Comment: Parental Leave Benefits in Malaysia - we need a single-payer system

This was written shortly before the announcement of Malaysia's Budget 2020, where paid maternity leave has been proposed to increase from 60 to 90 days.

I would like to address a few concerns on Malaysia's laws on parent leave and parental allowance.

To briefly reiterate the Employment Act of Malaysia (1955)'s current stance on parental leave and statutory monetary allowances, currently, employed women who give birth to a child must receive up to 60 days of statutory maternity leave with allowance, at the liability of their employer. Fathers receive no parental leave and no allowance.

Concern #1. Statutory parental allowances (moms' and dads' paid leaves) are still charged to the private sector

In short, we need a 'single payer' system for statutory parental benefits, instead of involving thousands of companies' and distorting their trading/accounting concerns.

In many countries, the burden of payment of parental leave falls upon the government. Further studies are required to determine the pros and cons of such a policy. From my own limited perspective, what I do see in Malaysia is that this policy favours large businesses over small businesses.

Under the current law, an employee who has worked as little as three months out of a nine-month period may qualify for paid maternity leave, for another two months after that. This means that an employer (who abides by the law) has to budget for up to five months of pay, for a staff who delivers only three months of work, while the employer also has to juggle this process over an eleven month period. Larger businesses with specialised human resource and finance administrators are at an advantage in dealing with this phenomena. Smaller businesses are at a disadvantage.

So as I see it, the current implementation (law) is flawed, even though it aims to implement a desirable policy (paid maternity leave). The current implementation of the policy unequally burdens small businesses, and thus makes it more difficult for new merchants to lift themselves out of poverty (read: those who are young, inexperienced, and without special access to capital). Furthermore, this exacerbates a feedback loop which reduces the competitiveness of those smaller businesses, and reducing the effectiveness of the free market economy as a whole. This finally jeopardises economic reforms and our national goal to become competitive on a global scale.

I hope that the present and future ministers of Malaysia will consider changing the law, to nationalise the cost of compensating parents of any gender, for their duties in national building, via child-bearing and child-rearing. Instead of adding complexity to the accounting and administrative processes of thousands of private companies, I implore the relevant ministers and their staff to consider the benefits of a simplified single federal program which reimburses parents for their statutory parental allowances. Of course, the cost of this program should be compensated for by higher taxes.

More taxes, one place to collect benefits, and less complexity for everyone.

I hope this appeal gets an ear.

Concern #2. Paternity (dads') leave is still unequal to maternity (moms') leave

I hope that our ministers seek further to design families where the burden of child-rearing responsibilities are divided equally among parents. For reference, take a look at Spain's policy of progressively equalising paternity and maternity leaves.

Concern #3. Maternity (moms') leave is still too short

At 9-10 weeks, Malaysia's maternity leave falls behind a number of other countries which provide 12 -14 weeks of leave. Fast forward to this week's news, on 6 October 2019 Malaysian newspapers reported that the Human Resources Ministry is proposing an increase in the number of maternity leave days from 60 to 98. Bravo. Curiously, reporters haven't added comments from the Ministry of Women, Family, and Community Development, thought surely social policies such as these fall somewhat under their portfolios also.

What follows below is a broader, but related issue:

Throwing back to a broader point which I wrote about in June, parents and non-parents can't be compensated differently by the PRIVATE sector, without distorting the talent management finances of thousands of companies.

Paternity Leave - my brief policy opinion: we should have 90 days optional paid leave per annum, for a maximum of two years every seven years, for all employees, regardless of parenthood, and regardless of gender. This should be funded via a government fund. Having employers pay for it is completely ass backwards.

Comment: Public Policy & Mental Health

(this is not meant to be more than a random comment, it is not well thought out)


The traditional solution was that people would speak frequently with other members of their society, who lived and worked closely with them. As consumerism (read: the phenomena of social engineering which encourages individuals to maximise personal opex) led to smaller social units (notice how people like the Flecks live alone, rather than in shared spaces), the rudimentary support for smaller mental health issues has been reduced. This results from a public policy of increasing the rate of private property ownership per individual (read: not just real estate) and conversely decreasing the rate of public commons.

In theory, if the government is going to design policies that encourage smaller social units, and if it isn't going to provide supplementary social workers to replace the infrastructure that went missing with the reduction in size of social units, then individuals will suffer, and as we can see they may be required to seek help out of their own pockets. This is a public policy of privatising mental health services.

We see from the co-living/co-working trend a reflexive move by individuals to return to shared spaces. The need to share space is valuable - although it is not clear that those who seek to collect rent on shared space will be able to do this profitably. Nor is it clear that they should aim to do so.

What can individuals do about this? Be extra attentive to the people who appear to be lacking in friendships, in your various work and living spaces.

What more can individuals do? Lobby your parliamentary representatives, to form coherent policies that reverse the pattern of privatising the commons, at the expense of individuals' well-beings.

Why might anyone oppose this? Well, if you don't believe that mental health is a basic human right, and that it should be bought only by the wealthy, then no need lah to save the common spaces of society! :)

Shit, I seem to have stumbled upon an argument for the immorality of rented co-x spaces. LOL

Comment: What it Means, to Question Capitalism

/commented on whether the ruleset in MY is as biased towards holders of capital, as the ruleset in HK/

I don't really care about Malaysia, LOL, but this is an interesting discussion.

The key question is whether the rules of HK or MY favour holders of capital, or not. This simply means that if citizenX has more capital than citizenY, then the rules IMPLY that citizenX's ability to earn income is greater than citizenY's. THAT is what capitalism refers to - it's fundamentally about the regulatory system surrounding property rights.

Consider as an alternative a game where citizenX and citizenY, despite having different capital bases (say X has a million currency units in the bank, and Y has ten thousand currency units), were equal in their available opportunities for earning future income. This might entail, for example:

• some sort of limitation on X's ability to charge interest on lending out capital, or
• some sort of limitation on X's ability to buy up a lot goods with inelastic demand curves (read: daily necessities), simply to sell them at a profit
• some sort of tax on any profit X makes, from her capital base (as opposed to say, from selling her employment time)
• some sort of welfare benefit for Y which equalises any gains X made on X's capital base (perhaps, funded by taxes paid by X on X's capital gains)

HELLO, all of these are exactly the type of regulations that govern each present day national economy! The question isn't 'can we make money here' - it's not a binary yes/no proposition, as the substrate is pretty complicated.

That being said, I don't know a lot about HK's fiscal and monetary policy. (Oops, buat bising aje.) But I do think Malaysia's is messy... and it's because it's messy that 'we can make shit tons of money, if we try'. I don't think the messiness is ideal, and I don't have a problem with people making money on available resources - I think however, Malaysia has a long way to go in ensuring that whatever the rules are, they are optimised to maximise the total wealth in the system, and also the minimum standards of living for all citizens, regardless of their health, age, race, and laziness.