Way to measure the concept precarious working conditions in oil palm plantations

• Main Authors: Kumar M., Dileep, Ismail, Noor Azizi, Govindarajo, Normala S
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Canadian Center of Science and Education 2014
• Subjects: HC Economic History and Conditions
• Online Access: http://repo.uum.edu.my/12901/1/Lay.pdf; http://repo.uum.edu.my/12901/; http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ass

Oil palm plantations are the backbone of the Malaysian economy, since day immemorial. When you look into the past, the workers in the oil palm plantations were dominated by Indian and Chinese communities.Later due to the sigma associate with oil palm plantations jobs viz., dirty, dangerous and distance, the Indians and Chinese workers moved away from the oil palm work and they were replaced by Indonesians and Philippines.These foreign workers whom having the legal and illegal status under enforcement in Malaysia, have been living in remotely located inhabitations engaging in ‘dirty, dangerous and distance’ wise oil palm plantations.Though the larger oil palm plantation companies ensure minimum living and working conditions for the foreign workers, vastly located small holding plantations never follow such minimum and fair working environment. These conditions to be correlated with the term “precarious working conditions’ in small holding oil palm plantations.Due to lack of availability of the locals to engage in oil palm work, the plantations have to depend on foreign workers do all these ‘dirty, dangerous and distance’ workers in oil palm plantations.Except a few literature available from Amnesty international and local NGOs, there is less evidence to prove the existence of such exploitative working conditions in oil palm plantations. In order to explore precarious working conditions in oil palm plantations thus a qualitative research study is conducted in the Sabah region of the Eastern Part of Malaysia.The study followed, triangulation method through interviews with the migrated foreign workers, (legal and illegal), focus group discussions and Delphi technique with the identification of experts in the field to arrive at the factors and categories related to the theme ‘precarious working conditions’ in oil palm plantations.The outcome of the study fixes the variables that need to be concentrated for a higher level research through quantitative research.