Report: Top Glove says yet to receive workers’ housing Act penalty notice
KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 30 — Top Glove Corporation Bhd said it has yet to be notified of the penalty that it could be subject to for allegedly breaching the Workers’ Minimum Standards of Housing and Amenities Act 1990 (Act 446).
Under Act 446, if found guilty, an employer could be fined a maximum of RM50,000 per worker.
A report by The Edge Markets today quoted the world’s largest producer of rubber gloves as saying as such in reply to a query on whether the authorities have notified the company of the said penalty.
“We have not been notified and will continue to engage with authorities on this matter,” the brief WhatsApp message read without elaborating further.
On November 26, the Department of Labour Peninsular Malaysia (JTKSM) was reported to have found a glove manufacturing company in Ipoh to be in violation of the Workers’ Minimum Standards of Housing and Amenities Act 1990 (Act 446) during an operation.
At the time, JTKSM’s labour standards director Mohd Asri Abdul Wahab said that several offences had been uncovered at an unnamed company’s foreign worker hostel.
“Among the offences were the company’s failure to obtain an ‘accommodation acknowledgment letter’ from our department, overcrowding and unsanitary conditions,” he was quoted as saying.
The following day, Top Glove confirmed in a statement that the department had visited its foreign worker hostel.
In the same statement, the company said the exercise to further improve its workers’ living conditions began in July 2020 and is expected to be completed by December 2020.
Earlier this month, Top Glove was forced to temporarily halt operations at some of its factories in Malaysia after thousands of workers tested positive for Covid-19.
The Teratai cluster, which is said to have originated from workers of the glove manufacturer at its factory in Selangor, is currently Malaysia’s biggest Covid-19 infection cluster since the pandemic began.
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