BUKIT MERTAJAM: Penang Chief Minister Chow Kon Yeow today called for laws requiring employers to provide their foreign workers with a reasonable place to stay, such as dormitories.
Foreign workers, he also proposed, should not be allowed to live in regular residences in residential neighbourhoods.
He said for too long, residents in neighbourhoods across the country had been plagued by social ills caused by some foreign workers.
Chow said the problem was not with foreign workers per se, but the way they were placed in housing estates. He said it was common to see many workers crammed into one house, even in affluent neighbourhoods.
He said it was also common to see these workers bathing on their porches. They were also prone to social ills such as alcoholism and crime which had become an annoyance to locals, he added.
Although dorms were one solution, Chow said locals must accept that such accommodation would be part of their neighbourhood.
“Communities must be engaged to make them (locals) realise that it is a solution and not a problem.”
He said the authorities could emulate Singapore’s practice of only allowing foreign workers to live in dorms and not regular residences.
“The federal and state governments must take a brave step to resolve the issue of housing our valuable foreign workers,” he said at the opening of Penang’s first foreign worker dorm at Bukit Minyak here today.
Earlier, Chow handed over the certificate of completion to the dorm’s operators, Westlite Accommodation, run by Centurion Corporation Ltd (Centurion).
The 6,600-bed dorm located close to the Bukit Tambun toll plaza will open to its first batch of residents at the end of February. It will serve the larger industrial area in Bukit Minyak and Batu Kawan.
It is a three-block, 11-storey dorm with lifts, built at a cost of RM72.3 million.
It also has a food court, supermarket, mobile phone shop, internet services, prayer rooms, futsal court, gymnasium, volleyball and badminton courts and a sick bay.
Meanwhile, Penang Housing Committee chairman Jagdeep Singh Deo said the new dorm would help house foreign workers in a proper place with all facilities under one roof.
He said with 97,000 registered foreign workers in Penang, the state had taken steps to approve more dorms in the state.
Jagdeep said it had approved another seven foreign worker dorms, two on the island and five on the mainland, in anticipation of demand from the industries.
He said the seven dorms were expected to be completed in two to three years’ time.
Centurion’s accommodation business managing director Tony Bin said their latest dorm at Bukit Minyak was their seventh and the first outside Johor.
He said the average occupancy rates were in excess of 90% in their properties in Johor. He said their latest dorm in Penang was expected to reach similar rates.
Bin said the workers were placed in the dorms via direct dealings with industries or companies, who would get in touch with them for placement. He said the average rent per bed was about RM130 a month.
Their latest Penang property has close to 30,300 beds in Malaysia alone. Centurion currently runs 30 dorms across Singapore, Australia, the UK and the US, with over 61,000 beds. -FMT
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