Malaysian employees make complaints about WFH neglect

Malaysia’s Ministry of Human Resources (MOHR) has received 3,737 complaints on labour issues, of which 1,769 complaints involved cases of employers not allowing their workers to work from home during the implementation of the country’s movement control order (MCO).

“The highest complaint received through [the ‘Working For Workers’ programme (WFW) concerns] employers forcing their employees to come to work in the office even though it is against the standard operating procedures set by the government,” said MOHR Deputy Minister, Awang Hashim.

“Employers are supposed to only allow 60% of their employees to come to work in the office [for the permitted sectors, while the rest work from home]. However, it is found that there are employers that want 100 per cent of their employees to come to work in the office,” he said.

The government has also conducted accommodation checks on 19,981 employers, which involved 108,877 accommodations nationwide.

“As of today, a total of 757 investigation papers, involving various offences, have been opened under the Workers’ Minimum Standards of Housing and Amenities Act 1990 (Amended 2019) and 125 of the cases have been taken to court.”

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“Most of the cases is for not providing basic amenities to employees. To that effect, we will introduce a law to make it compulsory for employers to provide centralised accommodation to their workers so that it is easy for us to monitor and take action,” the deputy minister added.