AECOR INNOVATION SDN BHD v 1. ) MD MIRZA GALIB RAHMAN 2. ) ASHIKUR RAHMAN 3. ) LITON MIA 4. ) MD EBRAHIM 5. ) RASEL AHAMMAD 6. ) NAEEM BHUIAN 7. ) SABBIR AHMED 8. ) MD. MOBARAK HOSEN 9. ) MD AYET ALI 10. ) MOZNU MIA 11. ) PUNNA MONDOL 12. ) MUBAROK 13. ) MD JAFIRUL ISLAM 14. ) MURAD HOSSAIN

Case Significance

Treats a foreign-worker wage dispute as a matter of contract interpretation, holding the terms explicit that wages accrue from arrival in Malaysia and that asserted advances and poor-performance deductions were afterthoughts insufficient to displace the workers' entitlement.

This High Court decision at Shah Alam, one of several wage appeals disposed of together, concerns the employer's challenge to a determination of the Assistant Director of Manpower in favour of a group of foreign workers. The employer, Aecor Innovation Sdn Bhd, had recruited the workers and disputed both when their wages accrued and its entitlement to make deductions from them. The Assistant Director had allowed the workers' claims for wages on 8 November 2024. Approaching the dispute as one of contract interpretation, the Court asked what the parties had actually agreed, and found the contractual terms to be explicit: the workers were to be paid from the date of their arrival in Malaysia. That conclusion left no room for the employer's contention that the workers were entitled to payment only as and when they were deployed to third-party employers. The employer had further sought to justify reducing the sums due by reference to advances said to have been made and to the workers' alleged poor performance, but the Court viewed these as afterthoughts designed to defeat the workers' legitimate entitlements rather than genuine contractual answers. It endorsed the labour authority's view that the framework for bringing in foreign workers does not permit an employer to treat them as a ready pool of labour, drawing wages only for days on which they happen to be called upon. On the question whether the labour authority had failed to appreciate the employer's documentary evidence, including a spreadsheet said to record the position, the Court found no misapprehension warranting appellate intervention. It also stressed that the burden lay on the employer to prove any deduction it wished to make, and that unproven assertions of advances or underperformance could not be set off against a clear contractual debt, a burden the employer had not discharged on the material before the Court. It accordingly declined to disturb the determination in the workers' favour.