Indigenous Employment Policy and Foreign-Owned Corporation Employee ’ s Well-Being in Liberia

Every country institutes policy to take a course of action in favour of its citizens’ welfare. The view of indigenization policy in alignment with employment and workers treatment in Liberia takes different dimension. Liberia problem of unemployment cannot be compared to its underemployment and bad working conditions. The Liberian Indigenous policy has not reaped its fruit with marginalization, exploitation dispossession and poverty in commonplace. This study addresses the ineffectiveness of the indigenous employment policy and the state of workers’ well-being in foreign corporations in Liberia. This study adopts cross sectional method, and employs primary data. Information from 400 employees working with foreign-owned corporation was extracted from survey conducted in 2018 by the authors on the state of welfare of foreign-owned corporations’ employees in Liberia. The key explanatory variables are healthcare, social insurance, safety measures, stable job assignment, stable work hour, promotion on the job, and job security. The binary logistic regression was applied using version 22 of SPSS to examine association between the response and explanatory variables. The outcomes of this study showed that indigenous environmental policy was significant with worker’s well-being (p<0.05). The study concluded that indigenous employment policy has significant influence on the foreign-owned corporation workers’ well-being in Liberia.


Introduction
As placed by the International Labour Organization, national policy framework for creating employment and supporting livelihoods is essential if Liberia is to lay the foundations for equitable and inclusive grow [13,19]. The government of Liberia during the administration of one of Liberia's idols president William R. Tolbert in 1975 passed into law an Act for improving the livelihood of Liberians through creating employment and business preferences. This Act was not meant to discourage investors, which it never did; the underlying motive of the Act was majorly to safeguard the nationalistic nature of Liberia. It was widely and generally viewed by Liberians as an Act of patriotism that was to allow the people enjoy the good of their fatherland to fullest. The appropriation of the Act was aimed at the absolute inclusion of every national of Liberia in having equal opportunity to benefiting from the abundant natural resources that the country is endowed with. It was also an enacted policy that was aimed at the promotion of indigenization ownership of corporations in the country. As the past policy (Open-door) was known to never have had direct impact on the lives of majority of Liberians [30]. Contrarily to what is being witnessed today in the country, the perception of indigenization policy in alignment with employment and workers treatment in Liberia has taken a different dimension [6,22].
There is no doubt that the anticipated fruit of the country's Indigenous policy has been overshadowed with marginalization, exploitation, dispossession and abject poverty in virtually every sector of works [1,23,34]. The rising rate of unemployment rates globally has left the survivor of an average Liberian in the hands of mercy and miracle. Thus, this triggers concerns about employment security as well as employment protection within the ambits of the policy. In Liberia, the employed labour force has not received adequate attention, mostly, with term of conditions of work [9,23,35].
The Government of Liberian is committed to implementing policies that are investment friendly and eared to attracting foreign investment with its people in poverty, mainly resulting from joblessness and underemployment [12,36]. Liberia still heavily relies on grants from foreign organizations to overcome her domestic challenges; amongst which are human capital development, creation of jobs and infrastructural development [38]. However, the effort and strategies adopted by the government coupled with the supports provided by her international partners are far from alleviating the prevalence of poverty built over the decades as an aftermath of poor governance, social vices and absence of adequate skilled technocrats [11,12,18,36].
A substantive amount of empirical studies on Liberianization policy is yet to be published. A few resemblance studies have been directed on economic issues such as job creation, economic growth, infrastructure development and economic sustainability [15,27,31,33,40]. Awkwardly, the view is such that could be said to have been conceived by the developed industrialized economies, and tenderly and indirectly sold to the under developed emerging or struggling economies of the world. These countries, unfortunately, which Liberia is among, have been made to see the idea of foreign investment as the best alternative to solve their problem of high rate of unemployment. The argument has always been the same; thus, employment is relatively scarce in developing countries that have failed to embrace foreign investments. Also, a large volume of foreign investment has been identified necessary and recommended by economic scholars as an appropriate measure through which the problem of unemployment could be curbed in developing countries, thereby alleviating poverty to a large extent. Invariably, a substantial number of economic scholars have argued that for economic growth to be enhanced in developing countries, there is a need to increase the volume of foreign investment by the government of these countries posited that for massive engagement [2,3,27,32,38].
Nonetheless, this optimistic view has been subjected to questions, particularly in line with the denial of indigenous workers of their welfare benefits. In line with this, there are dearth of studies that have explored the link between the implementation of the Liberianization policy and workers welfare in Liberia. Therefore, this study addresses this gap by asking this question: to what extent has the Indigenous Economic (Liberianization) policy influenced the promotion and enhancement of workers' well-being in foreign-owned corporations in Liberia?

