Circumstances Prior To The Malayan Emergency - Employer Associations

Employer Associations

At the same time these avenues were being pursued, employers in Malaya, with government approval, began organising themselves into associations, "employers unions", to set maximum rates for wages and other benefits.

A member was not permitted to pay more than those rates to its employees.

That such agitation has been so often successful is due in very large measure to the fact that individual employers, in order to realise quick profits, have frequently given way to it . . . It is the opinion of Government that an effective union of employers has an important function to perform in resisting unreasonable demands.

These organisations included the Malayan Mining Employers Association (MMEA), formed late 1946, which included the larger Chinese and all European mine owners, the United Planters Association of Malaya (UPAM), and the Malayan Planting Industries Employers Association (MPIEA), formed September 1947.

A tactic of management that labour found particularly objectionable was the use of Japanese prisoners of war as replacement workers during strikes, so that workers found the same people who had oppressed them during the war appearing against them again. They were first used in the Singapore dock strike, October 1945. They were also used in the Batu Arang coal miners' strike. The P.O.W.s were not returned to Japan until 1947, and Morgan says that they were "consistently used by the British" as replacement labour. There were nearly 20,000 Japanese P.O.W.s in Singapore in 1946.

Both Harper and Nonini note that one of the most effective resources that workers had in the tug-of-war with employers over wages and conditions was the ability of many of them to turn to small scale agriculture, usually semi-illicitly as "squatters", as an alternative to wage labour: thus if they were getting a bad deal at the estates or mines, they could simply go home and farm until better terms were forthcoming.

Labour in rural areas exploited opportunities for diversification as best they could. Squatter cultivation was the primary means to this, and not only for Chinese. It was a major theme of the industrial militancy that accompanied post-war reconstruction. In Johore, for example, when a collapse of the rubber price led the UPAM to decree a 20 per cent cut in tapping rates in July 1947, over half the labour force left some estates. Those who remained supported themselves by illicit tapping. All the Javanese labour vanished and the Chinese went back to planting vegetables. In the Slim River area of Perak many Indians left estates to work in Malay kampongs on a crop sharing basis. Many failed to return. For employers, squatter agriculture lay at the root of indiscipline.

In effect this small-scale agriculture was an "employer"—an "employment opportunity" to be more precise—with which the large colonial employers had to compete; they sought to eliminate the competition. One option open to them was the eviction of squatters from private land. Harper reports that in early 1948 there was a surge in the number of squatter evictions. The first meeting held to discuss the "squatter problem" during the Emergency was between representatives of UPAM and the Malayan Estate Owners' Association, and the Colonial Chief Secretary, in mid 1948. UPAM had, for the preceding year and a half, been pressing the government to take action against squatters on its lands. At the meeting, it was seeking a legal procedure whereby it could evict squatters in groups, rather than having to act against each one individually as was then required under the law.

Confrontation in the forests supercharged industrial unrest on the estates when it became apparent that the administration was working to restrict the labourer's access to alternative sources of income.

The struggle between labour and capital in post-war Malaya took place against a background of considerable violence and uncertainty in the society in general, especially in rural areas. Short has stated that the British never really regained control over rural Malaya after the Japanese occupation. The MCP continued to have a stronger presence in some remote areas than did the government right through the post-war years and into the Emergency. In addition to the MCP, there were other groups that wielded power in some places. The Indian thondar pedai have already been mentioned. Also, Kuomintang (KMT) guerrillas "set up what was in fact a local government among cultivators in the Lenggong area where they collected taxes, settled disputes and even tried and punished people." In other places Chinese secret societies (e.g., the Triad) were powerful. And, besides these, there were bandit gangs with no political interest who simply engaged in robbing.

Over much of Malaya . . . not only was government unable to maintain law and order but it was, in fact sharing power and in some areas was certainly no more than first among equals.

Short gives a sample of some violent incidents that occurred in 1947:

In February forty Chinese bandits raided Klian Intan, shot a customs officer and Chinese villager and then pillaged the whole village itself. In March, two hundred and thirty illicit weapons and ten thousand rounds of ammunition were recovered from a dump nine miles (6 km) from Kuala Lumpur. In May, bandits threatened to decimate Klian Intan unless the village paid a ransom of thirty thousand dollars. A week later, the Kuala Lumpur-Penang night mail was derailed. Eight people were killed. In June, police and twenty bandits were engaged in an hour long shooting battle near Grik. The following day police discovered another large arms dump in Johore. In September, three police and six civilians were killed and fourteen wounded when bandits ambushed two buses and an escorting lorry-load of policemen, again near Klian Intan. There was a slight variation later in the month when bandits in Japanese uniform terrorised an estate near Rengam in Johore. In October, a European planter was killed and his wife injured by bandits, again in central Johore.

Interestingly, Short states that the rate of such violence was actually less in January through May, 1948, than it had been in 1947.

Turning again to the labour scene, by early 1947, the trade union movement in Malaya had reached the high point of its success. After that, there was a marked drop in the amount of strike activity, and the trend to improvement in workers' wages and work conditions slowed, and in some cases was reversed.

