MTUC Sarawak wants RCI on foreign workers issue
KUCHING: The Malaysian Trades Union Congress (MTUC) Sarawak division wants a Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) to be set up to get to the bottom of the country’s foreign workers issue.
According to its secretary Andrew Lo, the government’s decision to bring in another 1.5 million foreign workers was not consistent with their decision to put the increase of levy for foreign workers on hold.
“The increase in levy can only be good for the long term interest of industries and the country. It will compel industries to automate and modernise their operations instead of forever relying on the addiction of foreign workers. They should be doing this a long time ago,” he said in a statement yesterday.
Lo pointed out that employers had complained that the increase was ill-timed due to the current economic slowdown.
“MTUC believes that if indeed there is an economic slowdown, companies should be downsizing and reducing their foreign workers so any increase will have less impact.
“Yet at the same time, we decide to bring in another 1.5 million foreign workers. That is more than 10 per cent of the workforce and in total, more than 20 per cent of our workforce are foreign workers,” he exclaimed.
He estimated that there were two to four million illegal foreign workers in the country despite the many amnesty programmes and raids by the police and Immigration Department.
“The 6P legalisation programme launched in Aug 2011 has revealed that a total of 2,088,358 foreign workers had been registered, of whom 1,135,499 were illegals. This means that out of a workforce of 11 million, foreign workers accounted for one out of every five jobs.”
Lo said employers complained that Malaysians were unwilling to do dirty, difficult and dangerous jobs and also harped that Malaysian workers had bad attitude, were lazy, choosy, demanding and so on, thus resulting in their preference to employ foreign workers.
“In 2013, Australian employers harped exactly the same about Australian workers and prefer foreign workers, especially from Malaysia. Singapore employers also made the same complaints and we have more than half a million ‘lazy, choosy and bad attitude’ Malaysian workers there.
“It is likely that employers prefer foreign workers because they are easier to control and exploit. Some employers place a large number of these workers in harsh and dirty living conditions and this have led to tensions rising and workers unrest,” he remarked, adding that this led to wages in the country being severely depressed until it only contributed 32 per cent to the GDP.
He also noted that outsourcing companies often charged exorbitant prices on foreign workers.
“Most small time business owners, unable to afford the costly overheads, decided they would rather engage in the employment of illegal workers. Despite all this talk of reducing workers, the government is actually perpetuating it by granting licences with impunity to selected outsourcing companies to import labour and farming them out to endusers.
“This is worse than bonded labour and must be stopped immediately. MTUC calls for a Royal Commission of Inquiry to get to the bottom of the foreign workers’ issue, which is a multibillion dollar industry.”