MEF president Syed Hussain Syed Husman said foreign labour could be used for blue-collar work with supervisory roles given to locals.

He said that Malaysia urgently needed foreign workers and MEF hoped that the related ministries would work together to solve the shortage of foreign labour in selected sectors of the economy.

“If these sectors fail to be productive, then our overall national economy will suffer.

“We need to look beyond foreign workers and see what is immediately needed to grow our domestic economy quickly,” he said.

He said that the country’s economic recovery efforts would be severely jeopardised if foreign workers were totally disallowed.

He said that employers were frustrated for not being able to expand their businesses since locals avoided jobs usually given to foreign workers although more than 500,000 Malaysians are currently unemployed.

Syed Hussain also said that MEF condemned irresponsible employers who flouted labour laws and proposed that the government impose heavy penalties on them.

In a previous report, international trade and industry minister Mohamed Azmin Ali said the implementation of IR4.0 was meant to push technology adoption and digital transformation to propel the economy.