Human Resource Minister M. Kulasegaran the pledge to create one million job opportunities in Pakatan Harapan’s manifesto for the 14th general election is not empty talk. — Picture by Miera Zulyana

KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 4 ― The pledge to create one million job opportunities in Pakatan Harapan’s manifesto for the 14th general election is not empty talk, said Human Resource Minister M. Kulasegaran.

He said the government was capable of delivering on the promise but currently was facing the problem of insufficient manpower.

“The problem is not the figure or job availability, the problem is full employment as the unemployment rate is only 3.4 per cent. There is a shortage of workers, efforts are being taken to increase the pool of skilled workers as this will raise the nation’s income.

“Raising the minimum wage (MW) to RM1,500 is a policy of the government which certainly can be achieved in five years time. The first step has been taken which is raising the MW from RM1,000 to RM1,100 effective January, 19,” he said during the Question-and-Answer session ion the Dewan Rakyat today.

The minister was replying to a supplementary question from Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi (BN-Bagan Datuk) who had wanted to know if the government would keep its promise of creating a million job opportunities with the minimum pay at RM2,500 as contained in the PH manifesto.

According to him, there were 137,400 unemployed graduates in 2017, a four per cent rise as compared to 131,600 in 2016.

Among the programmes implemented to tackle this issue were upgrading the JobsMalaysia portal, job matching schemes, holding job fairs and walk-in-interviews, he said.

As for retrenchment, the minister noted that from Jan 1 to Sept 30, 15,903 workers lost their jobs, saying the figure was about half for the same period in 2017 which saw 31,945 workers let go.

He was responding to Ahmad Zahid’s original question on graduate unemployment and retrenchment of workers. ― Bernama