SUBANG JAYA | Those in the public sector could learn a thing or two from homegrown enterprise Mydin in employing persons with disabilities, Hannah Yeoh said today.
The deputy women, family and community development minister said the government set a 1 per cent employment quota in a circular in the 1980s, but added that it was never properly implemented.
“Mydin’s approach to hiring persons with disabilities is a success story that we can learn from, and share with others who similarly want to take on disabled employees but do not know how to start doing so.
“I’m impressed with this pocket work manual which they have introduced for nine specific job descriptions which the persons with disabilities do now at the hypermarket,” she told reporters after a tour of the work stations of disabled employees at the Mydin Wholesale Hypermarket headquarters in USJ here this morning.
“This is something which we all can refer to,” she added, referring to a mini-sized booklet produced by Mydin.
Yeoh said the government should properly lead the way forward in employing the disabled.
“We must first get all the government sectors to take the lead before talking about rolling out to private sectors,” she said.
She said the current focus should be to increase awareness of job opportunities available for disabled persons and the employment processes that can be adopted by bosses.
Yeoh said that to date, her ministry is the only one to have surpassed the 1 per cent quota while the Defence Ministry is almost there with 0.98 per cent employment of disabled persons.
No other ministries or state government agencies has achieved the target, excepting Terengganu at 0.97 per cent.
Mydin CEO Datuk Ameer Ali Mydin told reporters that the hypermarket started hiring persons with disabilities as far back as the 1950s when his family started the business.
He said the 62-year-old hypermarket has never rejected a disabled person because of his disability.
“We never told that we would not take disabled persons, but we took everyone in.
“It was in 2012 that we discovered that there was job coaching done in other countries, and then we started working with Japan International Cooperation Agency to train job coaches in Malaysia,” said Ameer.
Today, Mydin has 111 employees who are persons with disabilities. That is 1.4 per cent out of 8,000 employees.
“I didn’t even know there was a circular, because we were not selective with hiring. We want to offer jobs which help employees earn a decent living, something which they are proud to say that they are giving back to the society,” Ameer added.
Currently there are 549,554, registered persons with disabilities in Malaysia.
