Malaysia court sides with forced labour victims

An undocumented domestic worker has the right to pursue her claim for unpaid wages in Malaysia, a court has ruled, setting a legal precedent migrant rights groups said would help protect human trafficking survivors.

In a landmark ruling this week, a high court in Malaysia said an Indonesian domestic worker who was not paid for nearly five years can pursue her case after it was dismissed earlier by labour authorities because she did not have a work permit.

“This is a precedent for all undocumented workers,” Glorene Das, executive director at the Kuala Lumpur-based migrant rights group Tenaganita, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation yesterday.

“With this precedent, there is hope for undocumented workers to seek redress in court. They are workers who have been exploited in trafficked and forced labour situations,” she said by phone.

Malaysia relies heavily on foreign workers in areas such as manufacturing, domestic work and on plantations, hosting millions of migrant labourers from countries such as Indonesia, Nepal and Bangladesh.

But many of them are victims of human trafficking who were duped by brokers with promises of lucrative pay, often arriving without a valid work permit, and then suffer abuses later.

The Indonesian woman, who is in her 20s and whose name was withheld by Tenaganita for privacy reasons, fled to the group’s shelter in 2017. Tenaganita helped her file the legal case over unpaid wages.

She sought about 30,000 Malaysian ringgit ($7,300) in unpaid wages at the government’s labour department and then a labour court, but both rejected her case.

She lodged an appeal with a high court last year, which ruled on Monday that it was “premature” for the claim to be thrown out based on the work permit status, according sources. The court also ordered the case to be fully heard.