KUCHING: Recruitment of Bangladeshis to work in the oil palm industry in the state is done on a government to government (g2g) basis, clarified Land Development Minister Tan Sri Datuk Amar Dr James Masing.
He said there were two main reasons why the state government had to turn to Bangladesh for workers – firstly to move away from Indonesia which used to be the source country and secondly to discourage business to business (b2b) recruitment.
He disclosed this when speaking to reporters at the State Legislative Assembly (DUN) media centre during an interval of yesterday’s sitting.
“We are trying to discourage b2b recruitment because we have very bad experience with b2b kind of recruitment of foreign workers in the past, so now we try to branch out to g2g approach,” he said.
He also stressed that the state was eyeing Bangladesh as it could not allow itself to be confined to only one source of foreign workers.
“That’s why sometime this year I went to Bangladesh along with Datuk Seri (Ahmad) Zahid (Hamidi) to look into the possibility of engaging Bangladeshis and I think that’s why they come…12,000 of them,” he pointed out.
He explained that in g2g recruitment process the final decision would lie with the state government.
“It goes through federal government of course but because we control immigration at the same time so it comes to us and we will decide whether we need them.
“So any industry that wants foreign workers has to write to us and we will look at whether they really need foreign workers or not … we will identify that,” he elaborated.
On the bad experience with b2b recruitments, Masing said the problem was that sometimes foreign recruiters would bring in workers, say 100 of them, but once the workers were in the state the recruiters would just leave them alone because they had already got their share of money, leaving the foreigners not getting the jobs they were promised.
“That is why we need g2g so that we have better control of recruitment of foreign workers,” he pointed out.