KUALA LUMPUR: Another strict Movement Control Order (MCO) could lead to a million people going jobless, with low-income earners suffering the most.
Finance Minister Tengku Datuk Seri Zafrul Tengku Abdul Aziz said this projection would have a multiplier affect when a person’s dependents were taken into consideration.
“The average household has four members, which means up to four million more dependents could be affected if one million people were to lose their jobs.
“What is worrying is that the unemployment rate will not be balanced and will focus on those who are self-employed, youth, women and low-skilled workers.
“Besides that, more than 2.8 million self-employed people will lose their jobs,” he said after the National Security Council announced tighter restrictions for the MCO on Saturday.
He said the first MCO last year had contributed to a 5.3 per cent unemployment rate with 826,000 people losing their jobs.
This, he said, was the highest unemployment rate since the 1980s commodity crisis.
He said in April last year, which was during the first MCO, only six jobs were regained for every 100 lost.
However, when the curbs were relaxed in June, 40 people found jobs for every 100 jobs lost.
Tengku Zafrul regarded the gross domestic product contraction of 17. 1 per cent in the first quarter of last year as the worst in the nation’s history.
Elaborating on the social cost of the situation, he said there was a record RM78 billion in Employees Provident Fund withdrawals from 11.7 million people.
To make matters worse, close to 2.6 million people had less than RM1,000 in their Account 1, he added.
“However, MCO 2.0 not only managed to flatten the Covid-19 curve, but also helped to place the economy on the track of recovery, which caused only a 0.5 per cent contraction and reduced the unemployment rate to 4.7 per cent (753,000 people without jobs) in March 2021.
Tengku Zafrul said: “Based on the experiences of the MCO 2.0, we can effectively manage the Covid-19 caseload, while keeping the economy open to maintain a balance between lives and livelihoods.
“As such, with this further tightening (of the standard operating procedures), the government is confident that we can reduce cases besides mitigating people’s hardship by ensuring that livelihoods are protected.”-NST