MAKE 60 A MANDATORY RETIREMENT AGE IN PRIVATE SECTOR, - MALAYSIAN TRADE UNION

PETALING JAYA (Malaysia), July 5 (Bernama) -- The Malaysian Trades Union Congress (MTUC) has repeated its call to the government to set a mandatory retirement age in the private sector to 60 to achieve the goal of a high-income nation.

Without a binding law, the private sector would not respond to the raise
because they were very profit motivated, MTUC General Secretary G. Rajasegaran
said Monday.

He was responding to a media report that the government might raise the
civil service retirement age from 58 to 60.

Rajasegaran said the private sector had not followed the government's lead
on the retirement age issue and that at present, the average retirement age in
the private sector was 55 for men and 45 for women.

A later retirement age would benefit workers in the long run as they would
be able to save up more in the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) for their old
age, he said.

"Because private sector employees don't enjoy any pension benefits, a bigger
EPF savings would certainly help them through their old age," he added.

Industries, too, would benefit from the experience of these workers as they
would contribute to an increase in productivity, he said.

According to him, about 100,000 workers both in the private and public
sectors retired annually.

He said another advantage of an extended retirement age was that the
industries would be able to reduce their dependency on foreign labour.

At present, when a local retired, the management would hire cheap foreign
labour as a replacement, he claimed, adding that there were more than 2.1
million foreigners in the country's workforce of 11.1 million.
-- BERNAMA