Significant efforts have been underway to tackle the challenge of irresponsible recruitment in Malaysian value-chains. While many are enabling progress in the right direction, unethical practices continue to persist, suggesting that various interventions have yet to disrupt the deep-rooted causes sufficiently enough to bring about systemic change.
Over 2023, a cohort of recruitment agents, employers, worker representative organisations, civil society organisations, and responsible recruitment service providers engaged in a collaborative action inquiry to collectively diagnose the systemic barriers to eradicating unethical recruitment in Malaysia and where the opportunity areas to enhance the effectiveness of interventions exist. Uniquely, the cohort focused on how to build resiliency and future-fitness into responsible recruitment practices in the face of future climatic, environmental and social disruptors.
In this session, representatives from this cohort will share what we’ve learned through applying systems-thinking through a futures-led inquiry in developing different perspectives on how to unlock deep, transformative change, the possibilities for doing so, and our ideas for empowering stakeholders to collaborate and intervene differently to safeguard the rights of workers and foster a fairer labour ecosystem in Malaysia.