KL's ban on RI workers a 'time bomb'

Agencies, Jakarta

Indonesia criticized Malaysia on Monday for Kuala Lumpur's plan to halve the number of Indonesians working in the country, warning that the move could backfire and spark an influx of illegal workers.

Calling the plan unfair, Manpower Minister Jacob Nuwa Wea said Indonesians wanting to work in Malaysia in the future would more likely enter the country illegally rather than go through the official process.

"This decision is unfair because only some out of hundreds of thousands of people were involved in the violent demonstration. So it's unfair to send many people home," Jacob was quoted by Reuters as saying.

"The Malaysian government should remember that reducing or banning foreign workers can create more problems, such as more illegal workers ... it will be more difficult to control," he said.

The plan was made public by Malaysian Home Ministry secretary general Aseh Che Mat on Sunday only a week after violent clashes between Indonesian workers and police broke out there.

Che Mat was quoted by the official Bernama news agency as saying there were 900,000 registered Indonesian workers in Malaysia. Most are employed in the construction, manufacturing and plantation sectors and many also work as domestic helpers.

Meanwhile, director of the Center for Labor and Development Studies Bomer Pasaribu said that Malaysia's plan to halve its intake of Indonesian workers would worsen unemployment in Indonesia.

"We are already facing an employment crisis and this will only add to the pressure that may lead to the explosion of a social time bomb at home," Bomer, a former manpower minister, told AFP on Monday.

"If we are talking of unemployment, underemployment and new workforce entering the market, last year we had some 31 million people in those categories."

"This year, I estimate that 41 million of our potential workforce of some 102 million people, or 40.2 percent, will be in that category," said Pasaribu, adding that the government only dealt with labor issues on a case by case basis.

He said the government should institute an orderly process for selecting and sending workers abroad and improve cooperation with host countries. It could "learn a lot" from the way the Philippines manages its workers abroad.

Pasaribu said Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur should also address the "mafias" in each country that handle the inflow of illegal workers into Malaysia. He said these number were about the same as, if not more than, the legal number.

Minister of Foreign Affairs Hassan Wirajuda said on Monday that the Indonesian government could only hope that Malaysia would not generalize and punish "all Indonesian workers," due to the recent rioting incidents.

"We hope Malaysia will not make generalizations about Indonesian workers and later bar all our workers from entering Malaysia. Most have provided a significant contribution to the development of Malaysia," Hassan said.

Indonesian workers there will be visited regularly by officials from the Indonesian Embassy in Kuala Lumpur to ensure that the workers do not repeat their violent actions.

"They should try and understand that they are guests (in Malaysia) ... and should abide by local laws," he commented.

Jakarta earns about US$500 million in dollar revenue annually from the remittances of millions of overseas workers so any clampdown is a worrying issue for Indonesia, where the government has predicted unemployment will increase to around 40 million this year from around 36 million in 2001.

Last week, hundreds of Indonesian workers from a textile factory attacked police when officers tried to detain colleagues suspected of taking drugs. Fifteen workers alleged to have participated in the riots will appear in court on Tuesday, newspapers reported.

The factory riot came just over a month after more than 1,600 illegal Indonesian immigrants rioted at a detention camp in southern Johor state and burned down some of their quarters.

Despite the recent ban on the intake of Indonesian workers, Malaysian manufacturers urged the government on Monday to allow the employment of Indonesian women workers.

The Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers in a statement said it supported the ban and a new policy to diversify sources of foreign labor.

But it called for female Indonesians to be excluded from the ban, as quoted by AFP.

"This is because the manufacturing sector employs a large number of female workers from Indonesia. In addition, recruiting female workers from other source countries may meet with problems as the supply of female manpower in those countries may not be forthcoming," it said.