The Malaysian Insight

IT is the responsibility of labour leaders to speak up for all workers regardless of nationality, and their doing so would also be in the interests of Malaysian workers, said prominent economist Jomo Kwame Sundaram.

Addressing the Malaysian Trades Union Congress 70th anniversary dinner in Kuala Lumpur tonight, Jomo spoke of the squalid living conditions of millions of foreign workers, calling on union leaders to speak up for them.

“When we allow some workers to be badly treated, all workers are worst off,” said the former Council of Eminent Persons member.

“It is important to not only to think narrowly about your union or your nationality but to realise that when we practice discrimination against others, such as foreigners, the result is that our own workers suffer.”

MTUC president Abdul Halim Mansor, MTUC secretary-general J. Solomon and about 70 international trade union delegates were present

Jomo said local workers would also be affected if Malaysian employers were allowed to continue to exploit cheap illegal foreign labour.

“Employers will increasingly take advantage of the fact that they can always hire foreigners. And how do you compete when the foreign worker is working twice as hard for lesser income?”

The Khazanah Research Institute senior research adviser pointed to the decline of the National Union of Plantation Workers (NUPW) in the last 30 years as a warning.

“It has become almost irrelevant because all the workers on the plantations are foreigners and they work in deplorable conditions,” Jomo said.

“When you allow foreign workers to be badly exploited, the result is the workers in (our) own country would also be worse off.”
 
Jomo pointed to government estimates that there are 6.7 million foreign workers in Malaysia, of which only 2.2 million are documented.  

“One of the big challenges going forward is the question of trying to ensure that workers have jobs. And Malaysia has been relatively successful in ensuring a high level of employment compared to other countries.

“However, a lot of labour involved foreign workers, and this has resulted in relatively poor, low-income jobs because many employers have the alternative of using foreign labour instead of Malaysian workers.”

He said it was not true that Malaysians were not prepared to do hard work, adding that the claim was exaggerated by employers for their own interests.

He added that the trend over the past 30 years was that employers were successfully lobbying for foreign workers and some politicians were getting contracts to import these workers.

“We need to begin to think about what unionism in the third decade of the 21st country is going to be about,” said Jomo, who is also formerly the United Nations assistant secretary-general for economic development.

“It cannot just rest on the successes and the struggles of the past.

“It has to look forward and face the challenges working people face all over the world, particularly in our part of the world and to change and adapt our work in response.” – November 8, 2019.