KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 3 ― The federal government can resolve the high unemployment rate among Malay graduates by revising the Fair Employment Act, and then enforcing the amended law, the Malay Consultative Council (MPM) said today.
MPM secretary-general Dr Hasan Mad suggested the move as he claimed employers in the private sector were biased against hiring Malay graduates, adding that the challenge to gain legit work was compounded by a bloated civil service.
He admitted however that he does not have the statistics to back his claim.
“This conflict can only be resolved if the government dares to amend the Fair Employment Act. Enforce it to ensure that job opportunities in the private sector in this country will be fair and just.
“Fair in all aspects especially from the aspects of ethnicities and gender,” he said in his column in Malay daily Utusan Malaysia.
Hasan was a panelist on the 2015 Umno Economic Bureau.
In his column, he also suggested that government-owned companies should be the “main employers” of Malays while waiting for Putrajaya to take action.
He explained that government departments are too saturated to hire more people.
He also suggested for companies under the Public Enterprise Agencies (PEA) such as Majlis Amanah Rakyat (Mara) and the Rubber Industry Smallholders Development Authority (Risda) to be upgraded and made on par with companies under sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional or state oil company Petronas.
“In addition to creating job opportunities, the companies can create many economic projects that can be privatised to the graduates in its management through a conversion programme that can create entrepreneurs among the graduates to begin their careers as manager of projects owned by the PEA company,” he said.
Only then, Hasan said, it would be apt to call such companies the “Golden Goose” to the Bumiputera Economic Agenda, the government’s measure to financially empower the country’s largest demographic group, a significant portion who are said to still be mired in poverty.
