Lembah Pantai MP, Fahmi Fadzil Partners With Organisations To Beat Unemployment By End of 2022

By Edleena Sephia  •  21 Jun 2021 in News

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By the second quarter of next year, the recently launched Lembah Pantai Jobs and Training Centre (PKLP) is expected to create 500 jobs for unemployed people in the area.

According to NST, Lembah Pantai member of parliament Fahmi Fadzil said PKLP is aiming to help more people in need of assistance to look for career and business opportunities.

With the help of Aisling Consulting and other public and private organisations, Fahmi is determined that PKLP will achieve its main goal to employ people.

“What the centre aims to do is, almost on a bespoke basis, we will try and find a specific job for a person. However, what we have seen during this pandemic, people are taking a ‘wait and see’ approach in getting jobs.

“Because of the fear of going out, certain people who have a social support structure would kind of lean back into that. When you look at the statistics on a daily basis, I think the way that people look at the so-called outside world is shifting.”

Aisling Consulting managing director Melissa Norman said that due to the pandemic, PKLP had trouble getting targeted numbers of people to come to the centre.

According to Melissa, the agency originally planned to expand their marketing strategy with the help of other organisations to reach out to Lembah Pantai’s community.

“Our initiative is always to have close touch with our clients, and we recently have started to talk to companies as a program to help them join our initiative in terms of creating some corporate social responsibility (CSR) giftback by hoping to employ some of the candidates that come to us.

“Technology and e-commerce companies are the main companies that we are working with. We are also working with a number of banks and the workforce that we provide is not necessarily just permanent employment, but the gig economy is also offered,” she said.

It is a known factor that the unemployment rate has gotten worse due to the lockdowns. On the bright side, Fahmi said the rate for the unemployment in April this year fell to 4.6 per cent, which has dropped significantly lower since October 2020.

He added that from the viewpoint of economic sectors, services would increase an upward trend in the number of unemployed persons during the month largely in wholesale and retail trade, food and beverages services, retail and social work activities.

“So what can be done by the government to lower the trend is to expand the wage subsidy programme. Right now I fear it is not covering enough business and the amount is too little.

“If you look at some of the other jurisdictions like Singapore for example, they provide wage support to employers to support 60-70 per cent of the monthly wage for a certain number of months,” he added.

Fahmi also said that the post-covid situation needs to be acknowledged as the pandemic is unlikely to disperse any time soon.

“We have to begin to think about the post covid situation acknowledging that the pandemic situation of mutation and variants will still cause problems. The biggest worry is we are talking about ringgit but for lots of people, the impact is also physiological.”

“Unless, we reach the herd humanity target and as well as drastic reduction in the number of cases everyday. I think we will still have this psychological barrier to work. I hope to be able to achieve the 500 mark. I am being realistic based on our internal numbers that we can achieve this target before the second half of next year,” Fahmi said.