Foreign workers in Sabah, a state problem

KOTA KINABALU: The federal government has rejected the call by Kota Kinabalu MP Hiew King Cheu for a Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) on the foreign workers in Sabah.

Human Resources Minister Dr S Subramaniam said the rejection was based on the fact that foreign workers are not a federal jurisdiction but entirely that of the Sabah state government.

The minister also noted that the Chief Minister’s Department of Sabah had already set up a workshop programme on the management of the foreign workers in 2010 to tackle the problems arising from these foreigners.

Hiew, in making the request, noted that the presence of a vast number of foreign workers in the various sectors in Sabah, in particular the oil palm plantations, continued to be a grave concern of Sabahans.

Subramanium however replied that the plantation industry in Sabah had no choice but to depend on the import of immigrant foreign workers in order to carry out work locals shun.

He said that throughout 2010, the Sabah government had been carrying out aggressive programmes in helping employers to source for local workers for plantations.

He disclosed that in 2010, the state Labour Department carried out a total of 45 programmes to locate workers and 10 of these were solely for the plantation sector.

“A total of 6,789 vacancies were required in the plantations but (the department) only managed to fill 1,068 jobs.”

He said the same had happened the previous year when 47 recruitment programmes were held with 10 for plantations having 10,856 vacancies. Again the department only managed to fill 1,050 positions.

“The locals only choose office jobs, child care, and administrative work only. It is very difficult to get the locals to work as general labourers and as harvesters, therefore there is no choice but to employ foreigners to do the job,” he explained.

Offer better pay structure

Hiew however countered by saying that the salaries offered by the huge plantation companies were exploitative and was the reason locals were uninterested in the labour-intensive work.

He called on the government to implement a better pay structure with incentives to attract locals to work in various sectors that are currently occupied by the foreign workers.

Hiew accused the federal government of not paying attention to the problems faced by the state and was instead pushing all responsibility back to the state government.

He also asked what the state government would do now that the RCI on the issue had been rejected.