In a major policy shift, the new Malaysian government wants to reintroduce G2G, a state-level labour recruitment system, to eliminate middlemen in the recruitment that has always been marred by corruption and exploitation.
“We don’t want G2G Plus. Any arrangement should be government-to-government [G2G],” Malaysian Human Resources Minister M Kulasegaran said on Sunday, reports Malaysian daily The Star.
“There’s no reason why we cannot employ direct from the source countries,” he told reporters at a programme in Ipoh, capital of the Malaysian state of Perak. If the middlemen were removed, there would be less chance of corruption, he observed.
He said people who come to Malaysia as guest workers are not slaves and they should be treated with respect.
“There was no headache during G2G then — and we want to go back to that.”
His remarks came following a huge controversy over G2G Plus, a labour recruitment mechanism under which 1.64 lakh Bangladeshi workers migrated to Malaysia since 2016.