10/08/2011 (The Star) - The Sarawak Oil Palm Plantation Owners Association (Soppoa) is happy with the state Immigration Department “for being very cooperative” during the Legal Foreign Workers Biometric Registration Programme.

Soppoa secretary Philip Ho said the department’s deployment of officers to the sites to register legal foreign workers had helped employers save time and money if they were to send their workers to registration centres in towns.

“Their officers have been going to timber factories and mills to register legal foreign workers upon the request of the companies. This is a proactive move on the part of the department,” he said.

He said all Soppoa members had been asked to liaise with the respective Immigration divisional heads to help them in the registration exercise.

“We will try our best to register all our legal foreign workers within the given time frame.

“At the moment, I do not know how many of our members have done so,” he said.

There are some 150,000 Indonesia workers in Sarawak with between 75% and 80% of them in the plantation sector.

The others work in timber processing mills and the construction industry.