A third (32%) of the 200,000 workers in Malaysia’s electronics industry are forced labour, having either had their passports taken from them or working to pay back illegally high recruitment fees, reports The International New York Times.

The report, conducted by monitoring group Verité, commissioned by the US Department of Labour, said these practices were most common among migrants from Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Vietnam. 

The factories, which produce consumer electronics, motherboards, computer peripherals and other electronic goods, account for a third of Malaysia’s exports and produce products for many well-known companies; including Apple, Flextronics, Samsung, and Sony.

The report found that 92% of the migrant workers in Malaysia’s electronics industry had paid recruitment fees and that 92% of that group had paid fees that exceeded legal or industry standards, defined as more than one month’s wages.

The report said about half of the migrant workers who borrowed for their recruitment fees spent more than a year paying off those fees. According to the report, 94% of the migrants did not have their passports when Verité’s investigators interviewed them, and 71% said it would be impossible or difficult to get their passports back when needed.

Daniel Viederman, Chief Executive of Verité, commented: “This most modern of industrial sectors is characterised by a form of exploitation that long ago should have been relegated to the past. The problem is not one of a few isolated cases. It is indeed widespread.”

Labour Department officials commissioned the study because the federal government frowns on imports of goods made by forced labour. They sought an investigation after seeing evidence that the problem was serious in Malaysia.

Twelve investigators working for Verité interviewed a total of 501 workers from nearly 200 Malaysian factories. According to the study: “92% reported feeling compelled to work overtime hours to pay off their debt, and 85% felt it was impossible to leave their job before paying off their debt.”

Three-quarters (77%) had to borrow money to pay their recruitment fees.

“Workers are paying too much to get their jobs. That leaves them vulnerable to being trapped in their jobs,” Mr Viederman added.

Asked about the reports of forced labour, Chris Gaither, a spokesman for Apple, said: “This is an issue we have paid a lot of attention to and done a lot of work on. We were the first electronics company to mandate reimbursement to workers who were charged excessive recruitment fees.”

He said Apple’s supply chain, which employs 1.5 million workers worldwide, employs 18,000 in Malaysia, including 4,000 migrant contract workers. He said that since 2008, Apple had helped migrant workers in Malaysia and elsewhere to reclaim USD 19.8 million in excessive recruitment fees, which he defined as more than one month’s wages. Apple uses about 30 factories in Malaysia, and had audits done at 18 of them in the last year.