MP SPEAKS In 2008, the largest makers of sportswear, Nike, said there were major labour law violations in its Malaysian factory.

It said the workers’ passports were withheld by employers, their wages were garnished and the workers were also forced to live in squalid living conditions.

In 2013, 16 workers from Madurai in South India were rescued from bonded slavery by NGOs in Malaysia.

The NGOs said the workers were not given enough food, locked up after working hours, beaten up and verbally abused.

Supply chain specialists Verite’s two-year research of labour conditions in Malaysia’s electronics manufacturing sector revealed that one in three migrant workers surveyed were working as ‘modern-day slaves’.

Verite spoke to 500 workers over a period of two years.

The 2014 report provided evidence of widespread forced labour.

The Guardian newspaper’s investigative reporting revealed similar abuses in a Samsung factory in Port Klang last year.

Fast forward to today and we have an expose by Malaysiakini and Jakarta-based magazine Tempo providing evidence of modern-day slavery, long working hours and other abuses inflicted on migrant workers, including the possibility of trafficking from a swiftlet nest’s processing factory in Klang.

This report again shows that there are real problems with the employment and recruitment process and working conditions of migrant workers in Malaysia.

And these are clearly violations of standards imposed by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and transgresses local laws as well.

While the earlier report by Verite could have been used by Malaysia to scrutinise and review the employment and recruitment process, nothing has been done.

The abuses against migrant workers continue, clearly indicating that the government, the police, Immigration Department and other key stakeholders haven’t done enough to put an end to bonded slavery and abuses suffered by the workers.

Or that there is simply no political will to do so.

But this must stop. The government and all relevant agencies must discuss, review and implement migration policies plus employment and recruitment processes to protect the rights of migrant workers.

It must also make it easier for migrants to change employers, protect their rights to join trade unions and punish errant employers and unscrupulous recruitment agents.

The government must act now as the migrant workers have suffered enough. And it must start with the immediate investigation and dismantling of the infrastructure of migrant slavery as exposed by the Malaysiakini-Tempo report.

CHARLES SANTIAGO is Member of Parliament, Klang.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.