PETALING JAYA, Feb 17 (Bernama) -- Employers should not undermine legitimate trade unions from carrying out their tasks in order to maintain and strengthen the country's 10-year harmonious industrial relations record, the Malaysian Trades Union Congress (MTUC) said on Thursday.
Its president Mohd Khalid Atan said there had been no strike or union agitation on a large scale in the country since 2001.
This was largely due to the responsible national trade union leadership which preferred peaceful negotiations rather than confrontation with the employers, he said.
However of late, employers were "using unethical and underhand tactics" to weaken trade unions, Khalid told Bernama.
"Their favourite ploy was to encourage the setting up of in-house unions consisting of workers who are aligned to them to subvert and sabotage legitimate national unions," he said.
This, he said, was an indirect means of union busting which was frowned upon by ethical and worker-friendly organisations around the world.
"In the long term such tactics would back fire on the employers as workers would be disillusioned with the empty promises given by management to in-house union officials who were beholden to the bosses," he added.
Khalid said one of its affiliates, the National Union of Bank Employees (NUBE), was now facing a similar situation with a local bank where an in-house union had been set up with the blessings of the management.
"We understand that NUBE officials were prevented from carrying out their task (in the bank) and preference was given to the in-house union," he said.
Khalid said the Registrar of Trade Unions should carry out an immediate investigation as this was a "dangerous precedence and if allowed would undermine the national unions.
NUBE is the oldest and largest trade union in the financial sector in Malaysia and represents about 40,000 of the 70,000 workers in the sector.
-- BERNAMA
http://bernama.com/bernama/v5/newsgeneral.php?id=564277
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