Penang’s Parking Attendance Sheme: Smart Move In Difficult Times

BEFORE COUPONS PROLIFERATED, only to be replaced by digital parking applications, parking attendants were ubiquitous across Penang’s public parking facilities. Now largely vanished, these attendants were once part of a transformative state strategy to provide skilled labour for industrialisation in the 1970s, while combatting high unemployment rates.

In an unlikely twist, a parking attendant scheme was central to interventions of the City In-Service Training Centre (CITC, est. 1 February 1970), which was founded in response to Penang’s economic troubles in the 1960–70s. Although the CITC’s role has been superseded by the Penang Skills Development Centre, which pro-vides school-leavers with industry-specific skills today, we revisit this early scheme to understand how the inception of Penang’s industrial transformation unfolded at the personal and institutional level.

RESPONDING TO ECONOMIC DOLDRUMS
Following Malaysia’s formation, fresh political-economic directions and centralised control precipitated the erosion of Penang’s longstanding economic main-stay: its “free port” status. Following Port Klang’s development as Malaysia’s main port, Penang Port endured an immediate 15–20% decline in trade.[1] Coupled with the Indonesian Confrontation and economic nationalism, Penang’s combined trade with Indonesia, Thailand and Burma fell by about $70mil from 1962–63 alone.[2] This declining sector was unable to pro-vide sufficient jobs, while the nascent small manufacturing industries in Mak Mandin, Butterworth, could not absorb enough labour. Despite having an overall population density four times greater than that of Selangor (the second-most urbanised state), Penang suffered the lowest employ-ment rate nationwide.[3] With the complete erosion of Penang’s free port status by 1969, per capita income dropped 12% below the average national wage, and with recession, the unemployment rate increased to 16%.