Malaysia is one of Asia's biggest employers of foreign labour. But recently, cases of deaths, abuse and forced labour have come to light. What is going on? Who is protecting these migrant workers?
PEOPLE are the Philippines’ main export. Last year
more than 1m Filipinos left to work abroad as maids, nurses, sailors and in all
sorts of other difficult but low-paid jobs. Labour migration is huge, and growing,
in South-East Asia, as workers are sucked out of its poorer countries, increasingly
to their better-off neighbours, even though these are still themselves sending
workers to the rich world.<P>Many of these wandering wage-earners eventually
return. In the meantime they send home huge sums—in the Philippines’ case,
the equivalent of over 10% of GDP. This compensates for the opportunity cost of
having, at any one time, 8m of its best workers abroad. On January 15th the government
reported a surge in such remittances. In January-November they were $11.4 billion,
up 18% on the same period of 2005, not counting the odd billion that arrives unofficially,
as wads of cash in returning workers’ luggage. Poverty and unemployment are still
high in the Philippines and other labour-exporting countries. They would be far
worse but for this outflow of bodies and inflow of dollars. As for those Asian
countries that import labour, as in Europe (see <A HREF="http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8559830">article</A>),
falling birth rates mean they are going to need more foreign workers, like it
or not.</P><P>On January 13th leaders of the Association of South-East Asian Nations
(ASEAN), meeting in the Philippines, signed an agreement to aid and regulate migrant
workers—a sign of their realisation that the flow of labour, often illegal
and undocumented, between their countries is a growing problem that they cannot
blame on outsiders. A 2005 study reckoned that 8.4m South-East Asians worked outside
their home country but this did not include the huge numbers of Indonesians doing
so without papers. The study also had just 150,000 Burmese working in Thailand,
whereas up to 2m Burmese illegal immigrants are thought to live there. So the
true total is probably rather higher.</P><P>The new agreement talks of guaranteeing
foreign workers access to justice and welfare services though, like other ASEAN
documents, it is full of get-out clauses. But it does oblige governments to draw
up a charter of migrant workers’ rights which might have some teeth. The Philippines
is already seeking to improve its own migrants’ rights: it plans to ban recruitment
agencies from charging fees to workers (as opposed to employers) and is raising
the minimum wages that such agencies offer.</P><P>Roughly speaking, of the ten
ASEAN countries, the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos
export labour, Singapore and Brunei import it, and Thailand and Malaysia do both.
Gyorgy Sziraczki of the UN’s International Labour Organisation (ILO) points out
that, in the next ten years, the total labour-force of the worker-exporting countries
should grow by about a third—but labour migration, legal and illegal, is
growing twice as fast as even that. Tackling the problem before it gets out of
control clearly makes sense. But the labour-importing countries are terrified
that, with huge numbers of poor people just across their borders, any moves to
improve the welfare of their existing immigrant workers and give papers to the
illegal ones will only encourage masses more to stream in.</P><P>Locals in the
receiving countries already seem to be worried about competition for their jobs.
In a recent poll for the ILO, 59% of Thais said their government should admit
no more foreign workers, and only 10% thought more should come. Even in prosperous,
cosmopolitan Singapore, just over half of locals oppose admitting more foreign
workers, according to a poll in the Straits Times. Opinions might soften if the
public got a more balanced picture of the pros and cons of importing labour to
do jobs that no local will take. Malaysians think that the increase in foreign
workers has worsened crime rates. Official figures show that foreigners in the
country commit proportionately fewer crimes than do Malaysians themselves.</P><P><I>Source:
http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8565050</I>
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