The imposition of legal restrictions such as those described earlier, and the mounting opposition of employers, were undoubtedly prime causes of this change. To these reasons, Stenson has added that apparently there was a tactical decision made by the leaders of the Malayan left in early 1947 to adopt a more conciliatory approach to the business and government establishment. Let us go into these matters in more detail.

Beginning in March 1947 there was a sharp reduction in strike activity. (See table.) According to Morgan, "Undoubtedly this was largely the result of the increased tempo of the employers' and Government offensive against organised labour." Stenson, however, sees nuances. In March 1947 the PMFTU had "reluctantly" decided that it would have to seek registration; also, the constitution for the upcoming Federation of Malaya was under discussion, and the MCP hoped to have a voice in this process via a left-oriented umbrella organisation of which it was a member, the All-Malayan Council of Joint Action (AMCJA); these considerations caused the MCP to unilaterally call a "cease fire" in the labour struggle, in order to make itself more palatable to the government.

..it would seem certain that the MCP instructed its front groups to eschew militant confrontation with employers or government after February 1947 in an attempt to gain official registration and recognition for the PMFTU, and consultation and concessions for the AMCJA. It was for this reason that the strike wave of February was suddenly called off in March, that every attempt short of abdication of centralised control was made to satisfy the Trade Union Registrar's demands, and that the PMFTU's affiliates exerted all their efforts toward beginning negotiations with the principal employers. Even the most provocative of employer or government actions, such as the military action in Kedah, the unilateral enforcement of a 20 per cent wage cut on Chinese estate workers in May, or the complete rejection of the AMCJA's proposals by the middle of the year, were greeted with only token protests, mainly taking the form of one day work stoppages.

Stenson notes that although the reduction in worker days lost in Malaya—713,000 in 1946 down to 512,000 in 1947—does not seem dramatic, many of the days lost in the latter period were in wildcat strikes, presumably not under MCP direction, by the Chinese tappers who had suffered the 20 per cent wage cut. The Singapore figures show a clear drop.

Whatever the cause for the cessation of labour militancy, the result was that in 1947 and early 1948 labour generally lost ground. Also, as already described, government continued its regulatory and legal attacks on labour. And—the acid test—the FTU's were, in the end, refused registration and the AMCJA was excluded from the constitutional discussions. Stenson:

By the end of and certainly by February 1948 the message must have become all too clear. There was to be no form of democratic process in which the MCP or its front organisations could compete peacefully for political influence. Moreover, the union movement was to be ever more strictly controlled and any form of centralised direction, whether exercised by the MCP or not, to be prevented.

In February 1948 the applications of the Pan Malayan Rubber Workers' Council and of the Pan Malayan Council of Government Workers for registration were denied by the registrar.

The quiet period in strike activity suddenly ended shortly before the Emergency was declared. "At the beginning of April the workers at the Palau Brani tin smelter in Singapore came out on strike. After two weeks they were all given 24 hours' notice and told to leave their houses." "The dockers' strike at Port Swettenham was broken by the employment of 200 Malay peasants as . Cases of police brutality were frequent." A sit in strike at the Tai Thong rubber factory in Singapore was broken up by police: 38 of the workers were given 3 months rigorous imprisonment (hard labour) for trespassing. Strikes in the Slim River area of Perak resulted in 79 evictions from two of the estates involved. At the Chan Kang Swee estate in Segamut, North Johore, "the entire labour force dismissed by a new European management. The workers, however, refused to leave their quarters, took over the running of the estate and expelled the manager. The latter returned with 100 police, who in a baton charge against the labourers beat to death seven and injured ten others, without firing a shot or suffering any injuries themselves.

On June first, 1948, the MCP formally acquired Min Sheng Po, the Chinese-language newspaper with the biggest circulation in the Federation. On 9 June 1948, the editor, Liew Yit Fan, was arrested for sedition. The charge stemmed from his paper's coverage of the killings at Segamut. On 30 or 31 May 1948 the FTU leader in Perak, R.G. Balan, and four other unionists were arrested.

The regulatory changes that effectively destroyed the PMFTU, the SFTU, and the state FTU's were amendments to the Trade Union Ordinance which were passed by the Federal Legislative Council on 31 May 1948. The amendments had first been discussed by officials in November 1947 and the drafts had been approved by the Labour Advisory Board in February 1948. Stenson states that information leaks out of the Labour Advisory Board were normal and that the MCP "almost certainly" would have known of the proposals.

The amendments were in three parts. The first stipulated that a trade union official must have at least three years experience in the industry concerned. The second prohibited anyone convicted of certain criminal offenses (notably intimidation and extortion, which were common charges against unionists) from holding trade union office. The third stated that a Federation could only include workers from one trade or industry. The last provision clearly eliminated the PMFTU and the SFTU. The first provision Stenson describes as "a measure designed to exclude educated 'outsiders'." It was also problematic owing to the seasonal and transient nature of much of the work in the colonial economy.

On 13 June 1948 the PMFTU and the state FTU's were notified of refusal of their registration, and outlawed.