BERITA NUBE

Amid Festive Lights, Malaysia’s Bank Employees In Dark Over Promised Pay

Dec 5, 2024

The festive lights twinkling in his home sometimes create as much stress for Joseph Solomon as the cheer they’re supposed to bring this time of the year. His worry: Will the 15,000 or so bank workers in Malaysia — who’ve placed their welfare in his hands — get the additional full month’s pay they’ve been promised for upcoming Christmas, Chinese New Year, Hari Raya and Deepavali celebrations?

As the long-serving general-secretary of the National Union of Bank Employees Malaysia, or NUBE, Solomon is one of the nation’s most vocal labor advocates. And a visible one too. Standing at 6’ 2”, he might have been a promising NBA recruit in the US. But in his home country, he has taller ambitions than basketball.

The problem though is those playing against him — Malaysia’s commercial banks that is — have all the money and influence his union doesn’t.

“They prefer to spend on lawyers rather than their employees,” Solomon says. “And they try to seek government and court intervention to declare game over for NUBE, even before our play can begin.”

Joseph Solomon, NUBE’s
long-serving general-secretary
(picture: NUBE)

They here refer to the 19-member Malayan Commercial Banks Association, or MCBA, which has reached out to the Industrial Relations Department and Human Resources Minister Steven Sim over the past year to avoid staying on the negotiation table with NUBE.

At issue is the Festival Aid — a bonus that bank employees are to receive in advance of the country’s four main festivals, whichever they celebrate. The so-called FA came into existence on April 5th, 2023, via a memorandum of agreement between the union and MCBA. Bank employees got an extra month’s pay that year either for Raya, CNY, Deepavali or Christmas.

After those payments, NUBE wrote to remind the MCBA that the next round of festive bonuses should begin a month before CNY 2024 on Feb 10.

That’s when the union got a nasty surprise.

MCBA wrote back, saying no-go.

The 2023 round was apparently an experiment, as far as the banks were concerned, and the FA had to be renegotiated for it to continue, they said.

NUBE’s social media posts in the past argue that there’s nothing expressly mentioned in that FA agreement that the payments were supposed to be one-off.

The union argues that the banks appear to have pounced on a line in the FA agreement that says “both parties agree that this payment may be reviewed in the following year”.

NUBE says the clause was meant to determine the size of each year’s festive bonus — not the minimum one-month payment.

To make it clearer, that line was inserted as a means for the banks to pay employees more than a month’s festive bonus if they wished, and the quantum could be worked out in negotiations with NUBE.

Indeed, another clause in the agreement states that “banks that are paying better benefits to the employee or (have an) intent to pay better benefits shall do so”.

Solomon adds:

“If the banks had a bad financial year the previous year, then we could agree to waive the current year’s festive bonus. But as it is, most Malaysian banks made profits in 2023 and some even made record profits.”

MALAYSIAN BANKS PAY FESTIVE BONUS IN INDONESIA, NOT AT HOME

More dumbfounding to NUBE is that the same Malaysian-owned or operating banks that refuse to give a full-month’s festive bonus at home now have no qualms making such payments in Indonesia.

“If you have a company in Indonesia, you have to give an additional month’s festive pay not just to your workers but also the CEO,” says Solomon. “Maybank has business in Indonesia, CIMB has business there and HSBC as well. They pay their entire staff and management a month’s festive bonus, according to Indonesian law. My question is ‘if you can do it in Indonesia, why can’t you do it here?’ ”

As the dispute at home raged, NUBE was astonished by the extent MCBA would go to deprive Malaysian banking workers of a simple privilege taken for granted by their peers in poorer Indonesia, where sometimes even two to three months of festive bonus in a year wasn’t unusual.

The Malaysian version of the saga is worth telling, if not just for how minister Sim inserted himself into the matter to land a crippling blow to NUBE’s campaign after the union pointed out that the human resources ministry should prioritize the welfare of workers — not the interest of the banks.

The Industrial Court is expected to rule sometime in January on MCBA’s bid to nullify the FA agreement once and for all, in the hope that talk of such a bonus can never resurface.

