May

1

Gandhi once said that, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” No doubt, my animal-loving friends will agree with him. Indeed, I have shared this quote with friends from SPCA and they enthusiastically agreed.

Apart from humane treatment of animals, I believe one of the points made by that very wise man was that we can judge ourselves by how we treat others that are less fortunate than ourselves, especially those who cannot fend for themselves.

slave-trade-malaysia-2.JPGOn that note, I am sad to share this May Day message with my fellow Malaysians. I just read the April 21-28, 2008 copy of Newsweek magazine, which had an article entitled “Lured Into Bondage”. When I first saw the heading “The New Wage Slaves” on the cover of the magazine, I thought it was referring to some other lesser developed country. Alas, to my dismay, the article is actually on Malaysia. Please do check out the link above.

In any case, here are a few salient quotes from the article:

Some of the world’s leading computer makers don’t want you to know about Local Technic Industry. It’s a typical Malaysian company, one of many small makers of the cast-aluminum bodies for hard-disk drives used in just about every name-brand machine on the market. But that’s precisely the problem: it’s a typical Malaysian company.

About 60 percent of Local Technic’s 160 employees are from outside Malaysia—and a company executive says he pities those guest workers. “They have been fooled hook, line and sinker,” he says, asking not to be named because others in the business wouldn’t like his talking to the press. “They have been taken for a ride.” It’s not Local Technic’s fault, he insists: sleazy labor brokers outside the country tricked the workers into paying huge placement fees for jobs that yield a net income close to zero. “They say they were promised 3,000 ringgits [$950] a month,” the manager says. “How can we pay that? If we did, we would be bankrupt in no time.”

So why don’t those foreign employees just quit? Because they can’t, even after they find out they’ve been cheated. Malaysian law requires guest workers to sign multiple-year contracts and surrender their passports to their employers. Those who run away but stay in Malaysia are automatically classed as illegal aliens, subject to arrest, imprisonment and sometimes caning before being expelled from the country.

And what is our government doing about it?

In its latest report, the State Department ranked only Hong Kong and South Korea among the “tier one” countries making a serious effort to combat human trafficking. Singapore, Thailand and Taiwan were all ranked in tier two (trying but need to do more), and Malaysia alongside Burma and North Korea among the worst cases.

The report singles out Malaysia as a “regional economic leader” with the resources and government infrastructure to fight the trafficking of men, women and children into sex and commercial trades, but is making no significant effort to do so. It says Malaysia has failed to prosecute traffickers and has twice announced plans to create a shelter for foreign trafficking victims, but has yet to follow through. The report urges Kuala Lumpur to do more. Malaysia’s foreign minister, Syed Hamid Albar, calls the State Department report “all false, not true,” and adds that “Malaysia is a country that does not encourage trafficking in persons.”

But Malaysian law effectively makes every foreign worker a captive of the company that hired him or her. In the name of immigration control, employers like Local Technic are required to report runaways to the police. No one holds company managers accountable for lies told by independent labor recruiters inside or outside the country. And Western electronics giants give them business.

I hope our country will grow up into a nation with an enlightened conscience, rather than one that continues to look for excuses or give clever justifications for wrongs that we can undo – if we cared enough to, that is.


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