Downsizing and Restructuring: A Scenario in Malaysia as Dell Malaysia Offers VSS to 700 Penang StaffsUNIVERSITY OF MARA TECHNOLOGY
MASTER IN BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION
24rd April, 2011
HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT ASSIGNMENT 1
HRM 730
VIDYAMALA BINTI MOHAMAD 2010153603

Contents Abstract 2 The Arguments 4  Are downsizing legal? 4  Why firms keep repeating downsizing? 5  Why firms didn’t achieve their goals after downsizing being implemented? What has goes wrong? 7  What roles does government play in the downsizing issues? 7 The Conclusions 9 References 10

Abstract

Downsizing in Malaysia has been implemented a quiet time ago. The firms that using this kind of approach in Malaysia were the foreigner company (under the FDI). During the world recessions as happened in 1997 and 2009, recently. For my personal experienced, my brother in-law has accepted from Black and Decker, Kuantan Plant in 1997 and my husband has accepted from Pepsi Co. Malaysia in 2006. Downsizing became a new trend and not limited to foreign company, even the local company have also used this approach. As in 2000, Telekom have retrenched 4000 staffs. The mergers of several local banks in 1997 have affected a few hundred more. As reported from the statistics of Retrenchment Management Office at the Human Resources Ministry’s Labour Department show that 19, 325 workers, 12, 627 of them locals, were retrenched by 624 employers between October, 2008 and mid-March, 2009. And the highest was in Johor.
In translating to this phenomenon, some scholar called it as ‘organizational transition’. Organizational transition underlined three type of it. First type was the mergers and acquisitions. Secondly, the downsizing and third one was the privatization. All of these three would result either downsizing or lay-off to the workers.
As the pressure of global