KUCHING: The problem of recruiting legal foreign workers for the plantation sector in Sarawak could be solved if the recruitment agencies in the state are given immigration licenses like their counterparts in the peninsula.

President of Private Employment Agencies Association Sarawak (PAPSS), Augustine Chin, who said this yesterday, pointed this was the problem faced by many recruiment agencies in the state when dealing with agencies in Indonesia.

As such, he reansoned this led to problems such as high placement fees even for household maids.

“As example, our APS (private recruitment agencies) cannot do job order with Indonesia’s PPTKIS (agencies in Indonesia) to be endorsed in Indonesian Consul General in Sarawak.

“APS in Sarawak don’t have immigration license like what Peninsular APS have, since this is one of the terms spelt out in the MOU mechanism between Malaysia and Indonesia,” he said yesterday.

Chin was responding to yesterday’s news report quoting Land Development Minister Tan Sri Datuk Amar Dr James Masing as saying Sarawak should be given leeway to recruit foreign workers as it has its own autonomy on immigration.

According to Chin, he believed the state has the  authority on recruitment of foreign workers. “It’s only that we don’t have the authority to negotiate and sign MOUs with the recruiting companies from the countries involved,” he said.

On Masing’s call for the federal government to cut the red tape, Chin said recruitment agencies had been facing the problem bureaucracy as they were required to apply for Approval in Principle (AP) through the Manpower Department (JTK) to recruit foreign workers.

He added the agencies also had to put up advertisements for vacancies for general workers or harvesters to fulfill this requirement, despite the fact that such advertisements hardly receive any response from local job seekers.

On a related matter, Chin yesterday expressed his disagreement with a proposal to bring in Bangladeshi workers to work in plantations in Sarawak.

He said that based on feedback from planters in the Peninsula, the workers from Bangladesh are not quite suitable for the plantation sector and they were usually misled to work in such sector as they are promised good pay with high hopes.