PETALING JAYA: The move to use digitalisation to ease the recruitment of foreign domestic maids has garnered mixed reaction from stakeholders here.
Association of Employment Agencies Malaysia (Papa) vice-president Suresh Tan said digitising measures should only result in a platform that allowed employers to submit necessary documents for domestic helpers and monitoring the application process and nothing more.
“Any digitised system should not act as a business unit.
“Payments should not be handled by the system but by agencies themselves towards their foreign counterparts because there are many factors to consider here (when making payments), such as the terms and conditions of the workers’ employment,” he said when contacted.
He said employment agencies had been operating at a loss over the past few years due to the Covid-19 pandemic and that business had only recently begun picking up after foreign workers were allowed back into Malaysia.
“The government should provide policies and procedures for (employment) agencies to perform business, and let them (businesses) perform the technicalities with counterparts,” he said.
Malaysian Maid Employers Association (Mama) president Engku Ahmad Fauzi Engku Muhsein said the move was something the association had expected from Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s visit to Indonesia.
“The current arrangement for procuring Indonesian domestic workers needs to be reformed as it is too bureaucratic and inefficient while also being overly dependent on employment agencies.
“Employers should also be able to source (for domestic workers) online,” he said.
National Association of Human Resources Malaysia president Zarina Ismail applauded efforts to digitise the employment system, saying that all relevant stakeholders should also be integrated into the system when it came to foreign workers.
“This includes the Companies Commission of Malaysia and the Inland Revenue Board, in tandem with the Home Ministry and other related stakeholders.
“It also centralises the process (of hiring foreign workers) and saves time as the uploaded documents can be validated in a consolidated manner as opposed to employers having to submit these documents to each agency individually.
“We are living in the digital age and having a digitised consolidated system reflects this,” she said.
