MP: Kill the migrant-worker ‘cash cow’
DAP’s Steven Sim says govt policy should be to support local businesses, not make a business out of migrant workers.
PETALING JAYA: An MP has called for an end to the lucrative business of importing and employing migrant workers, which he said was raking in billions to Umno crony companies.
“The government’s policy on migrant workers should be to support local businesses not to make a business out of migrant workers,” said Steven Sim of the DAP, who is MP for Bukit Mertajam.
He said the “junior” Human Resources Minister seemed helpless against Umno cronies. While the ministry had projected a need for 1.87 million foreign workers by 2020, the current number of migrant workers approved by the Home Ministry was already 2 million.
“Even more curious, why does the Home Ministry want another 500,000 Bangladeshi workers to come each year for the next three years?” he said, referring to a policy announced last year, which was subsequently suspended.
“The question is: Who is really in charge? Why does this situation happen in the first place? Is it because the lucrative business of importing migrant workers is reserved for the ‘more senior’ Home Minister instead of the Human Resources Minister who has to helplessly step aside to Umno’s cronies?” Sim said in a Labour Day message.
He accused the government of allowing the migrant workers industrial complex to be come a lucrative business “especially for its rent-seeking cronies”.
He said that if the government and cronies of government leaders were making billions “it made sense for them to keep on introducing policy to sustain the industry – new contractors, new intakes, new tariffs and new laws to milk the cash cow.”
Sim called for a new human resource policy that would also deal with high unemployment and underemployment among young Malaysians, low numbers of working women, the problems of post-retirement workers, and a strategy to best tap into the global talent pool.
Sim questioned the need for new foreign workers when there were about 38,500 retrenchments last year, the highest level since 2010, and more job cuts were forecast this year and next year.
He said more than 200,000 graduates were unemployed, not including those with lower qualifications, according to a report by the Malaysian Employers’ Federation. Only 40 percent of graduates this year would be able to find jobs.
The Human Resources Minister, Richard Riot, had confessed that the unemployment trend would extend into 2017, and Sim noted that growing unemployment was a global trend.
“However, there is a general failure of human resources policy in our country,” he said.
He criticised the over-dependence on cheap migrant workers and pointed out that there were already 2 million migrant workers in the country and another 2-3 million unregistered migrant workers.
Sim said human resources policy had be pushed aside by the lucrative business of importing migrant workers, which brings in about RM3 billion a year for the government and another RM3 billion shared among a handful of crony companies.
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