KUALA LUMPUR: Employers and worker organisations want the government to suspend the amnesty programme for the 1.2 million illegal workers which begins today, arguing that the ongoing exercise to register legal workers using the biometric system was incomplete and riddled with problems.
“To carry out both exercises in parallel was a massive task which the authorities were unable to handle,” Malaysian Employers Federation (MEF) executive director Shamsuddin Bardan told Bernama yesterday.
The original plan was to begin the amnesty programme on July 11, but this was postponed because the home ministry incurred problems appointing agents while the machinery to register was not in place.
Instead, the ministry decided to carry out the biometric system of registering legal workers, beginning two weeks ago, and was still in progress with no definite dateline to complete. Shamsuddin said the current biometric system of registration for legal workers was riddled with so many problems that it needed to be ironed out fast before it could be concluded.
So far, only 600,000 legal workers out of the estimated 1.2 million have been registered.
With so much changes made to the programme within the last month or so, all stakeholders, namely employers, workers, foreign missions and even some immigration officers on the ground, were confused, noted Tenaganita executive director Dr Irene Fernandes.
“Unless proper planning is made, the whole exercise would be a failure,” she said.
Fernandes suggested the ministry provide clear guidelines on the amnesty programme and ensure it had the capacity to monitor the registration so that workers and employers were not cheated.
Malaysian Trades Union Congress (MTUC) vice-president A Balasubramaniam urged the ministry to rope in labour department officials and representatives of worker organisations to help in the massive exercise.
“The exercise should not be left to private sector agents who were merely profit-driven to do their work and thus, opening it for abuse,” he said, adding that the suspension of the exercise would give time for the authorities to properly plan and overcome shortcomings it currently faced.
Malaysian Agriculture Plantation Association executive director Mohamad Audong said the biometric system exercise had caused much inconvenience to his members because of insufficient registration centres. — Bernama