KL to tighten rules for foreign workers

KL to tighten rules for foreign workers

Agence France-Presse, Kuala Lumpur

Malaysia plans to tighten rules for hiring foreign labour because there is an oversupply of migrant workers in the country, reports said on Thursday.

Human Resources Minister Fong Chan Onn was quoted as saying by the Star that Malaysia needed one million foreign workers but there were currently 1.2 million registered with the ministry, excluding illegal immigrants.

The cabinet is concerned about excess foreign labour and wants to plug the loopholes that cause the oversupply because it undermines the hire "locals first" policy, he said.

"We want to tighten the regulations on the hiring of foreign workers because we fear there are some employers, especially in the manufacturing sector, who prefer to hire foreign workers ... rather then employ locals just to save costs," Fong said.

Among the measures identified to make it harder to bring in foreign workers include abolishing middlemen, requiring employers to seek ministry's approval before hiring and encouraging flexible work hours, the report said.

"We want a system that will make it more difficult to hire foreign labour while increasing our use of capital-intensive equipment," Fong was quoted as saying by the New Straits Times.

"The government has always viewed foreign labour as a temporary measure in our economy's transformation from being labour- to capital-intensive."

Malaysia, which is also home to an estimated one million illegal immigrants, mainly from Indonesia, has long sought to cut its reliance on foreign labour, most of whom are engaged in low- paying non-skilled sectors such as construction, plantation and services.

It introduced harsh new immigration laws in August 2002 and cracked down on illegal immigrants which saw nearly half a million of them being repatriated during a four-month amnesty period in that year.

However, this caused a severe labor shortage in the construction and plantation sectors, and the government later had to fast-track approvals for recruiting foreign workers for certain industries.