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Hitting the reset on labour

MALAYSIA’s rehabilitation for its addiction towards cheap foreign labour is now long overdue. Covid-19 has come to disrupt the supply since last year and the withdrawal symptoms have already started to crop up. The road to addiction may have very well started in the 1980s during Malaysia’s journey of industrialisation and economic growth where the temporary solution to meet the severe labour shortage was foreign workers. The Medan Agreement was inked in 1984 for plantation and domestic workers while the later part of the 1980s would see the green light given to recruit workers from the Philippines, Thailand and Bangladesh. It was not really a problem, or at least those who tread the corridors of power did not seem to think it was, until Malaysia tried to climb the high-income ladder.

Reversing the decline among M40

PETALING JAYA: More than 600, 000 households from the middle 40% (M40) income group have slipped into the bottom 40% (B40) category as the Covid-19 crisis delivered a major blow on Malaysians’ income level, according to the Economic Action Council (EAC) secretariat. Against the country’s 7.28 million households, as reported by the Statistics Department for the year 2019, this represents at least 8% of households that have seen incomes drop below the B40 income maximum threshold of RM4, 850 a month. The significant drop in income levels raises concerns about widening inequality and the impact on Malaysians’ socioeconomic standing, and this in turn shifts attention to the government’s game plan to remedy the situation.

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