‘No plans to drop recruitment system for domestic helpers’

KUALA LUMPUR: The government has no plans to abolish the existing recruitment and placement system for domestic helpers, but will refine and improve it so that it is more effective, the Dewan Rakyat was told yesterday.

Deputy Human Resources Minister Datuk Awang Hashim said the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Malaysia and Indonesia on the employment of foreign maids expired in 2016, and there will be no new intake of domestic workers from the republic.

“For the time being, the government is negotiating with Indonesia for the signing of a new agreement.

“Although private employment agencies are not allowed to recruit domestic helpers from Indonesia, the government does not prevent them from recruiting from other source countries such as the Philippines or Cambodia.”

He was replying to a question from Teresa Kok Suh Sim (PH-Seputeh) on whether the Labour Department is in the process of abolishing the recruitment and placement system for domestic helpers as more than 1,000 foreign worker agencies have not had any new supply of foreign maids since 2016.

Awang said as of Oct 31 this year, a total of 88,752 foreign maids are working in the country.

He added that since 2006, the recruitment and employment of Indonesian domestic helpers to work in Malaysia has been done through a series of MoU between Malaysia and Indonesia.

“The 2011 protocol-amending MoU expired on May 30, 2016. As such, we conducted a series of negotiations from November 2017 to November 2018 but were unable to finalise the MoU. Perhaps, we can do so by this year or early next year.”

Awang said the government also held bilateral meetings with the Indonesian government to finalise the MoU scheduled for November 2019, but had to be postponed due to several issues, including the onechannel system, one maid, one task concept and high recruitment cost. – Bernama