UzReport
October 17

The Cabinet of Malaysia has approved the government-to-government (G2G) agreement draft between Malaysia and Uzbekistan, which will supply labour force to the country. Human Resources Minister Datuk Dr Fong Chan Onn said that a number of agreements with the source countries, starting with Vietnam and Nepal, would be signed before the end of this year.

Among the new terms to be incorporated are the workers must be able to at least communicate in either Bahasa Malaysia or English, free of any criminal record and the host governments be accountable in bringing their workers back if they violated Malaysia's laws.

"The responsibility to learn Bahasa Malaysia and English will also lie with the workers themselves or their governments," Fong said following the weekly post-Cabinet meeting today [presumably 17 October].

Besides Uzbekistan, G2G agreement has been approved between Vietnam, Nepal, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Cambodia, Laos and India. Fong said with the G2G agreement where recruitment procedures will be made more systematic to allow for a comprehensive data collection, the government hopes that it can address the problem of illegal foreign workers in the country.

[There are currently 794,000 legal foreign workers in Malaysia]

Fong also said the bulk of the new foreign workers would be employed in the manufacturing sector while the others would be hired for the service sector, the estates and the construction industry.

On another development, he said the ministry had received 2,470 applications from employers involving 8,000 workers who wanted to extend their work permits for another five years.

He said their skills would be assessed by the Malaysian Vocation Training Council and the permits would be extended for the skilled workers.

---