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PETALING JAYA: Projected 1 million unemployed Malaysians will require three financial shields costing RM31.4 billion, DAP Secretary General Lim Guan Eng (pix) said today.
With the unemployment rate at 4.9% or 773,200 in June 2020, Human Resources Minister Datuk Seri M. Saravanan said that as of September, the number of job seekers in the country could rise to one million.
“Saravanan attributed the increase in unemployed Malaysians to one million, 350,000 new graduates and 200,000 Malaysians returning from abroad,” it said in a statement.
“One million unemployed Malaysians would be the highest in history and requires immediate action by the government through increased debt of tens of billions of ringgit.”
DAP has proposed three economic shields that cost RM31.4 billion. The first is the immediate implementation of the increase in monthly social assistance from RM200-300 to RM1,000 as proposed by Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin at a cost of RM12 billion, Lim said.
He suggested an extension of the moratorium on bank loan repayments for another six months when it expires on September 30, at a cost of RM6.4 billion that will help eight million Malaysian people and businesses.
Finance Minister Tengku Datuk Seri Zafrul Aziz said the value of the loan moratorium is RM78.14 billion as of August 21, 2020. 300,000 companies used RM27.35 billion, while 7.7 million Malaysians used 50.79 billion ringgit.
Lim’s third suggestion is to provide Malaysia @ Work hiring incentives of RM 500 per month to employees and RM 300 to employers to encourage them to hire local workers as proposed by Pakatan Harapan in the 2020 Budget.
“Expanding this scheme to cover 600,000 Malaysian workers and their employers would cost RM13 billion. This would also help the more than 500,000 young people who are unemployed, which constitutes a large proportion of 4.9% of the unemployment rate, ”he added.
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