Malaysia is responding to an acute labour shortage by considering allowing refugees to join the workforce, and blacklisting employers who abuse foreign workers, reports said today.

Home Affairs Minister Azmi Khalid said that employers who were found to be cruel would be banned from hiring new foreign workers, in a bid to curb abuses and even deaths among labourers.

"Employers have responsibilities towards their workers, including foreign workers. Being cruel and abusive is unacceptable," he said.

Last year, 23 cases of mistreatment of foreign workers were recorded by the immigration department while another 14 cases have been reported so far this year.

Azmi was reacting to the case of an Indian national who reportedly died of yellow fever after being locked up along with some 400 other Indian workers in a hostel for two weeks by an employer in southern Johor state.

Separately, Minister in the Prime Minister's Department Mohamed Nazri said some 90,000 refugees in the country may be absorbed into the workforce to ease the labour crunch caused by a mass expulsion earlier this year.

"Since we have refugees in the country and most of them are unemployed, why not use them to resolve the labour shortage?" he was quoted as saying.

"All we need to do is provide them with some kind of identification and get them to fill the jobs," he said adding that such employment would be temporary.

Amnesty exercise

His announcement came after the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) last week urged the government to allow refugees living in Malaysia to work legally.

The country is one of Asia's largest importers of labour. Foreign workers, legal and illegal, number around 2.6 million of its workforce of 10.5 million.

The repatriation of about 400,000 illegal immigrants, mainly low-wage Indonesian workers, during a four-month amnesty that ended in March left a huge gap in the agricultural, construction, manufacturing and services sectors.

The labour crunch has prompted the government to seek mass recruitment of workers from Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar and Vietnam.