THE Association for Community and Dialogue welcomes the statement of Human Resources Minister M. Saravanan that the wage subsidy programme has prevented 150,000 companies from going bankrupt and more than a million workers from losing their jobs. 

According to the minister, the WSP helped reduce the unemployment rate which dropped from 5% in May to 4.7% in July.

“A total of RM11.8 billion out of RM13.8 billion has been disbursed to 300,000 companies in tackling unemployment,” Saravanan said.

While the employment rate has gone down it is vital that the Human Resources Ministry comes up with a plan to make employers who receive such subsidies to invest in the future and not merely retaining their employees for a certain period of time.

A new criterion related to skilling, re-skilling and up-skilling the employees should be introduced so that the government’s outlay could be justified in terms of value to employee development and adding value to the economy.

Secondly there is a need to help the businesses, especially small- and medium-size companies,  that are receiving the wage subsidies to move up the value chain by embracing digitisation. This should ultimately lead to digitalisation where digital technologies and digitised data impact how work gets done and which create new digital revenue streams that help companies in the long run in terms of quality and productivity.

The current criteria for wage subsidies should be revised so that only employers who desire to retain their employees, have a long-term vision of human capital development and technological growth qualify for the programme.

There is also a need to review the criteria so that unscrupulous employers will not receive the wage subsidies for a period of time and then retrench their workers when the programme ends.  There is a need for systematic progress that requires a holistic review of the wage subsidy programme as we have come a long way from the MCO to RMCO  – September 29, 2020.

* Ronald Benjamin is Association for Community and Dialogue secretary.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.