e-Risalah USIM - Edisi Julai 2022

JULAI 2022 14 | Enforce Recruiter Accountability and Rights of Workers Governance of migrant worker recruitment remains a complexmultifaceted business as it involvesmonitoring of a considerable number of official and unofficial private actors. Private recruitment agencies or manpower agencies often include a large constellation of individual sub-agents, also known as intermediaries or brokers. Various studies including by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) concluded that hefty recruitment fees by multiple recruitment actors contribute to the increased risk of vulnerability of workers as they have to repay their debts for an extended period of time through fee deductions from their wages, often times, at usury rates. Yet recruitment agencies and sub-agents continue to be central players that connect low-wage workers to otherwise remote employment opportunities abroad by providing them with information about jobs abroad, support in preparing necessary documentation and anchoring numerous formal processes and requirements for foreign employment. To ensure fair recruitment and equal treatment of migrant workers, the ILO’s Fair Migration Agenda seeks to enhance global knowledge on national and international recruitment practices, strengthen laws, policies and enforcement mechanisms, promote fair business practices, and empower workers and provide access to remedies. In adhering to these international standards, Malaysia must ensure that its zero- recruitment policy is understood and upheld in terms of what it entails to employers and workers. It must also guard against licensing frameworks that fail to or do not adequately enforce recruiter accountability for their misconduct and migrant worker protection both in source and destination countries. Renewals of licenses to export workers which are not tied to recruiters’ protection obligations and remediation of harms following grievances would only incentivize systemic misconduct within recruitment while recruiter accountability remains ambivalent and access to justice for workers limited and unenforceable. In part, the latter is due to the workers’ lack of awareness on their rights and enforcement procedures, and fear of backlash by the relevant recruitment entity. Another critical dimension that is frequently ignored from the regulatory framework is the role and accountability of multiple independent sub-agents or brokers that operate on a community level but whose actual connection to the principal agent is often opaque. A large pool of workers from Bangladesh have migrated through the service of such intermediary working within networks that span both source and destination countries whose unlicensed existence is invisible from the government data. Common cases of misinformation and exaggeration in recruiting and placing workers result in harmful experiences of trafficking and labour abuses of migrant workers while these key actors continue to operate with impunity. The country’s labour migration mechanism has led to human trafficking, debt bondage, and workers’ exploitation among the low-skilled and most vulnerable. Malaysia and its labour sending countries require a reformed labour recruitment premised on rights-based governance framework and practices that are transparent, comprehensive and robust to effectively monitor and enforce the legal responsibilities of recruiters, including informal brokers and the protection of migrant workers. In light of these, measures that minimize room for misconduct and malpractices such as the Malaysia and Bangladesh’s earlier implementation of the government- to-government recruitment scheme deserves a more thorough and in- depth exploration of its potential and viability as a state-led and managed recruitment model proven to have significantly reduced and controlled the role of intermediaries and migration costs. Dr. Rodziana Mohamed Razali Lecturer Faculty of Syariah and Law In Our Words