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It has been a profitable pandemic for Top Glove Corp, the world’s largest manufacturer of disposable rubber gloves. But as the company helps meet the world’s needs for public health equipment, its own workers are suffering.
This week, the Malaysian government announced that at least 3,400 Top Glove employees had tested positive for Covid-19. Over the past two weeks, the company has contributed more than half of Malaysia’s new cases in a few days, leading to a temporary closure of its factories.
It amounts to a crisis for Malaysia, which makes more than half of the world’s rubber gloves. But it is not surprising. The working conditions that appear to have enabled the Top Glove outbreak are common throughout Southeast Asia. As the region becomes home to more manufactures in the world, the mistreatment of workers is likely too glaring to ignore.
In the 1990s, Southeast Asia became a destination for migrant workers from around the world. The lure was the higher wages in fast-growing industries that were (or claimed to be) struggling to hire workers locally. The United Nations estimates that there were around 10 million migrants in the region by 2017, many undocumented. Malaysia is home to at least a third of them and they make up at least a quarter of its workforce.
Despite their critical importance to the economies of the region, these workers are generally denied the same rights and social services as citizens. In Malaysia, the government requires health insurance coverage for documented workers, but fees and other barriers ensure that many are still unable to access health care (creating the now recognized risk of an easy spread of the disease ). Similarly, high costs, language barriers, and fear of retaliation often inhibit migrants from seeking legal help.
Such impediments make workers in the region especially vulnerable to exploitation. It is common for migrant workers to pay thousands of dollars in fees to agencies that secure employment abroad. Once they arrive at their new workplaces, they are deeply in debt and cannot return home for years (in a practice often known as debt bondage). This allows unethical employers to easily take advantage of them.
The Malaysian rubber glove industry has been accused of being a hub for such practices. In 2018, The Guardian reported that Top Glove and WRP Asia Pacific Sdn Bhd, another major glove maker, demanded excessive overtime from workers, punitively withheld their pay, confiscated their passports and imposed recruitment fees that took years to pay off. . Another report found similar abuses, as well as evidence of overcrowded worker housing. (Both companies have denied having violated workers’ rights.)
Covid-19, and the flood of orders for rubber gloves that resulted, has only made things worse. In April, Top Glove employees provided photos and videos of overcrowded work and living conditions at the company’s facilities to local media. In July, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced that it was blocking the import of Top Glove products due to labor violations, including debt bondage. Shortly after, the company agreed to reimburse more than 10,000 workers for $ 40 million for hiring fees.
It was a big step forward but insufficient. A Top Glove factory complex in Selangor is now at the heart of the resurgent Covid crisis in Malaysia. The company blames increased testing for the high numbers. But overcrowded workers’ dormitories were almost certainly to blame, just as they were in earlier outbreaks in neighboring Singapore. Malaysia’s human resources minister did not hesitate to point the finger: “I have visited the shelters and the conditions are terrible,” he told local media.
It’s hard to believe that the government recently found out about these problems. Most likely, the welcoming relationship that exists between regulators and large employers in much of Southeast Asia prevented them from being addressed. Changing that dynamic will not be easy: Malaysia and its regional counterparts have spent two decades adopting international agreements to protect the rights of migrant workers, but ongoing scandals, from Malaysian factories to Thailand’s fishing industry, suggest they are not fully committed.
Greater international pressure could help. CBP’s recent actions against Top Glove should serve as a powerful reminder of what can be lost if the proper action is not taken.
Meanwhile, as European and US companies move their production out of China, they will have the opportunity to improve their own operations and those of their contractors. They should start by requiring more frequent and credible audits of labor practices in the companies with which they do business.
That will not guarantee that workers are not abused. But as the Top Glove outbreak has shown, Southeast Asian corporations are rushing to protect the vulnerable when others are watching.
Adam Minter is an opinion columnist for Bloomberg.
The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.
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