PLEASE emphasise on more educational and advisory enforcement stance instead of making it a very aggressive and microscopic fault-finding mission where companies are immediately imposed fines even for minor oversights.
Such is the plea of Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers (FMM) president Tan Sri Soh Thian Lai given that very little empathy is shown on companies that are struggling to sustain operations amid economic and financial devastations brought about by the unabating COVID-19 health crisis.
“Many enforcement visits/checks are driven to find the tiniest fault in the premises with no consideration on the level of relevance of the fault in relation to the core purpose of the visit ie to prevent COVID-19 infection spread,” lamented Soh.
“No opportunity was also given for rectification and re-assessment of compliance before a fine is imposed.”
Faulting industries on minor standard operating procedure (SOP)-related issues by imposing fines and business closure based on different interpretation of the SOPs is not acceptable because it creates continuous fear and anxiousness within the business community, according to Soh.
“FMM wishes to state again that based on data from the Health Ministry (MOH), factories are not the main source of infections,” Soh pointed out. “Based on MOH data, majority of the cases especially in 2021 have been sporadic cases and not originated from clusters including workplace clusters.”
Very recently, MOH reported that only 15,069 or 9.7% out of a total of 156,105 infections cases from June 1 to June 26 were attributed to the manufacturing sector. In fact, based on recently available data, Soh revealed that the manufacturing sector contributed only between 5%-10% of the infection cases on average for this year.
Given the need to support the economy during this very fragile economic situation, Soh said workplaces especially those related to the manufacturing sector will have to continue to operate to support the economy.
“In this regard, managing the entry of infections into the workplace or hostels is more challenging for the industry despite putting the SOPs and preventive measures in place,” he noted.
“With the virus in the community, it can easily go into factories especially through the asymptomatic sporadic cases.”
However, these sources of infections then are often not traced back to the community but to the workplace when more workers get tested due to any confirmed infections in the company.
“This in turn is classified as a workplace cluster by the authorities giving rise to the misconception that the workplace is the primary source of infection,” added Soh. – July 7, 2021