“If we were to list the litany of wrongdoing by the banks since this saga began, it could run into pages,” says Solomon.

It began when the MCBA, still in discussions with NUBE over festive aid beyond 2023, referred the matter to the industrial relations department without the union’s knowledge. The broader collective agreement between the two sides stipulates that a joint “standing committee” be formed to resolve disputes. Yet, the MCBA saw fit to ask for the department’s mediation without informing NUBE.

And after two reconciliation sessions hosted by the department, minister Sim showed up at the MCBA office — again without NUBE’s knowledge. He said there would be a half-month’s bonus for clerical and “special grade’ clerical banking staff, who make up 95% of NUBE’s 15,000 members, and a full-month payment for non-clerical banking employees, who account for the balance 5% of the union. Those payments would be one-off, the minister added.

After the reduced payments for 2024 went out, NUBE lodged a police report against Sim for abuse of power. Then, news articles on the announcements the minister made at the MCBA office mysteriously disappeared from online portals, apparently pulled down from their servers. But Sim had one more deed to perform for the banks: Escalating the dispute to the Industrial Court.

“This is an organization that happens to be a custodian of Malaysians’ funds,” says Solomon. “But MCBA is now asking the court to nullify an agreement it was party to. Is this the sort of mistrust it wants to create with employees and the Malaysian public?”

BRANDED “TRAITOR” AND LATER “FRIEND”, SOLOMON HAS SEEN IT ALL

It has been stormy for Solomon for most of the 23 years he has served NUBE as general secretary.

Once branded a traitor of his nation for airing Malaysia’s labor injustices in speeches delivered to the International Labor Organization in Geneva and later regarded as a friend by Nazir Razak, the powerful one-time chairman of Malaysia’s number two bank CIMB, Solomon has seen it all.

He has no regrets for bringing the nation to task over its labor and other violations, saying his dual role at one time as head of NUBE and the Malaysian Trade Unions Congress, or MTUC, made him responsible for the welfare of nearly a million workers. “I had a mandate and I’m happy that it resulted in the government extending SOCSO employment-related injury to the more than two million documented migrant workers in the country since 2020.”

On the banking front, NUBE often butted heads with Maybank, and to a lesser extent with CIMB.

“Maybank and CIMB — as the first and second largest banks in the country, respectively — have always led the industry, with the other banks following whatever the two say,” Solomon says. Aside from size, the two had clout as well as government-linked companies. State investment firm Permodalan Nasional Bhd has a 44% stake in Maybank while sovereign wealth manager Khazanah Nasional has a 21.6% equity in CIMB.

While Maybank had almost always been a problem for NUBE — “they wanted absolute control of their employees”, Solomon says — things got a little testy with CIMB too at one point, he recalls.

It began after Solomon and CIMB chief Nazir were summoned by Abdullah Badawi, who served as Malaysia’s prime minister between 2003 and 2009, to his office to resolve one of NUBE’s collective agreements with the MCBA.

Riding down the elevator of the prime minister’s office after the meeting, Nazir was clearly unhappy. ‘How can the PM get involved in these issues?’ Solomon recalled him asking Malaysia’s Second Finance Minister Mohd Nor Yackop, who was also at the discussion and in the lift later with the CIMB man and NUBE chief.

Solomon had a different view of the matter, of course. “To us, Pak Lah (as the prime minister was known) wasn’t just PM — he was also Finance Minister. Since banking workers are part of the financial sector, the PM was addressing the welfare of people directly under his purview. But I can also understand why Nazir was upset. Once the PM is involved, the dynamics change and the banks probably could not be as tough as they wanted in their negotiations with us.”

After that, relations worsened between MCBA and NUBE. At one point, Nazir joined Maybank in going hard against NUBE. Solomon was equally forceful in his retaliation for the union.

Then one day, the CIMB head called his NUBE rival in for what’s popularly known in Malaysia as a “table talk” — or peace attempt between two warring sides.

Solomon remembers the conversation vividly: “Nazir began by saying, ‘Ok, Solomon, I can’t understand why 200 or 300 members of NUBE who work for CIMB don’t want to take the money I want to give them’. What he meant was that these 200 or 300 people refused to participate in CIMB’s annual performance appraisal bonus.”