Data Source and sample size
This study is a cross sectional designed, and it employs primary data extracted from survey conducted by the author on the state of welfare of foreign-owned corporations operating across Liberia in 2018. Information on the state of welfare enjoyed by employees of foreign-owned mining, agricultural, industrial and services corporations in Liberia were elicited from 400 workers of these corporations. A pre-test was carried out on 40 workers in BHP Billiton a multinationals in the mining sector to test the reliability of the questionnaire. This helped to rephrase the questions that are not well structured to achieve an accurate and reliable result.
Where n is the sample size, N is the population size and e is the error margin, 5% error margin. The sample size is 400 employees.

Research variables and Methods of Analysis
The response variable, worker's state of well-being is dichotomized into "1" if foreign-owned corporation employee is satisfied with the corporation welfare package and "0" if otherwise. The key explanatory variables are healthcare, social insurance, safety measures, stable job assignment, stable work hour, promotion on the job, and job security. Statistical analyses were performed at the descriptive, bivariate and multivariate levels using SPSS version 22. The descriptive statistics employed was the representation of respondents' background information in charts. The chi-square and binary logistic inferential statistics were applied at the bivariate and multivariate levels of analysis to examine the relationship between indigenous employment policy and state of welfare enjoyed by foreign-owned corporation worker.

Data and Research Methods
This study is a cross sectional designed and it employs primary data extracted from survey conducted by the author on the state of welfare of foreign-owned corporations operating in Liberia in 2018. Information on the state of welfare enjoyed by employees of foreign-owned mining, agricultural, industrial and services corporations in Liberia were elicited from 400 workers of these corporations. A pre-test was carried out on 40 workers in BHP Billiton a multinationals in the mining sector to test the reliability of the questionnaire. This helped to rephrase the questions that are not well structured to achieve an accurate and reliable result. The response variable is worker's state of well-being is dichotomized into "1" if foreign-owned corporation employee is satisfied with the corporation welfare package and "0" if otherwise. The key explanatory variables are healthcare, social insurance, safety measures, stable job assignment, stable work hour, promotion on the job, and job security. The binary logistic regression was applied. Statistical analyses were performed using the social sciences statistical software (SPSS) to examine the relationship between indigenous employment policy and state of welfare enjoyed by foreign-owned corporation workers.

Results
Figures 1 and 2 present the outcomes of the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the respondents. The results show that at least two-third of the workers irrespective of their nationality had postgraduate qualifications. Similarly, a two-third of the indigenous workers were age 51 and above, while about a quarter of the foreign workers were not living with their partners. The results further show that two-third of the respondents had spent at least 5 years in their various corporations; while majority of the foreign workers earned more than US$1000.00 on monthly basis. However, while compared with indigenous workers, less than 20.0% earned that much income monthly. The results on professional qualification of the respondents show that approximately a ninth of the foreign workers had acquired one professional certificate or the other, while majority (71.5%) of the indigenous workers had no professional qualification of any kind. The presentation of data on the distribution of respondents by type of corporation and their perspective on the provision of welfare in Table 1 shows 11 out of every 20 employees of foreign-owned corporations had access to goof first aid treatment while less than half reported that they were confined to poor first aid treatment whenever the need arose. Also, about a ninth of the respondents irrespective of the type of the corporation that they worked for had good training on the job trained on the job compared less than a tenth that claimed of being poorly trained on the job. On the other hand, the safety measures of more than half of the respondents were poorly met, while only 3 out of every 10 the workers had access to good safety measures in the various foreign-owned corporations where they were working 3149 for.

