Malaysia policy ‘abuses’ migrant workers

Amnesty International has hit Malaysia for the Muslim country’s severe and excessive criminal penalties on migrants, saying that foreign workers are being punished even if errors are committed by the employer.

This was revealed in a report, “Trapped: The Exploitation of Migrant Workers in Malaysia,” which documented widespread abuses against migrant workers from eight South Asian and Southeast Asian countries, including the Philippines, who are lured to Malaysia by the promise of jobs but are instead used in forced labor or exploited in other ways.

The report was authored by Michael Bochenek, also the director of policy of the London-based Amnesty International.

“Large-scale, public roundups in markets and on city streets and indiscriminate, warantless raids on private dwellings in poorer neighborhoods are common. Police frequently ask migrants for bribes,” it said.

“Those who cannot pay are arrested and held in deplorable conditions in immigration detention centers,” the report added.

Based on Philippine government records, there are at least 243,000 Filipinos in Malaysia. But there could be more since there are a lot of undocumented workers.

The Bochenek report said that Amnesty International has heard over a dozen cases in which Malaysian authorities delivered immigration detainees to traffickers operating on the Thai border between 2006 and 2009.

“The Malaysian government must stop criminalizing its migrant worker force and instead tackle forced and compulsory labor,” it added.

According to the report, migrant workers in Malaysia are easy prey for unscrupulous recruitment agents, employers and corrupt police because they receive less legal protection compared with other workers.

“Labor laws are not effectively enforced, and labor courts may take months or years to resolve cases. For domestic workers who are not covered by most of the labor laws, recourse to the courts is usually not an option,” it said.

Not surprisingly, migrants in Malaysia are then forced to work in hazardous situations, often against their will, and toil for 12 hours a day or more while some are subject to verbal, physical and sexual abuse.

The Bochenek report revealed that most migrants wanting to work in Malaysia pay recruitment agents substantial sums of money to secure jobs, work permits and training only to find out later that much of what their agents told them about their new jobs is untrue—the pay, type of work, even the existence of those jobs or their legal status in the country.

As a result, most workers have taken out loans at exorbitant interest rates, making them incapable of returning to their home countries.

“Nearly all employers hold their workers’ passports, placing workers at risk of arrest and in practice preventing them from leaving abusive workplaces. Coercive practices such as these are indicators of forced labor,” the report said.

The Malaysian government, according to the Bochenek report, has the responsibility to prevent such abuses but instead facilitates trafficking through its loose regulation of recruitment agents and through laws and policies that fail to protect workers.

“Until Malaysia’s labor laws offer effective protection and are effectively enforced, exploitation will continue,” Bochenek said. –LLANESCA T. PANTI Reporter, Manila Times