MALAYSIA:::Foreigners join effort to help flood victims

KUALA LUMPUR: For 23-year-old Anthony Hoang Van Thoan, seeing houses ravaged by floods and people evacuating to shelters is not an unfamiliar experience.

In fact, this Vietnamese worker told Bernama, he knew exactly how it felt as his hometown in the Lai Chau province in the Northwest region of Vietnam had been hit by floods year in,year out.

For that, Hoang said when he read the report that most states in Malaysia were hit by floods, he registered himself to participate in the East Coast Malaysia Flood Relief Programme organised by the Archidiocesan Office for Human Development (AOHD) without a moment of hesitation.

He said although he could not afford to give cash and materials, at least he could help the flood victims by giving his time and energy.

ILO:::Contract work woes

INCREASING the prevalence of contract work in the labour market is a global phenomenon. Low production cost and increase in productivity — the reasons cited by economists for contract labour — both lead to the accumulation of wealth. Thus, the hidden motive behind contract work is the desire, or the greed of the employer, for more profit, more money. No wonder, then, contract work is so confounding that even the International Labour Organisation (ILO) finds it full of complexity and riddled with ‘conceptual’ problems.