‘LOWER SALARIES ONLY TEMPORARY’
Saravanan: Pay levels and job opportunities will improve once economy stabilises
THE decrease in fresh graduate salaries last year compared with 2019 is temporary, said Human Resources Minister Datuk Seri M. Saravanan.
In a statement yesterday, Saravanan said his ministry was confident that the salary levels and job opportunities will improve once the country’s economy has stabilised.
He said various recovery and stimulus packages by the government, coupled with the ongoing Covid-19 vaccination programme, will contribute to the recovery of the economy, the business sector and the employment market.
He said the ministry, through agencies such as the Social Security Organisation (Socso) and the Human Resources Development Fund (HRDF), had been actively implementing the government’s initiatives to stabilise the labour market and make it easier for job-seekers to find employment.
“This includes various programmes under PenjanaKerjaya, namely the Hiring Incentive Programme, training, open interviews and career carnivals held on a regular basis.”
Saravanan said the Covid-19 pandemic had a different impact on the sectoral growth and employment in the country’s labour market, with salary rates for certain jobs either on the increase, decrease or unchanged.
He said although graduates were the most affected, job placements for them was reported to be the highest.
“The percentage of job placements for occupations equivalent to graduates, namely professionals, managers, executives and technicians (PMET), improved from 38 per cent in the third quarter of last year to 50.2 per cent in the fourth quarter of the
same year.
“The increase of graduate equivalent occupations in the services and manufacturing sectors is also a good sign for the recovery of the labour market, as these two sectors were the main sources of employment for graduates during the pre-crisis period in 2019.”
Saravanan said Socso’s Employment Insurance System (EIS) statistics revealed that the majority of employees, including graduates employed in the third and fourth quarters of last year, received monthly basic wages of between RM1,200 and RM1,499, while only 8.8 per cent of the employees were paid a minimum of RM1,200.
“The concentration of wages between RM1,200 and RM1,499 can be attributed to the high demand for non-graduate jobs, location and cynical unemployment due to the Covid-19 pandemic.”
He said in the fourth quarter of last year, 45.5 per cent of jobseekers were graduates.
“However, 70 per cent of the vacancies offered by employers were for non-graduate jobs.
“With the shortage of vacancies for PMETs, graduates have opted for jobs such as clerks, sales assistants, administrative assistants, customer service and the like as temporary measures until the economy recovers and generates more job opportunities for the category,” the minister added.
As the unemployment rate rose from 3.3 per cent pre-pandemic to 4.5 per cent during the crisis, he said, many job seekers were turning to non-graduate jobs despite the lower wages instead of being unemployed.
In the same statement, Saravanan said that based on EIS data, the average monthly wages last year had increased by 4.4 per cent from RM2,519 to RM2,631.
“The same data also revealed that the wage bracket between RM1,000 and RM2,999, and between RM1,000 and RM1,499, experienced growth of 1.2 per cent, while the wage bracket between RM3,500 and RM3,999 remained unchanged.
“There was a decline for the wage bracket of RM1,000 and below. This shows that more employers are adhering to the minimum wage rate in Malaysia,” he said.
As for wages offered by employers through the MYFutureJobs portal, Saravanan said 67.3 per cent of available vacancies were within the RM2,000 to RM2,499 range.
“Only 4,294 or 8.6 per cent of the total vacancies on the portal had monthly wages of below RM1,500. This, however, is related to pre-career positions, including interns.”