M’sian foreign worker policy cuts firms’ costs: Minister

KUALA LUMPUR — The Malaysian government’s policy of allowing foreign workers is a form of subsidy for businesses that will otherwise have to pay double or more to hire locals to do the same job, said Deputy Home Minister Nur Jazlan Mohamed.

“For example, let’s say for the same sector and same job, an employer would have to pay RM3,000 (S$1,015)a month to a local, but only RM1,500 to a foreign worker,” he noted.

“The difference here, multiplied by 12 months, works out to RM18,000, and yet the highest levy the government imposes is RM2,500 per year.”

Under a revised levy structure, employers are to pay RM2,500 per foreign worker in the manufacturing, construction and services sectors, and RM1,500 per worker in the plantation and agriculture sectors.

He told The Malaysian Insider that this, in effect, means employers get a “subsidy” of around RM16,000 for hiring a foreign worker, adding the government was “fed up” with taking the blame for the large number of foreign workers in the country when it was the employers who wanted cheap labour.

Mr Nur Jazlan said he was aware of Malaysians doing difficult and low-paying jobs in Singapore, saying that this was again because employers in Malaysia did not want to pay local workers the wages they wanted.

“I don’t think Malaysians want to go to Singapore to work; they have transportation issues, hardship, but because local employers don’t want to pay them enough, they have to go away.”

He revealed that the government planned to develop a draft policy on the number of foreign workers needed by June. Malaysia already has 2.3 million legal foreign workers, besides the estimated 2 million illegal foreign ones. They are hired to work in “3D” — dirty, difficult and dangerous — jobs shunned by Malaysians.

Putrajaya’s plan to bring in more migrant workers has been opposed, with some saying the government should register the existing illegal workers so that they can be absorbed into the workforce.

Last month, Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi announced that foreign labour recruitment from all countries was to be frozen to reassess the needs of the workforce. This came shortly after the government announced that it signed a memorandum of understanding to receive 1.5 million workers from Bangladesh over the next three years.

At the same time, a plan called Rehiring Programme for Illegal Workers will run until Dec 31 to legalise undocumented foreign workers and fulfil employers’ needs for labour.

The opposition claimed the brother of Mr Zahid — who is also the Home Affairs Minister and whose ministry governs the intake of foreign workers — stood to benefit as he runs a company that could provide a management system for the workers, an allegation Mr Zahid denied.

Mr Nur Jazlan told The Malaysian Insider that the economic and social cost to the government in allowing employers to continue depending on foreign labour was escalating and becoming burdensome.

“In terms of financial costs when they use our public health services for instance, and the social cost, when they marry locals and so on, is already a burden too big to bear,” he said.

The ongoing rehiring programme, which began on Feb 15, was one step to move away from reliance on foreign workers.

“So, we want to reduce the intake of foreign workers from now on,” said the Minister, reiterating that there would be no punishment for employers who registered illegal workers they had been hiring. AGENCIES