A new report about migrant workers in the BWI’s sectors in Malaysia has documented eight fatality cases and a further twenty serious injuries where no compensation has been paid whatsoever. The report entitled, “No compensation, no justice: Dead and injured migrant workers in the ‘new’ Malaysia,” has been released by the BWI Malaysia Liaison Council (BWI-MLC).
“We were glad to see the Government’s decision that migrant workers will be progressively transferred on to substantially similar social security protection as local workers,” said Azlan Yaacob, General Secretary of the Timber Employees Union of Peninsula Malaysia (TEUPM). “However, the cases documented in this report show that it is likely still too easy for employers to avoid their legal responsibilities.”
The report reviews available statistics on migrant worker fatalities and injuries, suggesting that Malaysia could be responsible for at least one thousand migrant worker fatalities per year. It also questions the claim that most workers die of heart attacks, documenting a case where a worker’s colleagues said that he had died in a workplace accident but official documentation records the death as a heart attack.
“We have long been suspicious of these statistics, and note that neither the Workers’ Compensation Act or SOCSO will pay out in cases of a heart attack,” said BWI Asia-Pacific Regional Representative Apolinar Tolentino. “We know that migrant workers often face extreme work pressure as a combination of low wages and hefty recruitment debt; however, we remain concerned that workplace injuries may still be disguised as heart attacks.”
Without compensation, workers’ families are often saddled with remaining recruitment debt in their country of origin. The report calls on the Malaysian Government to develop a programme for migrant workers’ families to receive fair and just compensation caused by past deaths and injuries in Malaysia, and implement a cross-border system to verify the payment of compensation to families in the country of origin.