It is better for Human Resources Minister S. Saravanan to suspend himself and his officials for 2 weeks instead of imposing unnecessary hardship on businesses by repeating the previous 2-week suspension for the application for the recruitment of migrant workers from August 15-31. The previous 2-week suspension was on June 1-15.
The 2 week unilateral suspension by the Human Resources Ministry does not make any sense just when the recruitment of migrant workers from Indonesia were recently restored and normalised on 1 August 2022. S. Saravanan’s failure to deliver on his promise in the Memorandum of Understanding signed with Indonesia, to stop Malaysia’s Maid Online System(MOS), caused Indonesia to abruptly freeze all Indonesian workers coming to Malaysia and label Malaysia as a disgrace.
Saravanan did not respond to the insult from Indonesia but ate humble pie to comply with the Indonesian requirements in the MOU to allow Indonesian workers to return to Malaysia. Barely two weeks after the Indonesian worker situation was normalised on 1 August, the recruitment of all migrant workers is now inexplicably suspended for 2 weeks beginning August 15.
This would hinder efforts by all industries to overcome the 1.2 million worker shortage and inflicted losses of RM33.5 billion to the plantation sector, glove and auto spare parts industry alone. Other industries will also record losses of tens of billions of ringgit.
There is no reason why the current application procedure and conditions should not be maintained to overcome the severe labour shortages expeditiously. The suspended procedure includes the decentralisation of the interview process via the One Stop Centre at the state labour offices to allow the industry a seamless process of foreign worker application.
According to the Malaysian Muslim Restaurant Owners Association (Presma), 1,500 Indian-Muslim restaurants, popularly called “mamak” restaurants, are expected to close nationwide following the lack of foreign workers and difficulty in sourcing local workers. PRESMA claims that the lack of foreign workers has already caused 3,000 restaurant operators out of 12,000 registered association members to be closed since the Covid-19 pandemic started more than two years ago. The mamak restaurant industry needs at least 30,000 more workers to fill vacancies across the country.
Many industries suffer the same predicament as the mamak restaurants. The Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers (FMM) has opposed the suspension of the foreign worker application procedure for 2 weeks. FMM claims that the suspension would disrupt the current economic recovery by derailing the manpower planning of the industry, which will lead to their inability to fulfil their projects and orders.
S. Saravanan should wake up and do his job by allowing applications for the recruitment of migrant workers to continue. He should focus on cutting the red tape surrounding the many applications pending processing and approval, which has the industry seeking an efficient processing system for a quick turnaround on the applications.