Malaysian Trades Union Congress (MTUC) council member A Sivanathan said migrant workers might not be aware of the safety and health risks they faced at the workplace, and that it might not necessarily be their fault.
There are 2.5 million migrant workers in the country, with a further four million believed to be undocumented.
“Workers have to know about the chemicals they are dealing with and what steps need to be taken if there is any emergency. There have to be proper signages in languages they can understand, but all this is absent,” said Sivanathan.
He said employers should not be just focusing on getting workers to wear personal protective equipment (PPE) and issuing fines if they do not.
They should look at modifying their workplaces and providing their workers a better working environment as this would also increase their productivity.
“A common complaint from workers is that they don’t find working with PPEs conducive. They should be allowed to speak out freely and express their dissatisfaction about issues like these without facing any repercussions,” he said.
Sivanathan was commenting on the Occupational Safety and Health Master Plan 2021-2025 announced by Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob earlier this month.
Ismail said most migrant workers in the country lacked “basic knowledge” about occupational safety and health. He also called for a programme to provide these workers with the basics of occupational safety and health knowledge so that the accident rate at workplaces could be reduced.
Hardly a week after the announcement, an Indian national died in a “flash fire” while cleaning coal dust at a cement factory in Ipoh while his Bangladeshi colleague suffered burns. The Perak department of occupational safety and health promised legal action if it found any violation of the Occupational Safety and Health Act 1994.
Adrian Pereira, executive director of human rights group North South Initiative, said the disparity between the migrant workers’ death rate and Malaysians’ death rate at workplaces “is abnormally large, so something must be terribly wrong”. He did not give figures.
As safety information was often not translated into the migrants’ language and their grasp of Malay and English was limited, he said, migrant workers could not be expected to be fully conversant with Malaysian safety and health procedures.
Pereira said most migrant workers employed in Malaysia might only have a Standard 6 education and would have been brought in as a “general worker”.
“The migrant worker recruitment process is not being done according to specific sectors and needs, and there are different hazards in each sector,” he said.
Asking how the government’s levy on migrant workers was being used, Pereira suggested that it be utilised to upskill workers and provide them with knowledge about occupational safety and health.
The levy for migrant workers in Peninsular Malaysia ranges from RM410 for domestic helpers to RM1,850 for those in the manufacturing, construction and services sectors.
In Sabah and Sarawak, the levy ranges from RM410 for domestic helpers to RM1,490 for those in the services sector.