As the great Deng Xiaoping once said: “It doesn’t matter whether it is a black cat or a white cat. As long as it catches mice.”
Following that line of thinking, I would also like to add that it doesn’t matter whether Anwar is a white cat that is sincerely trying to get the workers their just recompense for their honest labour or whether he is but a black cat that is merely trying to win by-elections by dishing out election goodies – the only thing that matters is whether he is a cat that is doing things like raise the wage of the civil servants, and a shift a bigger portion of the wealth in the land from the pockets of the capitalist to the hands of the worker.
Regardless of what some people claim, raising civil servants' pay by 7 to 15 percent will have a comprehensive effect on the market and not just be limited to the civil service. Like it or not, the private sector will have to follow suit by raising the pay of its workers, too.
As the saying goes, “If you pay peanuts, you will get monkeys.”
If the private sector does not react to the 7 to 15 percent rise in wages in the public sector, the private sector is going to end up with monkeys. If they do not want to lose their competitive edge, they will be forced to match or exceed the pay rise in the civil service.
According to Anwar, starting on 19 August, the civil servants will be doing their jobs promptly and punctually to deserve their rise in pay, but I am personally not sanguine at the prospect that the raise in pay will result in improved productivity or punctuality. Things like punctuality and productivity are a matter of habit, not just will. Just because you are willing to break a habit today, it doesn’t mean that you will break the habit by tomorrow. If it were that easy to break a habit, there would be no cigarette smokers or alcoholics in the world. To improve productivity and punctuality in the civil service, more than just raising the pay of the civil servants and making them promise that they will do a better job will be necessary but in any case, it doesn’t matter whether the civil servants improve their productivity and punctuality – at the end of the day, workers in the country still deserve a pay rise.
The idea that a pay rise can only be given if there is a commensurate increase in productivity is a capitalistic myth. It is a myth because the top capitalists – be it the owner of a corporation or its CEO- are themselves hardly productive. There is hardly any CEO who has come up with an original product or service for their organisation. If a CEO was that productive or essential for an organisation when they leave an organisation, the impact of their absence should be palpable throughout the organisation – this is almost never the case. A worker in Genting will have to work for more than 2000 years before they can match the salary of their CEO, not because the Genting CEO is that productive. CEOs like the Genting CEO, like every other CEO, are paid tens or hundreds of millions simply because they are the ones who determine who gets paid what, and they tend to pay themselves an exorbitant amount simply because they tend to inflate their own worth in the organisation while deflating the worth of the regular workers.
To get the pay that they deserve, workers generally have to rely on either the trade unions or the government to negotiate a better wage package with the employers, but considering that most, if not all, trade unions in Malaysia have been castrated, and considering the fact that our government has historically been too cozily connected with the employers and the capitalist to arbitrate the issue of wealth disparity on an objective basis, workers in Malaysia have long suffered from being underpaid in Malaysia.
This is why, in Malaysia, the payroll at the average company accounts for just 15% to 30% of its revenue, compared with more than 40% in many companies in the Western Hemisphere.
Sure, the increase in the payroll of the civil servants will likely add to our already humongous RM 1.5 trillion national debt further, but so what – the national debt is going to increase, one way or the other – at least this time, it is increasing in favour of the workers, instead of forever increasing only fatten the pockets of the capitalist.
Anwar came to power by promising us reform, and so far, other than the subsidy rationalisation, his move to increase the wages of the workers is the two most significant moves that he has made in line with his promise.
If Anwar just sees to it that these two moves succeed in reaching objectives, which is to ensure that “the average person gets paid a bit more for what he toils over so he can have an acceptable standard of living with enough left over for a rainy day and perhaps a little luxury,” I daresay that by the time he leaves office, he will be almost certainly be elevated as “Bapa Reformasi Malaysia”, even if everything else he does is dodgy or ends up as a failure.
Of course, just raising wages and restructuring subsidies will not be sufficient to ensure that an honest person who does an honest job, carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders, will be able to lead a meaningful life in our nation.
No matter how much wealth Anwar tries to move from the capitalist’s pocket to the worker's hand through such moves as raising wages and restructuring subsidies, the capitalist will still try to move it back into their pocket through inflation.
To fully achieve the goal of redistributing wealth in a more just manner, Anwar must by hook or crook, also do something to ensure that the capitalist only attempt to increase their profit by increasing their sales, while keeping prices the same, and not succumb to the temptation of increasing their profit by both increasing their sales and price.
If he could only do that, I say with a full heart, millions would be praying for his health and the longevity of his reign.
To the degree that the Madani government is intent on pursuing such reforms, I hope that Fortune and Fate will forever look upon their endeavor with favour.
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