Employers hard pressed ‘redeeming’ legal workers

NINE agonising months ... that is how long it took an irate building contractor to get the work permits of his foreign workers renewed.

According to a report in Sin Chew Daily yesterday, the current immigration blitz to flush out illegal migrant workers has caused those without valid papers to go into hiding to avoid arrest.

Even legal workers risk being rounded up and sent to detention centres pending verification of their status.

Employers lamented that apart from incurring losses due to no-show by workers who fear arrest, many have to run around to secure the release of legal migrant workers detained in the current operation.

The crackdown, code-named “Ops Mega”, began on the night of June 30 right after the deadline for employers to register their illegal foreign workers for the Enforcement Card, or E-Card, had expired.

The irate contractor, identified only as Phang in the report, told Sin Chew that it took six to nine months for employers to get the work permits of their migrant workers renewed through the government-appointed agent, MyEG Services Bhd (MyEG).

He said in September last year, a month before the work permits of his foreign workers expired, he submitted the applications to renew the workers’ permits with their passports and all necessary fees to MyEG, but did not obtain the new permits until last month.

He explained that migrant workers have to surrender all personal documents when applying for the renewal of their work permits, but MyEG would issue a receipt to the employers as proof that the workers’ permits were being renewed.

Employers would in turn provide a photocopy of the receipt to these workers.

What irked him, Phang said, was that the enforcement officers carrying out Ops Mega also rounded up workers who held only such receipts.

The employers thus have to go to the Immigration Department to find out where their workers had been taken before retrieving their documents from MyEG to prove that they are legal workers, he said, adding that it could take up to a week to get their workers “redeemed” and in the process, many man-hours were lost.