Conciliation may be made compulsory to resolve IR cases faster

The Star - Thursday, 9 April 2009

PUTRAJAYA: The Human Resource Ministry is looking to make conciliation compulsory each time affected workers report their case to the Labour Department as part of a move to help resolve their cases faster.

Its minister Datuk Dr S. Subramaniam said under the current system, affected workers had the option of whether to seek conciliation or have the matter referred to the Industrial court directly to hear their case.

He said the problem was that when the workers opted to take their case to court it had to be first referred to the Human Resource Minister for decision on whether there was a valid case and this meant looking through some 3,000 cases yearly.

This together with all the court proceedings at times meant the complainants had to wait for up to three years, at times, for a decision, he said.

“We have already introduced the conciliation system under the Labour Department to some extent and have trained and are training staff in the field with help from the International Labour Organisation (ILO).

“The service has proven successful and has helped reduce the number of cases referred to court to about 700 last year from over 2,000 before that,” he told a press conference after handing out Excellent Service Awards to over 500 of the ministry’s officers here Thursday.

Subramaniam said about 170 trained officers were based at all 13 of the Labour Department’s state branches and they would take up the task to conciliate between the workers and employers right after the report was made. This way the branches had settled about 65% of the cases reported to them.

“When the officers at the state cannot solve the problem the matter is referred to our ‘super experts’ at the headquarters (in Putrajaya) and it is only referred to the Industrial court if they too cannot find an amicable solution,” he said.

He said the ministry would have to seek amendments to the Industrial Relations Act 1967 in order to make conciliation compulsory and was most likely do so next year as it had to create a strong and able service first.

On the job matching efforts by the ministry, Subramaniam said the ministry would launch next month its latest effort in the shape of the Community Employment Support Service that would Labour Department officers being based at 106 centres nationwide to offer guidance to the unemployed.

He said 22 of the centres would be placed in highly visited places, such as shopping centres, while the rest would be at the respective Labour Department offices.

He said he was following up the Jobs Malaysia job-matching portal and would provide the human touch that would help to increase the standard of service offered.

As at April 7 there were 27,116 retrenched workers, 7,386 who had been given the voluntary separation scheme, 17,268 temporarily stopped from work and another 28,000 facing salary cuts.

“We are trying to raise our service to help all these categories of workers and we even plan to launch a promotion for the portal so more will register with us,” he said.

Subramaniam said the portal already offered all jobs under the Public Services Department and the private sector and was now working on also putting online jobs in the police force and armed forces.

This, he said, would make the portal the single largest online job-matching service in the country.