Involvment of Agibg Workers and Their Poductivity in Labor Market

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Malaysia’s rapid industrialization attributes to its openness to the early foreign direct investment. The government encouraged foreign direct investment policy and accelerated Malaysia’s prosperity. Nowadays, globalization and the need for Malaysia to advance its global competitiveness have made it imperative for Malaysia to modify its previous paradigm of economic development (J. A. Xavier & Z. U. Ahmad, 2012). To develop market oriented economy, and the social and economic stability, and educated workforce, as well as technology and equipment that link Malaysia to the world, not only assists the prosperity of enterprises in Malaysia, but also to encourage them to become partners of government in national development.

Malaysia’s rapid and sustained development in aspect of economy and society poses various impacts on its labor markets. In recent years, the rapid development of secondary industry and tertiary industry provides the nation and the people a broad employment market. The successful rural urbanization also facilitate most of the labor force enter into the labor market, coupled with the government’s positive employment policies, as well as networks, magazines and newspapers, employment agencies and other driving force, which all contributed to the formation of unified labor market in Malaysia. Many groups of the population in Malaysia got higher level of income which benefited from its prosperity during these decades. However, also because of its own economic prosperity and development, its multi-ethical culture, as well as its geographic advantage in Southeast Asia, which can provide large quantity of cheap labors, its labor market appears to be complex. Due to uneven distribution of wealth and other social problems, economic growth in Malaysia raised the earning of the young more than it did those of older men; the more educated relative to those with less schooling; those in urban places relative to rural residents (James P. Smith, 1990). In addition, due to Malaysia’s domestic labor shortage, the government, in order to protect the interests of their labors, issued some policies to limit foreign workers, leading the Malaysia labor market different degrees of deficiency in aspect of supply and demand mechanism, competition, and human resource development.

1.2 Problem Statement

As time pass by, many countries around the world face varying degrees of population aging problems, including Malaysia. Malaysia is a developing country, it also face brain drain issue, which is the large-scale movement of educated and skilled workers from developing to developed countries (A. Ibraheem & C. Devine, 2013).

Since the support to aging people and fostering young generation require different social resources, the burden borne by society and government are also different. Medical expenses and social pension are the main items of expenditure for the aging people. Aging people will be a big social burden especially when they are retired. After retirement, aging people have to leave their working post to younger employees, and rely on retirement pension. Thus, on this occasion, idle aging workforce will be a waste of social resource.

In Malaysian society, age discrimination and biasness against older people do exist. Older workers are perceived to lack an orientation towards flexibility, innovativeness, and change (Kidwell, 2003), and they are considered to be less energetic in and motivated about their jobs (Kroll, 2003). Some people even have subjective malicious discrimination to aging people. They consider old people are out of date, and useless for family and society.

Whether the aging people themselves want to work after retirement is also a factor that may influence the involvement of aging people in labor market. Some aging people may be not willing to work anymore after retirement. They may consider that they are too old to do physically jobs, or they have struggled for decades to make ends meet and support the family, it is time for them to take a break and be supported by their children.

As people get older, their body functions gradually degenerate, and people even have to face many health problems and disease. Therefore, health becomes a main concern for aging people in both their life and work. (Feldman, 1994). Even though these aging employees want to work, they had to consider their health condition. Some organizations may let their employee retire early because of their unhealthy status. Thus, it is considered that health is a very important factor that impact aging people’s involvement in their work.

In this research, education level is also chosen as a factor that will influence aging people’s decision and involvement in the labor market after retirement. Even though those people get older and their body functions degenerate, they still master abundant professional knowledge. With these knowledge, aging people still can make a contribution and create value for the society.

1.3 Research Question

To better understand the topic and make the research direction clearly, four questions about the relationship between those independent variables and dependent variable are listed below:

Q 1. How does age discrimination or prejudice will affect aging people’s involvement and productivity in the labor market in Malaysia?

Q 2. Is there any relationship between the number of aging people who are willing to work after retirement and Malaysia’s labor market?

Q 3. How health status influence aging people’s involvement in the labor market in Malaysia?

Q 4. To what extent does education level of aging people affect their contribution to the labor market in Malaysia?

1.4 Research Objective

In this research, we will achieve four objectives:

1. To find the relationship between age discrimination and aging people’s involvement in Malaysia’s labor market.

2. To identify the influence of the aging people’s willingness to work after retirement and their involvement in the labor market.

3. To learn how the health status of aging people will affect their involvement in Malaysia.

4. To analyze the impact of aging people’s education level on their involvement and productivity in the labor market.

1.5 Significance of the Study

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