Malaysia has initiated an inquiry to find out how hundreds of migrant workers came from South Asia without jobs, despite paying high fees to acquire them.
The situation brings up worries about labour violations in Malaysia, a crucial industrial centre at the centre of the global supply chain that has received several complaints in recent years about worker exploitation.
Following payments of up to 20,000 ringgit ($4,500) to intermediaries to secure employment, hundreds of employees from Bangladesh and Nepal have arrived since December, according to representatives of two rights organisations who spoke with dozens of the workers.
The campaigners said that many people took out loans to pay for their recruiting costs but are unable to begin repaying them since they lack employment or wages. They also claimed that upon landing, recruitment agencies had taken away their passports.
Independent labour campaigner Andy Hall, whose group has been in touch with the migrant workers, said that “these workers are at high risk of being subjected to forced labour and severe destitution.”
Their predicament was made worse by things like debt servitude, substandard housing, isolation, and restricted freedom of movement once their passports were seized, he said.
The International work Organisation lists passport confiscation and financial bondage resulting from the high recruiting price among its symptoms of “forced labour,” coupled with fraud.
Asri Rahman, the director general of the labour department, said that the Malaysian government is looking into the situation but refused to disclose more information until the investigation was over.
A group of 226 Bangladeshi and Nepalese employees who had been in the nation of Southeast Asia for 40 days without the employment they had been promised were visited by V. Sivakumar, the minister for human resources, last week.
He called the employees’ cramped quarters “appalling” and offered to get them employment as soon as possible, although he did not mention who provided the facilities.
Lack of Transparency
The probe comes as Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s five-month-old administration aims to combat worker exploitation and clamp down on corruption.
This month, anti-graft investigators detained two of Sivakumar’s assistants as part of a probe into the hiring of foreign employees. He was questioned as well and has agreed to help.
Over the years, Malaysia has been accused of using forced labour in the production of palm oil and in manufacturing. The United States has even prohibited imports from many of Malaysia’s companies due to these allegations.
Bangladesh, a significant source of migrants for Malaysia, requested increased openness from Kuala Lumpur to guard against employment fraud against its residents.
In a Facebook post on Saturday, its High Commission in Malaysia said: “If the Malaysian government’s approval process for hiring foreign workers is transparent, not a single worker should be unemployed.”
According to the high commission, this forced an employer to hire some of the migrants while still trying to find employment for the others.
Speaking to reporters on the condition of anonymity, a Bangladeshi official said that a “few hundred” of its countrymen were stranded in Malaysia without work.
The Nepal embassy said that it was attempting to place 125 of its residents in jobs after they had been similarly left stranded and that it had also heard similar concerns from other people.
