Geoffrey Williams of HELP University said such a policy was not feasible because too many citizens were unemployed. It would cost the government billions of ringgit to implement, he added.

He estimated that the Covid-19 pandemic had caused the two million people in the country to either lose their jobs or fall into underemployment.

In proposing the policy on Wednesday, PKR Youth communications director Chan Chun Kuang estimated that more than 741,600 Malaysians were currently jobless. He cited reports from the National Statistics Department

Last July, Umno Youth called for a similar policy directed at youths.

Williams told FMT he understood PKR’s call to mean that people would be offered jobs on fixed wages in the public sector and private companies would be encouraged to offer employment through wage subsidies and other hiring incentives.

He said similar policies were implemented in the former Soviet Union from 1928 to 1991, in China from 1949 to 1997 and in Australia in the mid-1990s.

The outcomes of those policies were poor, he said, because they created artificial work and caused inflexibility in the labour market. The long term effects on those countries’ economies were negative, he added.

He said he feared that implementing such a policy in Malaysia would cause firms to hire people just to get a hiring fee from the government or to dismiss their workers unless the subsidy was given.

“It’s far too crude to be useful as a crisis response,” he said. “It could only be introduced as part of a full system of social welfare and employment reform.

“There are lots of monitoring costs and bad effects which make it difficult to implement in practice.

“It’s not the job of the government to create artificial jobs. It’s the job of the government to create the right environment for the market to create real, well-paid and sustainable jobs.”

Williams said the best way to handle unemployment was for the government to spur consumer demand by giving people money and encouraging them to spend.

Malaysian Trades Union Congress deputy president Mohd Effendy Abdul Ghani said the government should focus on adding more resources to the Employment Insurance System (EIS) under the Social Security Organisation (Socso) instead of drawing up a job guarantee policy.

“The government needs to improve the EIS,” he said. “We need to encourage more workers to sign up for it.”

He said many people were still unaware of the EIS and its benefits, such as its provision of income replacement for people who have lost their jobs through a job search allowance for up to six months.

Malaysian Employers Federation executive director Shamsuddin Bardan said the government could offer only a few jobs under the proposed policy because the number of public servants was already sufficient.

However, he said it could be a good temporary measure that would allow people to receive a form of income until the economy recovered and the labour market picked up.

He said it could be carried out in ways similar to “Ops Isi Penuh”, the government’s public service recruitment programme in 1980.