A number of prominent factories in Penang, northern Malaysia have begun cutting their expenditures by temporarily shutting down their plants and letting their staff go for forced leave.

Unconfirmed sources indicated that Agilent Technologies, Flextronics, Jabil Circuit, AMD, Spansion and ASE Electronics are among those which are ready to shut their plants between November and December.

The fate of Dell’s employees, on the other hand is still in doubt after the company has been reported to be sourcing for potential buyers from the outsourcing market. Not far from Penang, rumour is fast spreading that Silterra, which operates its facilities in Kulim, Kedah may be forced to close its business due to disasterous losses in the last 3 years.

Recruitment and hiring are running at a snail’s pace, and some of the companies may have to resort to retrenching and shrinking their workforce size in order to survive.

The scenario looks like a repeat of the Asian financial crisis ten years ago, where many manufacturing companies in Penang closed their business in flock. Shutting down plant is one of the popular ways for manufacturing companies to reduce its cost of expenditure, but if this exercise fails to bring back the company on track to profitability, then the employees may be facing their worst nightmares as retrenchment may not be too far away.

Despite the unforgiving economic downturn, the Human Resource Minister of Malaysia, Datuk Dr S Subramaniam has come up with an assurance that the government does not intend to retrench its workers who are serving the public.

According to Subramaniam, both permanent and contract staff with the government are safe from lay off and mass termination.

In the recent weeks, the future of the government workers, especially some 50,000 of them who were hired on contractual basis has been put into question by the union of public servants, Cuepacs. The body anticipates that many of them will lose their jobs before the end of the year as the government would exercise some cost cutting strategy and reduce the number of workforce.

While his assurance comes a bit as a relief, Subramaniam may soon find himself having to eat his own words. In early November, Cuepacs alleged that 100 workers who were serving the public sector in Kelantan had their service terminated despite the Prime Minister’s assurance that the government will continue hiring and maintaining workers.

After Singapore, it is Germany’s turn now to slip into recession after its quarterly GDP growth tumbling helplessly to its second consecutive contractions.

It became the second country from the European continent to have fallen into a technical economic downturn after Ireland.

The country’s largest corporations are now in panic as major losses and retrenchment exercises seem the likelihood. Stocks and inventories are piling up, and businesses are cutting up expenditures. Some of them are expected to close down businesses in the next few weeks.

This might as well be the end of of Germany’s era as the largest economy in the country.

A country is considered to be technically in an official recession when it records two successive quarters of negative GDP growth. Just like Singapore, Germany’s economy relies heavily on export industry and with the export demand especially from the United States nose diving to a new low, the results are inevitable. As the global financial crisis intensified, analysts are predicting the United Kingdom to be next in recession, followed by Italy and Netherlands.

The world is facing its worst financial crisis in 80 years, triggered by the collapse of the housing market in the US, which rippled through every other industry and continent.

In a research undertaken to measure gender gap disparity, Norway has come on top and has been ranked as the best country for women in the world.

Norway was trailed by 2 of its European counterparts, Finland and Sweden, followed by Sweden, Iceland and New Zealand. Last year, Sweden was ranked first, ahead of Norway.

In a surprise finding, Philippines came six, making it the best country in Asia to make it to the 130-long list. The country is headed by a women President, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

Other top 10 countries include Denmark, Ireland and Netherlands.

Another shock sees an advocate of gender equality, United States, did not make it even to the top 25 and was ranked way behind the likes of Latvia (10), Sri Lanka (12), Lesotho (16), Mozambique (18), Trinidad and Tobago (19) and Moldova (20).

The study also concluded that, while women are still provided with equal access to education and health care, they are somehow still lagging behind in two other fields, namely politics and economy. The report was done by the World Economic Forum, a not-for-profit organization which is recognized for its role in organizing the annual global leaders forum based in Davos, Switzerland, and was helped by researchers from Harvard and University of California.