Abstract

Oil palm plantations are the backbone of the Malaysian economy, since day immemorial. When you look intothe past, the workers in the oil palm plantations were dominated by Indian and Chinese communities. Later dueto the sigma associate with oil palm plantations jobs viz., dirty, dangerous and distance, the Indians and Chineseworkers moved away from the oil palm work and they were replaced by Indonesians and Philippines. Theseforeign workers whom having the legal and illegal status under enforcement in Malaysia, have been living inremotely located inhabitations engaging in ‘dirty, dangerous and distance’ wise oil palm plantations. Though thelarger 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. Theseconditions 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 foreignworkers do all these ‘dirty, dangerous and distance’ workers in oil palm plantations. Except a few literatureavailable from Amnesty international and local NGOs, there is less evidence to prove the existence of suchexploitative working conditions in oil palm plantations. In order to explore precarious working conditions in oilpalm plantations thus a qualitative research study is conducted in the Sabah region of the Eastern Part ofMalaysia. The study followed, triangulation method through interviews with the migrated foreign workers, (legaland illegal), focus group discussions and Delphi technique with the identification of experts in the field to arriveat the factors and categories related to the theme ‘precarious working conditions’ in oil palm plantations. Theoutcome of the study fixes the variables that need to be concentrated for a higher level research throughquantitative research.

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