Many undocumented workers in Malaysia come in as legal workers but are forced by exploitative employers and horrible working conditions to flee.
A report in The Guardian of the UK details the suffering of these workers due mainly to exploitative employers, limited healthcare facilities, lack of education facilities for their children, discrimination by locals, and even abuse of power by policemen.
Quoting unnamed NGOs and trade unions, the report says there are more than four million undocumented workers in Malaysia.
Most of them, it says, arrive through legal routes but then “become undocumented to escape dire accommodation, low pay or because employers refuse to renew their work permits”.
The Guardian report quotes an unnamed official at Nepal’s embassy in Kuala Lumpur as saying: “The workers are not illegal – they are made illegal by their employers.”
The report records the experiences of some of these undocumented workers.
Among them is the experience of a worker from Nepal, Sonam Lapcha, who had to put up with putrid, doorless toilets and dirty drinking water, and had to share a hostel hall with 300 other men.
Lapcha, 30, employed by a factory near Kuala Lumpur, told The Guardian: “It was much worse than Nepal. We even had to buy our own beds and bedding. The company only gave us a metal frame.”
His shift started at 8am and did not finish until 10 or 11 at night. Often, as he and fellow workers walked back from work, they were accosted by locals, and regularly beaten and robbed.
Worse, the company didn’t pay him what he had been promised. Eventually, Lapcha fled the factory in search of a better job.
In detailing the problems faced by undocumented workers, the report says employers take advantage of them, playing on their fear of the authorities.
Also, those with school-aged children cannot send them to government public schools. Hospitals, too, the report says, are “out of reach for undocumented workers”.
It quotes one worker, who had contracted dengue, as saying he was turned away from a government hospital because he had no passport. The passport was with his previous employer.
The report says the exclusion of undocumented workers from public services reflects wider discrimination against migrants.
It quotes the International Labour Organisation as stating in a recent report: “Scapegoating of migrants, regardless of the realities, has contributed to an environment where exploitation and abuse are sometimes viewed as acceptable.”
The migrant workers also say they fear going out alone or in small groups as they could be assaulted or robbed.
A migrant who has lived in Malaysia for eight years and runs a restaurant in Kuala Lumpur is quoted as saying:“People don’t behave nicely nowadays. They think we come here to take their food, their money, their place. They treat you like a second-class person. It really hurts me.”
The report says migrants, especially those who are undocumented, are also afraid of the police, whom one worker described as “robbers in a uniform”.
The report detailed how one Cambodian worker, Vani, became tense upon seeing a policeman on a motorcycle.
He told The Guardian: “I’m very nervous when I see the police. You have to walk slowly and not show that you are afraid.” He had been picked up four times by the police, and each time he had to pay them a hefty “fine”.
The report quotes Migration Working Group Malaysia coordinator Sumitha Shaanthinni Kishna as saying Vani and millions of other migrant workers are caught up in a system that is arbitrary and indifferent.
“The informal sector is thriving; locals don’t want to do this work and the cost of recruiting documented workers is unaffordable to some employers.
“There is very little political will to deal with the problem. As long as someone is making money out of migrants, the exploitation will not stop,” Sumitha is quoted as saying by The Guardian.
Original article from http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2017/02/03/sleeping-in-a-hall-with-300-others-sharing-doorless-toilets/