Liberian Foreigner
The data on the accessibility of workers to social insurance benefits show that one-third of the workers had access to good social insurance policy packages, while approximately one-fifth of the workers were confined to poor social insurance policy by their various employers. Results show that two-third of the workers had stable working hour, while one out every three employees of foreign-owned corporation were denied of good stable working hour by their employers. Two-third of the workers received poor family welfare benefit while three out of every ten of the workers received good family benefits from their employers. The results further show that majority (97.5%) of foreign-owned corporation workers were confined to poor health care packages, and less than 2% of the workers had access to good health care policy. The results as presented in Table 1 thus show that family benefits, health care welfare, stable job assignment, safety measures, stable working hour and first aid treatment are significantly associated with the indigenous employment policy in Liberia (p<0.05). The odd ratio distribution as presented in Table 2 shows that foreign corporation employees that were partially denied of their family welfare benefits were 0.7 less likely to attribute it to the local challenges faced by their employers than those that enjoyed full family welfare benefits.
Similarly, the distribution shows that foreign corporation employees that were denied of their family welfare benefits were approximately 0.1 less likely to attribute their denial to the local challenges faced by their employers than employees that enjoyed the full family welfare benefits. The distribution on gaining promotion on the job shows that foreign corporation employees that were denied promotion on the job were 1.1 times likely not to attribute the denial to the local challenges faced by their employers than foreign workers that were promoted on the job. Also, the distribution on first aid shows that foreign workers that had poor first aid were 0.8 less likely not to attribute their denial to the local challenges faced by foreign corporation than those that were had good first aid. The odd ratio distribution shows that foreign corporation workers that had fair working time were 1.0 times likely to attribute this denial of their

Liberian Foreigner
welfare benefits to the local challenges faced by foreign corporation than foreign workers that had good working time.
The distribution on the safety measures provided by foreign corporations shows that the foreign workers that had poor safety measures were 0.8 less likely to attribute the denial of their welfare benefits to local challenges faced by their employers than foreign corporation workers that enjoyed good safety measures. The distribution on the availability of social insurance benefits shows that foreign corporation workers that had poor social insurance benefits were 0.8 less likely to attribute their denial to the local challenges faced by their employers than foreign corporation employees that enjoyed good social insurance; while foreign corporation workers that received fair social insurance were 1.2 timely likely to attribute the denial of good social insurance to the local challenges faced by foreign corporation than foreign workers that enjoyed good social insurance. The binary logistic regression was applied. Results showed that indigenous environmental policy was significant with worker's well-being (p<0.05).

Discussion
The outcomes of the study have shown the existence of differentials in treatment of indigenous and foreign workers engaged by foreign-owned corporations in Liberia. These findings are in agreement with that of Heintz, (2009) that the developing nations, particularly the African labour sector, offered more preference to foreign expatriates than the locals, even when both had the same educational qualifications and experience for the job in question. The outcomes of this study also showed that the Liberianization policy was yet to take its full effect; consequently, to the welfares and safety of a good number of locals working with foreign firms in the country was so devastating that a simple first-aid tools were inadequate in some of these foreign-owned-corporations in the country. More so, it was evident that Foreigners were better paid than indigenous employees working in the same foreign-owned corporations who were assigned with the same responsibilities, or, with even more responsibilities. According to the reports by the Government of Liberia & United State Government [12], McDougal, [24] and LISGIS [22], foreign employees working with many of the foreignowned corporations in Liberia earned higher salaries than the indigenous working in the same corporations. Similarly, as discussed by Heintz [14], the high prevalence of household poverty in many homes in Liberia could be attributed to scarcity of employment for the youth, as well as poor working remuneration (salaries/wages) for the few that were gainfully employed. Also, as indicated by Chapman [9], the best of workers, in terms of their output or productive level could be inversely associated with how effective the labour law, judiciary system, and social welfare benefits that were made available to the employed. Relatively in Liberia, job insecurity and lack of welfare in misuse of facilities, bribery, and government demands were among the key leading factors triggering the denial of local employees engaged by multinationals or foreign-corporation in the country.
Likewise, the weakness in the governance of labour market and limited social protection for Liberian workers were leading factors making these corporations not to bother about their welfare of their local employees. These findings were in concomitant with Abras & Cuesta [1], as well as with ILO [15] and UNDP [31] whose findings identified the weak labour policy in Liberia as a key factor that foreign-owned corporations have taken advantage of; therefore, failing in their social welfare responsibilities meant for their employees, especially, that of the indigenous workers.. Also, in line with this established assertion was the World Bank (2014a; 2012b) reports that attributed the slow growth in employment generation in the country to weak economic and labour policies. On the other hand, the findings from our study also revealed that indigenous workers with low socioeconomic status were at higher risk of being denied of their access to welfare packages, compared to indigenous workers with higher educational qualification and those that were sociallyconnected. In line with this, Best [7] observed that Liberian employees in foreign-owned corporations were more vulnerable to poor working conditions than their foreign counterparts as a result of both weak labour policy and differentials in their socioeconomic standards. According to ILO [15], Johnson-sirleaf [20] and UNDP [31] reports on "Regional Integration and Human Development in Africa", the gap in acquisition of skills and technical-know together with shortage of highly demanded skilled man-power in the country remain one of the leading factors that have prevented the holistic implementation of the Liberianization policy by the Government of Liberia. Therefore, it is evident from our study's outcomes that the welfare of indigenous workers across foreign-owned corporations in the country is largely not met, particularly among the indigenous workers with low socioeconomic status. Thus, discrepancies may exist between expatriates and indigenous workers across multinationals or foreign-owned corporations in the country, workers with less skilled as a result of their poor technical and logical contributions tend to suffer more, in terms of welfare benefits accrued to them.

