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KUALA LUMPUR: After a 20-year struggle to unionise workers in the electronics industry, Bruno Pereira’s perseverance finally paid off when the Cabinet on May 27 last year allowed industrial unions to be set up for this sector, albeit at the regional level, in Peninsular Malaysia.
After being long considered a thorn in the flesh of the anti-union multinationals way back in the 1990s, he is glad to be able to complete what he had started. He has so far taken steps to organise four independent regional unions.
The first was the Electronic Industry Employees Union Western Region covering Selangor, Perak and Kuala Lumpur – where he is the general secretary.
“Similarly, the northern and southern regions unions, too, were registered recently and the work on setting up the structure for the workers is almost complete. The eastern region union is being formed,” he told The Paper That Cares.
Pereira’s involvement in trade unions started in 1988 when the government declared then it would only allow in-house unions in the electronic sector. At that time, Pereira was unionising workers in Stats Chippac (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd – which was then known as Harris Advanced Technology Sdn Bhd.
“This constraint denied electronic sector workers the chance to be part of a union of their choice and gain the benefits an industrial union could bring,” he said.
This in-house union, with Pereira as the general secretary, was deregistered on Oct 10, 2006 – when the Court of Appeal ruled that when a company changed its registration, the existing union cannot represent its workers.
“That is precisely why we opposed the formation of in-house unions and insisted on industrial unions. Thus, even if the company changed its registration, the industrial union can still represent the workers.
“A generation of workers in the electronic sector have been denied their benefits, in spite of the huge profits these companies have been raking in year after year for the last 35 years.”
The industry registered RM157 billion in terms of value of gross output in 2007 alone, he said. Pereira will conduct a briefing jointly with the Malaysian Trade Union Congress today on the status of electronic sector workers unionisation in the country.
Source: Malay Mail
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