Malaysia bids to silence
immigrant labor
revelations By Baradan
Kuppusamy
KUALA LUMPUR - Foreign workers,
mostly from Indonesia, now make up just over 10%
of Malaysia's workforce of 14 million people, both
in the formal and informal sectors, according to
the latest government statistics.
A recent
series of incidents has highlighted the shocking
conditions in which these laborers toil and
exposed the lengths to which the Malaysian
government will go to keep the press quiet on the
plight of immigrants in the country.
Irene
Fernandez , a prominent Malaysian human-rights
activist and long-time champion of exploited
foreign workers, has come under severe attacks
from government ministers and employers for an
interview she gave a Jakarta newspaper in which she
condemned poor governance
and alleged that migrant workers felt "unsafe" in
Malaysia.
In the April 30 interview,
Fernandez, president of Tenaganita (Women's Force)
and winner of the Right Livelihood Award in 2005,
said that apart from low wages and rampant
exploitation, migrant workers were also subjected
to unfair labor practices and often stopped and
harassed by uniformed personnel, in a country that
has no legal framework to protect, regulate or
ensure the safety of immigrants.
Immigrants' housing, wages and welfare
were left to market forces, she told the
English-language Jakarta Post, causing a chaotic
situation that enabled rampant exploitation of
vulnerable workers.
The interview came on
the heels of rising anger in Indonesia against the
reports of exploitation of its nationals in
Malaysia.
The wave of immigration, which
began in Malaysia in the 1990s, coincided with a
construction and commodities boom that saw vast
swathes of the jungle-cloaked country transformed
into oil palm plantations.
As countless
skyscrapers popped up and rapid urbanization made
the construction sector hungry for cheap labor,
Indonesians were lured into the country en masse,
quickly growing to be the biggest group of foreign
workers, numbering nearly two million last year.
Others - Indians, Bangladeshis, Nepalese,
Vietnamese and Africans - followed to work on
plantations and in the construction, manufacturing
and service sectors whose rapid expansion left the
top 10% of Malaysia's 28 million people, along
with foreign investors, extremely wealthy.
The middle class also expanded but the
bottom 60% of the country suffered, competing
ferociously for the manufacturing sector's four
million jobs.
According to the Malaysian
Investment and Development Authority (MIDA), a
government agency, from 2011 the government
expanded foreign employment to include 11
sub-sectors such as restaurant jobs, cleaning
services, cargo handling, launderette services,
golf club caddies, barbers and so forth.
As high demand pushed wages down, the
"3-D" jobs - dirty, dangerous and demeaning
employment that most Malaysians no longer want to
do - became almost exclusively associated with
Indonesian immigrants.
'Sedition' To counter
Fernandez's allegations now circling around
Jakarta, the mainstream media in Malaysia is
running daily stories of happily employed
Indonesian workers with no complaints about the
system.
The interview is seen as a
"betrayal of Malaysia" by Fernandez and has
sparked vociferous calls for action against her.
She has been accused of everything from
unpatriotic behavior to being a traitor and has
been held responsible for spoiling an otherwise
"excellent" relationship between the two
countries.
Under pressure from the
government, the Malaysian Anti-Corruption
Commission and the police announced this week that
Fernandez was being investigated for "sedition", a
catch-all law that many civil-rights activists
have described as "archaic" and used against
human-rights defenders.
Fernandez, who for
the past two decades has been virtually the lone
voice in the country decrying the plight of
foreign workers, said she was unfazed by the
attacks.
"I will not be cowed. I will
continue to speak up for voiceless migrants and
the oppressed poor people of Malaysia," she told
Inter Press Service (IPS).
"I have no
regrets. I want to highlight the sorry plight of
thousands of migrant workers," she said, adding
that she stood by everything she said in the
Jakarta Post interview.
This is
Fernandez's second run-in with the law. In 1996,
she was charged with publishing false news to all
the foreign missions in the capital about the
deplorable living and working conditions of
immigrants in detention centers.
After a
marathon trial that lasted 13 years, the court
acquitted her. She was given the Right
Livelihood Award for her "outstanding and
courageous work to stop violence against women and
abuses of migrant and poor workers".
Fernandez has a long history of activism -
she organized the first textile workers union, was
instrumental in setting up trade unions in the
country's free-trade zones and focused on
development of women leaders in the labor
movement.
Tenaganita aims to secure the
rights of foreign workers who, according to a
government census in December 2011, number nearly
3 million, documented and undocumented.
The hysterical reaction against Fernandez
for speaking the truth was typical of the
government, said Arulchelvam Subramaniam, the
secretary-general of the Parti Sosialis Malaysia
(PSM).
"The country has a first-world
infrastructure and a booming economy but remains
immature intellectually," he said. "At a signal,
everybody jumped on the bandwagon and lashed out
at her [Fernandez], including the mainstream
media," in the process forgetting the real issues
involved such as the exploitation of workers, low
wages and corruption in the legal system.
According to Subramaniam Sathasivam, the
Human Resources minister, all labor laws are
equally applicable to locals as well as foreign
workers. "We are fair in that," he told IPS.
But the laws are weak and easily
surmounted by employers, while law enforcement and
persecution of offenders is weak and ineffective.
Some laws look good on paper but are impractical
to implement.
While seeking to deflect
criticism on its handling of foreign workers, the
government is now toying with a Foreign Workers
Act, which would regulate immigrants' working and
living conditions.
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