Unlike Huawei, the world’s largest glove maker Top Glove will be avoiding a permanent ban from the US Customs once the company gives a proper explanation on the foreign worker issue.

While the Chinese company has no respite, our Malaysian owned rubber glove maker will not be facing a similar predicament. It was reported that the US government had recently imposed an import ban on goods from two of Top Glove Berhad subsidiaries TG Medical and Top Glove Sdn Bhd for alleged abuse of foreign workers in its manufacturing plants. However, the situation is not as dire as the matter is just a technical misunderstanding and that the foreign issue matter has already been resolved in 2019.

Senior Trade Minister Dato Seri Mohamed Azmin Ali, has instructed Top Glove to explain to US Customs and said that such an incident has occurred before and once the explanation was given to the US administration, they had lifted the ban and allowed the goods to enter the US,” he added.

Top Glove said there was a possibility that the US sanction might be related to foreign labour issues, which the company had already resolved except for an issue regarding retrospective payment of recruitment fees by its workers to agents prior to January 2019 without the company’s knowledge.

However, the company said it had already borne all recruitment fees since January 2019 when its Zero Recruitment Fee Policy was implemented.

Meanwhile, Mohamed Azmin said the government expects the manufacturing of rubber gloves and other medical products in the country to continue undisrupted post-COVID-19 to meet the high global demand.