Regiocentric orientation Model
The lack of theories dealing with the effects of foreign investment adapted to the specific situation of less-develop countries, since most theories in question almost exclusively take the point of view of developed, even highly industrialized economies. Hence, the Regiocentric orientation Model. The model is a "region oriented" method of international management approach. This model argues strongly that geographic regions have commonalities that make a regional focus advantageous and that company problems related to that region are generally best solved by individuals from the region. Relatively, the level of welfare benefits enjoyed by employees working with foreign-owned corporations in Liberia is a function of where these firms originated from, that is, the base of their headquarters. Nevertheless, the employees of the same firms in other countries, particularly in societies with good industrial and economic policies enjoy better welfares compared with the situations of their employees in Liberia.

Equity Theory
The equity theory describes the role of equity and inequity in an organization work setting. It explains that employees are motivated by both equity and inequity but in different ways, either negative or positive to organization's goal and objectives. Thus, the theory (Adams, 1963, 1965) placed motivation more squarely in a social context. The central assumption of this theory to this study is that employees' inputs (e.g., effort, knowledge, skill, loyalty) are to be matched by their outcomes (e.g., pay, bonuses, benefits, recognition), regardless of their colour, gender, citizenship or any distinctive identity by comparison to others with same qualification and position which creates a sense of equity or fairness. The application of this theory to this study particularly focuses on the equitable and fair distribution of employees' needs to all employees in an organization. As applied in this study, inequity exists when an employee or employees get more, or less, than other employees with same position and qualification. This makes this theory best suited for this study for checking the Liberianization policy in foreign-owned organizations in terms of equal distribution of employees' benefits and welfare generally. For example, an inequity occurs if the comparison employee earns a higher salary, had more vacation time, better insurance benefits, among the likes. Therefore, this study is underpinned by both the equity theory and Regiocentric orientation model

