Ops against illegals: Chamber wants Esscom to follow SOP
Published on: Thursday, May 28, 2015
Tawau: The Tawau Chinese Chamber of Commerce (TCCC) urged the Eastern Sabah Security Command (Esscom) to ensure its personnel strictly abide by the standard operating procedure (SOP) in discharging their duties.Its President Lo Su Fui said if there is none, then Esscom should formulate the SOP as a guideline for its personnel.He said he had received many complaints from the business sector here, alleging unprofessionalism among the Esscom personnel who were also rude while conducting operations against illegal immigrants in the Eastern Sabah Security Zone (Esszone).
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He claimed there were many incidences where the armed personnel rudely barged into business premises, stores and shop houses, and simply kicked open doors while searching for illegal immigrants suspected to be hiding there.He felt that the brute force action was unnecessary since it not only caused fear and tension among the workers and business operators but also incurred losses as a result of damage to properties."Please don't treat us as if we are criminals. We are more than willing to cooperate and would gladly comply with your (law enforcers) request, if you ask us to open the doors. "Unfortunately, these personnel just simply kicked open the doors as they liked and then left as they wished, leaving us to bear the cost of the damages to our property," he said.
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Lo hoped the government would seriously look into the plight of the local business operators.Apart from that, Lo also called on the government to review its 'business-unfriendly' policies and procedures which had inevitably forced many business operators to hire illegal workers.
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He lamented that the existing policies and procedures governing the foreign workers were inefficient and provide no guarantee or whatsoever to the business operators."It takes too long for us to obtain the foreign worker permit which often takes more than a year. Secondly, if a foreign worker left the job we would lose our deposit for the foreign worker, which usually costs more than a RM1,000 per worker," he said.Other problems faced by the business operators were the detention of foreigners during operations despite their permits being processed; unclear foreign worker quota in the service sector as well as the issue of sub-contractor and those with short term projects of less than a year not being allowed to hire foreign workers, which seriously affected the progress of projects.He attributed this to the lack of proper understanding on the demand for workforce in the various sectors, especially those labour-intensive ones like the oil palm plantation by the authorities concerned."Often, the oil palm plantation owners only get half the number of foreign workers that they applied for after interviews by the authority concerned, and this is barely enough to handle the daily job."What we can't accept is that, the authority concerned is not willing to listen to our plea, despite the fact that they lacked the knowledge of manpower needed in both the agriculture and construction sectors. All they know is to reduce the number of foreign workers," he said.Lo cautioned that if no immediate solution was in sight to review the existing policies on the State's manpower needs, it would eventually adversely affect Sabah's economy.Stay up-to-date by following Daily Express’s Telegram channel.
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