Hundreds of Bangladeshi factory workers in Malaysia are planning to return home in protest at alleged mistreatment at their workplace, an official said Tuesday.
The nearly 800 workers hired buses to take them from their textile factories in southern Johor state to Malaysia's largest city, Kuala Lumpur, where they met Monday with government officials, police and diplomats, said Ishak Mohamed, the Immigration Department's enforcement director.
"They don't want to go back" to the factories, Ishak told The Associated Press. "The salary was not as what the employer promised. The second (complaint) was the living conditions."
The workers, who arrived in batches since early this year, claimed they received only 200 ringgit (US$60; €42) per month, less than one-fifth of what had been promised, and that they were forced to live in cramped quarters with few toilets, Ishak said.
Malaysian authorities were investigating the claims, Ishak said, adding that the workers were expected to return to Bangladesh later this month.
Bangladeshi embassy officials could not immediately be contacted.
The plight of migrant workers in Malaysia came under the spotlight last month when thousands of Bangladeshis were forced to camp in a car park at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport because their employers showed up late or failed to collect them.
The Malaysian government responded last week by barring employers from recruiting any more Bangladeshi migrant workers. There are some 200,000 Bangladeshi migrants in Malaysia.
Rights groups say migrant workers receive little protection because of inadequate laws to penalize errant employers in Malaysia, which legally employs about 1.8 million migrants, mainly from Indonesia, to handle mostly menial tasks in plantations, factories and other services.
"It's no surprise there are these kind of problems," said Florida Sandanasamy, an officer at Tenaganita, a nongovernment organization that helps migrant workers. "It's the entire recruitment process. There is no transparency, accountability and proper monitoring."