Literature Review
Liberia problem of unemployment cannot be compared to its underemployment and poor working conditions [6]. The civil war left almost every government services dysfunctional and disorganized, thus affecting the implementation of most government policies. The conflict in Liberia has caused setbacks, lack of educational opportunities and the migration of many others to other countries from 1990 -2000 thus, creating shortage of skilled manpower [32,33]. It has also dilapidated the existing labour force, educational institutions as well as facilitating lack of efficiency in some government agencies [10]. This in turn has hampered the realization of the Liberianization policy [8]. A larger proportion of workers in Liberia often are subjected to unfavourable terms of trade: poor remuneration relative to out-put and cost of living [13,14,37,38,39].
In Liberia, foreign-owned corporations carry out business activities as a sole proprietorship or partnership. The country's Liberianization policy allows an investment to be incorporated locally or abroad, and its ownership can as well be a combination of foreign and local ownership or foreign only. Every foreign established business in the country is mandated to be registered with the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MCI) by submitting a Letter of Application and complete pre-registration forms which summed up to a total amount of US$100.00 [25]. In order to provide equal job opportunities to all, particularly to the indigenous workers in the country, a clause in the concession agreement guiding foreign-owned corporations, especially multinational corporation (MNC) is to give preferential treatment to skilled Liberian nationals, with percentage of Liberians nationals holding senior positions and a timeframe to reach the targets; and require the corporation to provide employment related statistics to the Ministry of Labour on quarterly basis [15]. Likewise, new concession agreement imposes social obligations, such as staff training and investment in education for Liberians [9,15] It is evidence that the Investment Act of 2010 has not effectually increased Liberian participation in commercial industries. Therefore, in an effort to attract foreign investment, the government of Liberia in 2010 placed some consideration to the mandate that foreign-owned corporations must employ Liberians at all levels and limiting the types of investments to be owned by only Liberians. Thus, as part of the government efforts to make Liberia a more striking community for investors, the government in late 2010 carried out an extensive review of the incentives offered under the Investment Incentives Act of 1973. The revised incentive code brought Liberia in line with international best practices, by granting foreign investors the same rights and subjecting them to the same duties and obligations as those that apply to domestic investors However, there are efforts to encourage all companies to hire Liberians. Section 216 of the Liberian Labour Law, approved July 2011 stipulates that "the Ministry shall not issue a permit to work in Liberia unless it is satisfied that there is no suitably qualified Liberian available to carry out the work required by the employer." This is a complete discrepancy with the unfolding realities, taking a statistical distribution of the number of foreign corporations and their employee strength to the number of labour force presence in the country that are seeking employment. Thus, it becomes self-evidence of the effectiveness of the policy stated earlier. As Socrates said, if government cannot do the job which they exist-to protect and promote common welfare, than all else is lost.
Imperatively, the Liberian government officials have done little to generate Liberian interest to force multinationals to play a more participatory role in the empowerment of the indigenous people [21]. The outcome has been "growth without development" in the sense that Liberia growth rate is acknowledged to be rising while the standard of living of its people remain relatively low [31,34,38]. Therefore, Liberianization policy needs more than enforcing its implementation but also creating a balance system to please both ends. Policy decisions taken by government in Liberia determine whether or not foreign-owned corporations have a positive or negative impact. The fact remains that foreign corporations cannot leave out measure to keep alive, they seek to apply necessary strategies to bring in individuals that are considered reliable with the goal of optimizing profits [5,28,29]. In doing so, they need to consider the environment that is capable of changing its work atmosphere, employing the locals, training, building institutions (academic, medical, and other recreational sites) for empowerment [4,20].
For instance, the conducting of job aptitude test for job seekers in the country is not common yet a large number of job applicants, particularly the young unemployed Liberians are often disqualified and tagged unfit for the advertised or available vacancies. It is a common occurrence to have the same job vacant positions re-advertised in newspapers, local radio stations and on local television months after the initial advertisement month in the country on the ground that there were no qualified indigenous people to fill the vacant positions. However, the truth of the matter is that in most cases, there were qualified indigenous people capable for the vacant positions; and it is often just another denial of Liberians of getting the well-paid jobs in their fatherland.
More so, the policy allows a business to be incorporated locally or abroad, and its operational ownership to be a combination of foreign and indigenous ownership or foreign only. Every foreign establishment in the country is required to register with the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MCI) by submitting a Letter of Application and complete preregistration forms that are available for US$100.00 from the Ministry of Commerce and Industry cashier [25]. The submitted documents by the intending establishment must state the proposed name of the business, initial capital, location, ownership and nature of business activities. In Liberia, the registration fees for foreign businesses are as follows: Sole Proprietorship -US$700; Partnership -US$800; Corporation -US$900 [25]. The aforementioned registration fees depend on the amount of capital to be invested, the sector (e.g. mining, energy, agriculture, telecommunications), and location of the investment. Investors may be eligible for investment incentives offered by the National Investment Commission (NIC) [25]. Foreign investors are often advised to provide the NIC with a detailed project proposal to determine if the intended investment qualifies for investment incentives or concessions on custom duties or tariffs [25].
Remarkably, a clause in the concession agreement guiding foreign-owned corporations, particularly multinational corporation (MNC) is to give preferential treatment to skilled Liberian nationals, with percentage of Liberians nationals holding senior positions and a timeframe to reach the targets; and require the corporation to provide employment related statistics to the Ministry of Labour on quarterly basis [15,16,35]. The fact remains that the larger proportion of Liberians are yet fit into this category of "highly skilled workers"; and there are no possibility that they would even in the next few decades. Also, new concession agreement imposes social obligations, such as staffs training and investment in education for Liberians. The Liberianization policy also dealt with ownership and control of MNCs, employment and training of Liberians, utilization of local resources [21,24,25].
The Liberianization policy is seen as a sleeping giant by an average Liberian [1]. The reason for this assertion is not farfetched but the dominance of foreigners in the control of the nation's economy at the detriment of the indigenous people of the land. The dominance of the Liberian economy by foreign investors was described as tragic and unfortunate phenomenon [7]. He posited that the economy of Liberia was opened to individual and corporate foreign investors as a result of weak and ineffective laws and regulations promulgated for promoting and safeguarding the establishment and growth of local businesses [25]. Comparatively, a pool of researchers have argued that for poverty to be alleviated amongst the people of Liberia, and for their standard of living to be improved, it is imperative that the hindrances posed by the high level of dominance of the country's economic activities by its foreign investors must be completely addressed [1,7,21,30].
Foreign investment has been identified by prominent leading economic experts, scholars and global economic organizations as a corrective measure that developing economies in the world could adopt to create jobs and improve the standard of living of their peoples [3,16,27,34,38,40]. The observed findings by these researchers in their various studies coupled with similar findings in related studies have come to buttress the empirical assertion of global economic bodies such as World Bank, International Monetary Fund, International Labour Organization that for developing countries to be rescued from their presence state of high prevalence rates of unemployment, underemployment and increasing level of poverty, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, proposition for thriving of foreign investment must be taken there very serious.