Solomon says MCBA’s collective agreement with NUBE clearly states that any performance appraisal must be negotiated in advance with the union and CIMB had not done that.

“Our advice to our members was that this appraisal could hurt you if you aren’t aware of the conditions attached. We, of course, didn’t stop anyone from participating in it, if they wanted the extra money. We had about 4,000 members in CIMB then and almost all of them went for that bonus.”

But a small number of less than 10% stuck with NUBE and resisted the CIMB appraisal year after year. “We truly appreciate the loyalty shown by those members and their faith in us,” says Solomon.

Nazir, meanwhile, wanted a 100% buy-in from CIMB staff for the bank’s appraisals. It didn’t look good that some continued to distrust the management.

The CIMB chief then offered NUBE a truce. “We will negotiate with the union and my officers will come and see you,” Solomon recalls him saying. “We will reach a consensus. Please ask your members to participate then.”

That was the turning point for the two, says Solomon. “From then, we became friends. Any problem, I would just call his HR people.”

Nazir left CIMB in October, 2018. “His departure was a true loss for NUBE,” says Solomon. “The two of us may have had some difficult exchanges but he was never malicious. He respected the process of dialogue and was instrumental in bringing the cost of living allowance into our negotiations that bank employees benefit from till today.”

Indeed, Nazir, when invited to NUBE’s triennial delegates conference in 2014, spoke about the importance of worker-management harmony. “We can agree to disagree,” he said. “But we cannot deviate from working with one another.”

Reflecting on Nazir’s words, Solomon said: “The man was an absolute gentleman, who cared as much for CIMB’s employees as his executives.”

After Nazir’s departure in 2018, things remained amicable between MCBA and NUBE for another four years, thanks to Maybank’s new CEO Abdul Farid Alias, who broke from his predecessors in “wanting a harmonious workplace for everyone”, says Solomon.

While Farid himself left Maybank in 2022, the positive environment he created lasted long enough for NUBE to conclude what Solomon calls “one of the best CAs ever” with MCBA on April 12, 2023.

ON WARPATH AGAIN, AND BELIEF IN DIVINE INTERVENTION

Shortly after that collective agreement, things went downhill again between two sides.

“Some executives at the banks were not too happy that NUBE got a good deal last year,” says Solomon. “What’s happened with the Festival Aid is a manifestation of that ill-intent, which has reached all the way up to the MCBA leadership, putting it on a warpath again with NUBE.”

Further perplexing him is the human resources minister’s role in the matter.

“Steven Sim is now taking cover from answering any questions on his actions by saying that ‘the matter is in the courts’,” says Solomon, referring to the minister’s citing of the forthcoming Industrial Court decision on the FA agreement.

“The fact remains that the human resources minister held a clandestine meeting with the banks, against the interest of the very workers he was to represent. He not only announced a scaled-down festive bonus for bank employees without consulting NUBE but added to their injury by referring the matter later to the Industrial Court, and ending any negotiations.”

When the Industrial Court heard the matter on Nov 20, it denied NUBE’s bid to subpoena Sim as a witness, saying the minister had not been material to the original FA agreement between MCBA and the union.

“The court is unable to see how the evidence or testimony of the minister would contribute to the determination of the issue under reference,” Industrial Court chairman D. Paramalingam ruled. The “issue”, as far as the court was concerned, was the validity of the FA as an annual occurrence — exactly what the MCBA was disputing. Paramalingam added that his court could not “go on a frolic of its own”, nor aid the “fishing expedition” he accused NUBE of.

NUBE disagrees and have instructed its lawyers to file a judicial review of Paralingam’s decision not to have Sim subpoenaed as a witness. That will be a separate matter, to be decided by Malaysia’s High Court.

Gazing at the lit Christmas tree in his home, Solomon remains hopeful that the country’s 15,000 banking employees will get an additional month’s festive pay each year.

He even thinks there might be a divine intervention.

“I must say, whatever issue we have faced, God has been kind … we have been able to resolve it. I hope to resolve this one too … without giving up our dignity.”

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