PETALING JAYA, March 4 — Employers refusing to provide comfortable living conditions for their foreign workers has been a longstanding problem, Malaysian Employers Federation executive director Datuk Shamsuddin Bardan said.

He said as far as the law was concerned, the only foreign workers accommodation provisions was contained in the Minimum Standards of Housing and Amenities Act 1990 managed by the Human Resources Ministry.

However, this Act applied only to plantations.

“We are fully aware of the situation and in fact, the government wants to extend the scope of this Act to cover every aspect of employment,” he said.

“It is still under discussion but I am sure we will need to clean it up within two years as we move towards the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) ratification.”

He said associations for each industry had codes that stipulated how foreign workers should be placed in reasonable accommodation adding that monitoring was also carried out by them.

“Checks and balances carried out by industry leaders can result in employers being subjected to auditing by their own associations,” he said.

He also said under TPPA, action can be taken against the government on how foreign workers were treated in the country.

“We are definitely trying to clean up our act as employers,” he said.

On changes planned by the Human Resources Ministry, its standard labour department deputy director Mohd Roshandy Mat Rosli said making sure foreign workers had comfortable accommodation was among guidelines being planned for employers.

The guidelines are in the final stage of completion. 

“The problem now is that even after it is enforced, we do not have any legal basis to prosecute employers who do not comply with the guidelines,” he said. 

“The only thing we can do is to blacklist these employers so that the next time they apply to take in more foreign workers, they will not be able to do so.”

He said the onus was still on the foreign workers themselves to complain about living conditions if they were unhappy about it. 

According to Section 78 of the Local Government Act 1976, overcrowding in houses that reached dangerous levels could subject a person to a fine not exceeding RM2,000 or a term of imprisonment not exceeding six months or both.

Section 79 of the same Act defines overcrowding as inhabiting in excess of the proportion of one adult to every 350 cubic feet of clear internal space.

The Act classifies adults as anyone over the age of 10 or two children not exceeding 10 years.