Opinion | After Covid-19, Malaysia must offer migrant workers a fairer deal
- As the country ponders its post-coronavirus future, it has a small window to achieve a more humane, progressive and efficient system
- The emphasis should be on the skills and productivity of Malaysian workers, rather than prohibitions on non-citizens
Among Malaysia’s “post-coronavirus” futures, few present as clear a reset window as its migrant labour regime.
Talk of change after the pandemic can be premature and presumptuous. So much remains enveloped in uncertainty and widespread “wait-and-see” postures. Not to mention, Covid-19 is fiercely surging, not subsiding.
However, in the migrant worker domain, Malaysia’s commitments and plans are laid out. The country has a window of opportunity to deliver already-made promises – precisely because the pandemic continues to rage.
Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers have returned home – or having lost their job which automatically invalidates their work permits, now live in the shadows as undocumented residents.
Total foreign worker permits plummeted from 2 million to 1.4 million in 2020. The last time Malaysia touched that level was in 2004, in the middle of a continuous, steep climb from 800,000 in 2000 to 2 million in 2008.
The Global Financial Crisis marked the start of a downtrend in permits and expansion of undocumented labour, until a massive regularisation and registration exercise ballooned the number of permits from 1.6 million in 2012 to 2.2 million in 2013. The figure hovered at 1.8 to 2 million in 2016 to 2019.
