Union, Social Security and Industrial Relations.

Fifty percent high-skilled workforce

He said the ministry's target was to create a 50 percent high-skilled workforce from the current 60 percent who were at the low-skilled or without skills category.

"Of the 60 percent, between 10 to 15 percent are without any skills. So, we need to re-look at our training modules and structure to ensure more Malaysians could be trained to become high skilled workforce in the future," he said, without mentioning when the 50 percent high-skilled workforce target could be achieved.

He said in the 1970s, the government had focused on training workers to meet the high demand of workforce for the manufacturing sector, especially in the electronics industry.

"The situation has now changed where the focus is on the services sector. We must now train workers to meet the increasing demand in this sector so that we can create a high income workforce in line with the new economic model," he said.