Culture Clash

Lately we've been told repeatedly by our management staff that we are eight times more expensive to employ than Malaysian workers doing the same jobs. Over the past few months the expense of Bill and Dave's American workforce has been a recurring theme for managers to whine about. It's been brought up so many damn times by managers that I'm sick of hearing about it. Really. In order to stay competitive we must shift production to Malaysia as quickly as possible, they say. If an assembler here costs the company $3,000 a month to employ, an assembler in Malaysia only costs $200 a month. That's the economics driving our corporate business decisions these days.

The first two groups of Malay employees arrived here weeks ago. Engineers and assemblers only so far. Oddly there weren't any technicians sent along for training on the instrument production lines. At least not yet anyway. Our job in assembly is to teach the Malay how to build RF and Microwave signal generators. It's been somewhat of an uphill battle because they are completely inexperienced working on instruments. Until now everything they have been manufacturing has been at the component or sub-assembly level only. Many of them don't understand English very well.

There are a few peculiar culture barriers to overcome when dealing with the Malay. For example, Malay are very concerned about being thought of as stupid. They believe that asking a question is showing ignorance so they seldom if ever ask any questions during training sessions. Ironically, by not asking any questions they don't learn much on the job until they've made a bunch of silly mistakes. I have been trying to do my best to go slow and make sure they are comfortable performing jobs before I let them loose to work on their own. I ask them over and over again if they understand a procedure or a group of steps, and the answer they always give back is a quick "yes." Seems to me they're just telling me what they think I want to hear. We work together, I will usually demonstrate a task by doing it first while a trainee observes me. Then I'll have the person try it on their own while I watch. I'm there to help in any way I can without making them nervous or by being a pest. It's frustrating for me though because I have no way of gauging if they are really ready to work alone, I just have to pick a time when I assume they've got it and let them try. Instruments have ended up mangled and smoking as a result. We start over from scratch again. And again. It's tedious.

Another problem working with Malay comes from their caste system approach to dealing with managers. Managers are not only their de-facto leadership, they are total authority for making any and all decisions no matter how trivial. Malay won't move to do anything without approval coming from their supervisor first. It's almost as if they are acting like nothing more than mindless drones. If an unforeseen problem suddenly arises and there aren't any managers available to ask for direction to solve the problem, Malay will stop what they are doing until a manager can be located. There will always be situations or times when employees have to be resourceful on their own. I hope we can teach them to be a little more self-reliant on the job before they go home in a few months.

All of the Malay assemblers are female, which is interesting because it makes me wonder if they view production assembly jobs as being nothing more than women's work. To me, these ladies seem extremely innocent and childlike. The majority of them are Muslim, you can tell if they are or not because the Muslim ones are required to wear a headscarf. On Fridays they come in to work wearing brightly colored long dresses that look like Indian saris, draping over their shoulders and flowing in air slightly behind them as they walk. Beautiful to catch a glimpse of when they're passing by in the hallways. A handful of the women are of different ethnic and religious backgrounds, Indian and Chinese mainly. They're more talkative than the Muslims and generally they seem to have adjusted to life here much faster than their Muslim counterparts.

The only time I have been able to get any of the Muslim women to open up a little bit is when I have asked them about their families. Eyes light up and they enthusiastically tell me about all their aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, cousins, children, parents and grandparents in painful detail. The average Malay family seems massive in comparison to American families. Muslim Malay men can have up to four wives, as long as they can afford to financially support them all. Can you imagine what it would be like having four wives? Four separate sets of kids? I can't. Damn.

I've been quietly watching the Malay engineers do nothing but play ping-pong since they got here. Every afternoon when I come into the building to start my shift I pass by a set of ping-pong tables. The Malay engineers are out there having heated tournaments. On my lunch break hours later I'll catch them still outside playing. Must be nice getting paid to hang out and play ping-pong. So far I haven't spotted any of them actually on the shop floor studying our instruments. They should be with us learning how these products function and the electronic theories behind their operation. Maybe our engineering department has them training in some other part of the factory but from the amount of time I see the Malay burning every day on ping-pong, I kinda doubt it. My first impression of these guys isn't good. In my opinion they seem flaky.

Differences in how we approach working on the job and solving problems aren't the only things to accomodate for or get sorted out. Some of our culture clash is over simple things, like using the restroom. Malay have been thrashing the men's restroom on a daily basis since they arrived. They won't sit on toilet seats to take a dump because toilets are a foreign, dirty concept to them. I guess in Malaysia they have bathrooms with little more than a hole in the ground that you put a leg on either side of to poo and pee into. Since we don't have hole in the ground action for them here, they climb up onto the toilet seat while squatting over the bowl to do their business. We've noticed water smeared dirty shoe-prints all over our bathroom toilet seats since those guys showed up. It's angered a bunch of people, including the janitors.