Ministries Meeting Tomorrow To Discuss Indonesian Worker Freeze

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M Saravanan being briefed by one of the booth managers at the job fair. On his right is housing and local government minister Reezal Merican Naina Merican, who is also Kepala Batas MP.KEPALA BATAS: Officials from the human resources and home ministries will meet tomorrow to discuss the freeze on worker recruitment announced by the Indonesian government, says M Saravanan.
The human resources minister said that they would discuss ways to navigate the issue before coming to a decision.
“We take Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob’s advice seriously,” he told reporters after officiating a job carnival here today.
“We (the home ministry and human resources ministry) are having a meeting tomorrow and we will decide.”
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However, he did not elaborate on the matter.
Saravanan’s response came in the wake of a directive by Ismail yesterday for both the ministries to resolve the issue as he did not want the problem to affect Malaysia’s ties with Indonesia.
On July 13, Indonesian ambassador Hermono said that the republic had imposed a temporary freeze on all Indonesian workers entering Malaysia.
According to him, the temporary freeze was due to the Malaysian immigration department’s continued use of the Maid Online System (MOS) to facilitate the recruitment of Indonesian maids instead of the One Channel System as agreed in the memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the two countries.
The MOS allows Indonesian workers to enter the country using a tourist visa before applying for a work permit, a practice that Jakarta wants to end due to the risk of forced labour.
Meanwhile, Saravanan also said that the country has settled the MoUs with other source countries.
He added that Bangladesh has begun to send its workers, and that the country’s high commission has started to approve applications from employers to recruit their workers.
The applications by the employers are cleared by the labour department before they are sent to the high commission to be verified. - FMT

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