Migrants targeted for deportation
The government has mounted the third drive in six years to deport what it calls ‘illegal workers’. In 1998, 480,000 were deported; in 2002 the figure was 760,000.

This year undocumented workers are estimated to number between 1.2 and two million; there are presently 1.3 million registered foreign workers, most of them from Indonesia.

Police methods are crude and unpleasant. Undocumented migrant workers say they cannot sleep for fear of ‘the knock on the door’ as police generally make their raids in the early hours of the morning.

A 2002 law legalised the caning of undocumented workers. This barbarity is conducted in prison; the prisoner is tied to inclined scaffolding and whipped with a rattan cane, one stroke of which usually scars for life – many receive five strokes, each administered a week apart.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi ordered the action to begin in August (now delayed for five months at the request of Indonesia’s government); the witch-hunt is planned to last for months. The authorities will increase the number of internal road checkpoints and midnight raids on suspected ‘illegals’ dormitories, by expanding the size of the volunteer reserve army by 60,000, an increase of over 25 percent.

Migrant workers began arriving under previous Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who encouraged foreign labour to work in factories because Malaysia’s workforce was too small; they were also wanted to do menial jobs that Malaysians would not perform.

Local media is helping the government to crackdown on migrants, fomenting racist hysteria about migrants “freely roaming” across the land and causing violent crime, though there is little evidence to prove that foreigners are responsible for Malaysia’s rising crime statistics. On 16 August The Star ran the sensational headline ‘Whip Illegals and Send Them Home’, and backed this with columns of calculated panic; in the same paper, hack V K Chin wrote, “It is better to just whip and send them home,” reasoning that if this were not done, “otherwise they will not learn their lesson.”

The gutter press colluded with the government using scaremonger commentaries to suggest that non-Malaysians were to blame for Malaysia’s, “[R]obberies, murders and riots … the list is endless,” ranted the Sin Chew Jit Poh.

South China Morning Post, 21 August 2004

Domestic work is indentured labour
In May neighbours of wealthy housewife and employer, Yim Pek Ha, found Nirmala Bonat, a migrant domestic worker from West Timor, Indonesia, with extensive burns on her chest, back, and legs. Bonat said she had suffered extreme physical abuse at the hands of Yim for five months, most recently by branding her with a clothes iron and scalded with boiling water.

The maid was treated in hospital for second and third degree burns. Yim was released on bail after being charged with assault.

This case is merely the tip of an iceberg of abuse that is a reality for domestic workers across our region, most often highlighted in Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and Singapore, where cases are reported regularly (See ALUs passim). Critics of the ‘industry’ have called it modern day slavery, though strictly it is not as the workers are not owned; however it is a form of indentured labour, with the workers having no control over their lives for the duration of the two year contract.

Malaysia is ‘temporary’ home to 240,000 maids, 90 percent of who are from poor rural areas of Indonesia. Overwork, abuse, poverty wages (as low as US$0.15/ hour), racism, legalised discrimination, and fraud typify what has become a major ‘industry’ and source of foreign exchange for Indonesia, the Philippines, South Asia, and Thailand, with host countries turning a blind eye to outrageous recruitment and working conditions, and ignoring the low wages and widespread abuse because the ‘industry’ is one of these countries’ major foreign currency sources, e.g. bringing US$5.5 billion a year into Indonesia.

Recruitment agencies’ fees are very high, often up to six months’ of workers’ salary, spawning a usurious money-lending industry that is ignored by sending country governments.

Many of these women workers are forced to ‘live in’ with employers, but not even provided with a room of their own – sleeping with the children they look after, or even on the kitchen floor – or decent food even though they cook proper food for their employers’ family. This employment condition, which means isolation for the worker, lends itself to such abuse as suffered by Nirmala Bonat.

Maids who ‘live out’ often also live in terrible conditions. One worker told New York-based Human Rights Watch that she slept on the bare floor of a windowless room using her bag as a pillow and sharing one dirty toilet with 300 other maids

A Memorandum of Understanding on labour migration was signed between Indonesia and Malaysia in May but explicitly excluded Indonesians recruited as domestics, signalling the Indonesian government’s determination to ignore the appalling abuse of its citizens that it knows exists.

World Socialist Web Site, 16 August 2004