HR Ministry retracts 'mistaken' reply to ILO

PARLIAMENT The Human Resources Ministry has admitted that it had made an erroneous response to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) over the case involving a dispute between the National Union of Bank Employees (Nube) and the director-general of Trade Unions two years ago.

However, Human Resources Minister Richard Riot said the ministry wrote to the ILO on May 20, 2013, to correct itself and "withdraw the previous comment".

In the corrected reply read out by Riot (left)  in the Dewan Rakyat, the ministry told the ILO that the case was pending in court and not concluded as previously stated.

In the previous statement made to the ILO, then-human resources minister Dr S Subramaniam had reported that the court had sided with the DGTU on Oct 5, 2011.

However, the High Court had onlydismissed Nube's attempt to challenge the DGTU's registration of a Maybank in-house union, Maybank National Employees Union (Mayneu), two years later, on Nov 7, 2013.

Subramaniam had made this statement in response to a complaint made by the Malaysian Trades Union Congress to the ILO in April 2011, and was included in the ILO's report.

The complaint on the decision of the director-general of Trade Unions decision to register Mayneu.

'Mayneu formed to thwart Nube'

Nube argued that Mayneu was formed to stop employees from joining and airing their grouses through Nube, and to thwart Nube's collective bargaining efforts.

Winding up the committee level stage of the debate on the 2014 Budget, Riot said although in principle each company should only have one union, some larger companies have many "workers' organisations".

For example, he said, Malaysia Airlines employees have the Malaysia Airlines Systems Employees Union and the National Union of Flight Attendants Malaysia.

That said, he added, these two unions have an ongoing dispute, which would be decided upon by the courts on Dec 9.

To this, Tian Chua (PKR-Batu) stressed that only trade unions can engage in collective bargaining and having numerous unions would complicate this process.