PETALING JAYA, April 9 — The Malaysian Association of Hotels (MAH) has called on the government to reverse its ruling that only allows service charges to be claimed by establishments with collective agreements (CA) as it is unfair to other businesses.
MAH president Cheah Swee Hee, in an email response yesterday, had also urged the Domestic Trade, Co-operatives and Consumerism Ministry to retract its previous press statements on the matter.
“Only seven per cent (of hotels in Malaysia) have CA. But service charge is also in the appointment letters of most hotels,” he said.
He said the ministry held a meeting with various stakeholders on April 1 to review the service charges.
“It was to collect information from stakeholders based on either abolishing service charge or renaming it.”
Cheah, however, said there was no resolution from the meeting and the ministry was supposed to return with a proposal — which it did not.
MAH had earlier issued a statement urging the government to withdraw the “ad hoc” decision to disallow service charge collection and work with stakeholders to formulate a solution.
“Allowing companies with employer-employee CA and depriving those without is a double standard and unfair to the economic welfare of the employee,” the statement read.
MAH said the decision was damaging to the remuneration of employees and impractical as hotels spent millions of ringgit to upgrade their software to accommodate the implementation of the Goods and Services Tax.
“MAH’s stand is to ensure employees are not short changed and employers are not being burdened with additional costs.”
