Malaysia's feckless foreign worker policy By Sheridan Mahavera

The recent fiasco over Putrajaya's handling of the 1.5 million Bangladeshi workers supposedly meant for Malaysia has highlighted, once again, the haphazardness in which foreign labour policies are made and questions about their effectiveness. Union and trade groups have said the debacle represented, yet again, the lack of a clear and consistent long-term policy on foreign workers by Putrajaya. This is despite the Najib administration's repeated pledge that it wants to cure Malaysian companies of its addiction to cheap foreign labour. That different ministers said different things on different days about the plan fuelled suspicions of "state capture" - that private interests close to Putrajaya were influencing policy in order to make billions in the lucrative manpower supply industry. Conflicting statements Now that the public is told that not all 1.5 million Bangladeshi workers are destined for Malaysia, one wonders why Putrajaya could not have said so at the beginning, when Home Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi first announced the plan in June last year. In the interim months until last week, Putrajaya took criticism over the plan from various groups, including the Malaysian Trades Union Congress (MTUC) and the Malaysian Employers Federation (MEF) - two groups that have historically disagreed with each other on almost everything related to labour issues. They argued that Malaysia already had about two million illegal workers and more than 143,000 refugees that could be absorbed into the system to fill job gaps in various industries such as plantations, manufacturing and services. There were also allegations that individuals close to Umno were trying to profit from this intake through their ownership of an online system to process those workers. MTUC secretary-general N. Gopal Kishnam (pic) said the plan ran counter to the 11th Malaysia Plan's to cap the proportion of foreigners to total workers at 15% by 2020. The 1.5 million plan would push the proportion up to 20%. In an interview with The Malaysian Insider, MEF's Datuk Shamsuddin Bardan estimated that foreign workers sent RM30 billion out of the country in 2014. Yet, Putrajaya took flak for more than six months and continued to defend the plan, right up till Friday when the Human Resources Minister Datuk Richard Riot gave the clearest explanation yet - the 1.5 million, he said, were not all meant for Malaysia but was the number of Bangladeshis who had registered with their government as supply available to 139 countries. To add to the confusion, Zahid announced hours later on the same day the suspension of recruitment of foreign labour from all source countries, including Bangladesh. The purpose of the freeze was to allow the completion of the Rehiring Programme of Illegal Foreign Workers to legalise those working without permits and to help Putrajaya assess the foreign labour needs of industries. "Two ministers with PhD cannot get their facts right. The level of competency among Barisan Nasional leaders is now more worrying," said Segambut MP Lim Lip Eng when commenting on Riot's revelation. Either Putrajaya genuinely made a U-turn after public criticism or Zahid's colleagues allowed him to publicly repeat a mistake and get skewered for it. More contradictions But the debacle over the 1.5 million plan is not the only sign of Putrajaya's uncoordinated approach to foreign workers. In his recalibration of Budget 2016, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak announced the rehiring programme for employers using illegal workers to legalise and rehire them at the cost RM1,200 per worker. In a BloombergTV report MEF's Shamsuddin (pic) as saying that no company was going to admit that it was employing illegals and pay the RM1,200 levy for each of them in order to legalise their stay. There is also a question of why there needs to be another programme to rehire illegal workers given that Putrajaya just finished a similar initiative called the 6P programme less than two years ago. Some 520,000 legal permits were issued during the 6P programme which ran from 2011 to 2014. According to Bloomberg TV, the remaining illegal workers were to be caught and deported. Yet instead of mass deportations, Putrajaya has now announced the rehiring programme that will run until December 31. At the same time, it signed a deal with Bangladesh for the recruitment of its workers. This lack of basic coordination and the inability of public officials to provide accurate and coherent explanations appears to support labour experts' advice to place foreign worker recruitment under the purview of the Human Resource Ministry, rather than the Home Ministry, since the former is asked with crafting of labour market policies. Perhaps what is really needed, as MTUC's Gopal has said, is a proper inquiry such as one by royal commission or a parliamentary select committee on the foreign worker industry to figure out why these debacles happen and how they can be prevented once and for all.