Conclusion
The study concluded that the general welfare benefits of workers should not be structured on whether a worker was a foreigner or a Liberian, rather equal welfare opportunities should be made available to all workers. Also, the provision of welfare benefits should not be connected to some type of organization, nor should workers welfare benefits be tied to differentials in the socio-economic and demographic characteristics. More so, the study observed that there was differentials in the opportunities that various foreign-owned corporation in the country have been subjected to adhere by. Nonetheless, these corporations may be facing one local challenges and another, the welfare of their workers should not be made to pay for the deficiency in the structure of the economy. This study has been able to establish the fact that indigenous employment policy is one of the significant predictors of how much welfare benefits could be enjoyed by employees working with foreign-owned corporations in Liberia.

Limitation of the Study
The study had limited human, financial and logistic bottleneck; none the less available and functional foreign-owned operations in the country were well covered and relevant information was sourced and findings have shown to a large extent the current challenges and denial that indigenous employees working in these corporations have been subjected to. However, the study is a cross sectional research and the situation may have either be improved on or worsen. Hence, the following recommendations.

Recommendation for Policy Implication
The empirical evidences as a result of the outcomes of the study have made the following recommendations very cogent and imperative: 1.
There is the need for strong judiciary system, specifically the labour court to address industrial matters.

2.
There is the need for enforcing a timely paid and indiscriminate paid policy in foreign corporations in the country.

3.
There is the need for responsible government ministries and agencies to periodically check the welfare of Liberians in foreign-owned corporations.

4.
Also, there is need for frequent research which will focus on the labour needs of Liberia. This will inform government, local and international organizations to introduce programs and reform policies which are implementable and goal-achievable or realizable. This will also keep up-to date data that reflect new demand for workers and help informed secondary and tertiary educational sector to direct priorities.

Data Availability
As explained above, the data for this study was primarily sourced. The sourced data used in this study are entered and saved in both SPSS and Stata file formats. Readers that are interested in the dataset should feel free to write the leading author through the provided email in the body of this work.

Conflicts of Interest
The authors state that they have no conflicting interests.