24,000 Malaysians laid off

24,000 Malaysians laid off

KUALA LUMPUR (AP): About 24,000 Malaysians have lost their jobs in the first eight months of this year, mostly due to the drying up of U.S. demand for electronics exports, news reports said Monday.

Human Resources Minister Fong Chan Onn said that 18,000 people were laid off in the electronics manufacturing sector, but the retrenchments were stabilizing in the third quarter of 2001.

Fong, quoted by The Star and Sun newspapers, said that the government could train these workers for jobs in other sectors. He said there were about 85,000 job vacancies in the agriculture and manufacturing sectors.

There are 9 million workers in Malaysia, a Southeast Asian nation of 23 million people. About 2.5 million people work in the manufacturing sector.

The U.S. is Malaysia's largest trading partner. U.S. demand for electronic products and components, Malaysia's largest export, helped lift the country out of the 1997-98 Asian economic crisis.