e-Payslip & Environment Protection

Our company recently introduce the use of e-payslip to replace the normal paper-printing payslip. I find it a bit amuse as the reason given was it will reduce the usage of paper thus more environment friendly so to speak. Not only that, the company seems to be converting everything using papers such as office memos, circulars, appraisal, progress reports and what not into electronic forms by e-mails or other on-line forms. That would reduce the cutting down of trees for making papers thus protecting environment.

Ironically, this company that I'm working with is the largest plantation company in the world. The company have been cutting down countless number of tress since the fifties or sixties in the effort to build up a mammoth hectaraege of 600,000 ha rubber and oil palm plantation.

Just a few day ago while visiting estate in Lahad Datu, Sabah, I was caught in an argument with a estate manager on the issue of global warming and environment conservation. He sort of blasted on the NGOs for their accusations on plantation companies being responsible for the degradation of environment and causing the extinction of wildlife such as orangutan, elephant, tiger and others. He followed by saying that the livelihood of the people is more important than environment protection. He stressed that the survival of the people is more important than the survival of Orang utan. To some degree I agreed with him, as the opening up of plantation does indeed improving the social economy for rural areas, but I told him that when the big plantation companies in Malaysia and Indonesia cutting down ten of thousand of jungle trees to convert into millions of hectare of plantation, It was not purely for the livelihood of the people. It provides plentiful of job opportunities no doubt, but it actually in the way creating more wealth for the capitalists. It is the urge to create more wealth that lead to the destroy of the jungle and the social economy aspects only come later. Apart from higher rank executive and staff which comprise mainly of Malaysian, the larger population of work force is actually comprising of foreign labours from Indonesia.

I then told him that our company is no longer printing payslips for the employees in order save the planet by reducing the cutting down of trees for papers. He then asked me to propose to our CEO that the employees should wear banana leaves instead to work so that we can save the planet even more. Both of us then laughed profusely.