Health and safety (h&s) challenges confronted by foreign workers in the malaysian construction industry: a background study

Abstract

Many scholars indicated that the occupational accidents rate for foreign workers is higher than for domestic workers in Malaysia. In 2015, a total of 140 Malaysia construction workers have suffered fatal injuries, consisting of 47 locals and 93 foreigners and these statistics show that the number of foreign workers who were killed was 2 times more than the number of local workers who died. This paper will therefore aim to promote a better understanding of the role of health and safety practices through identification of the challenges among foreign workers in Malaysian construction industry. The main study to which this paper relates actually adopts a mixed approach for empirical data collection. Whereas this paper is entirely based on secondary data collated through an extensive critical literature review. Findings of this paper provides a general overview of the health and safety challenges faced by foreign workers such as human-rights related problems, difficulty of applying working permit, communication barriers, compensation and insurance scheme, equal treatment, working environment and accommodation issues in Malaysian construction industry which has the potential to lead the relevant authorities such as policy makers and governmental officials in taking necessary steps to improve the safety practices among the local and foreign workers.