Chapter 18 The Work Force and Harvesting

The ravines roads constructed during my long stay in that plantation served us well as most of the ravine crops were harvest and collected back to the Mill.When these roads were newly opened up the sight by the lakes' sides were horribly disgusting, littered with rotten crop every where.The Boss saw them and was extremely mad at my predecessor.

Only shortcomings here was that I did not have the time to construct some of its side drains,thus with the natural flowing of water every deep pot holes were every where.Tractors were bogged down here. We were having only one backhoe.I had a hand full of jobs for it,the sole backhoe.I failed to convince the Boss to purchase another,despite the heavy jobs load..Naturally there were other options to have those side drains constructed but the Boss was not willing to spent more on them.Therefore I had to give top priority to other jobs in hand first with over worked backhoe.

As our palms were old and quite tall,we had to join two alluminium poles to reach the fruits.There were times that the poles were further extended to another ten feet or so.Previously it was easy to obtain workers to harvest those tall palms but trained workers were getting scared as the the labor force overturn were quite fast.

With old workers leaving for home after two to three years ,new workers were recruited.Such workers had to be trained and training seemingly hard.The number of absconding were high.The red tape existing for recruiting laborers made it difficult to recruit them even though we were willing to pay for them, their permits were not easily obtainable.

Plenty of money were spent to recruit them.I was twice swindled by unscrupulous Agents.Once to a small timer in Kuantan whom I caught personally.I had wanted to give him a trashing had not been the people around who knew my plight stopped me from it.That was a Chinese conman.

Another who ripped us off about forty thousands ringgit from us was an old Malay man.He was an unlike conman yet he was,and able to convince me that he being a religious man with a white cap could help us secured the required work permits.My Boss saw him too and so we agreed to allow him to apply the work permits on our behalf,but he absconded with our money,It would have been more had he able to cash the cheque which was in favour of The Immigration.

A Police report was filed and when the Police went to his purported office he had already packed off.Later they found him alright but the old man was already in a very pathetic state so much so they just let him be.What can I say???.I was fortunate as the Boss did not held me responsible for he too had a hand in wanting the old timer to apply those permits on our behalf.

Planters were also human - so to err is human,to forgive divine.
Easier said than done.At least we learned a lesson and be more cautious the next time around.next time around we went for established companies to recruit our workers.The law required the proprietors to apply for those work permits etc.,but how far true were that as I still workers' agent going around at the Immigration.

For the application of permits we had to make supply the Immigration with many details in booklet forms.When approved only did we employed an agent to recruit the foreign workers for us.As such we were in directly getting all the workers thus this leave the contractors nothing to do.

This being the case the harvesting contractors were thus retrenched,leaving me more jobs in hand.By now I had also to train these new workers to become harvesters.
There were little doubts that my assistants and conductors wee incapable or not up to standard.Instead of depending on them,I promoted some good workers to be mandols to trained all those new workers and it worked.

Of course not all the new recruits can be trained to be harvesters,those not good were taken out and worked in the fields.Then there those who were to be absconded from us,we were actually left with a little more than half able body as harvesters.
Thus actually the recruiting of harvester were expensive.


Manager hated by all dirty job
the big hole planting
Tavy estate replanting and semambu estate
the assistants to be