Must history repeat itself with the Malaysian labour market?
On May 31, Malaysia once again closed its doors to aspiring Bangladeshi migrants—along with workers from 13 other countries—because of anomalies in the worker recruitment process. Since the Southeast Asian country first started taking workers from Bangladesh, the labour market has been frozen several times, reportedly due to corruption and irregularities in the process at the expense of workers' exploitation and criminalisation. It is frustrating that in all these years, neither the Bangladeshi government nor its Malaysian counterpart took any effective steps to address the widely reported irregularities and bring to book the syndicates involved in the recruitment process.
The last MoU signed by the two countries in 2021 capped the cost of recruitment for each worker at $720, but in reality workers ended up paying as much as $5,000, the highest price globally, according to a report in our daily. Meanwhile, workers kept on being deceived by ghost recruiters, then jailed and detained in Malaysia for no fault of their own. In the meantime, the syndicates, including 100 Bangladeshi recruiting agencies, some of which are owned by Bangladeshi lawmakers and their families, kept on making money at the workers' expense. A portion of this money is also being laundered to Malaysia as bribes for Malaysian recruitment firms.
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In a recent letter to both governments, four UN experts talked about exploitation noting that "certain high-level officials in both governments are involved in this business or condoning it." Yet, the Malaysian high commissioner to Bangladesh would have us believe that the syndicates recruiting Bangladeshi workers in Malaysia are "beyond the control of the two governments." After decades of worker exploitation right under their noses, can the two governments absolve themselves of their responsibilities, particularly when they are yet to acknowledge—much less take action against—high-level officials involved in the corrupt process?
They must bring the perpetrators to book, no matter how powerful the syndicates are. The irregularities in migrant worker recruitment need to be resolved once and for all, so that our workers do not return as dead bodies or financially and emotionally broken individuals.
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