With regards to the issue of the proposed 90-day maternity leave as per the 2020 Budget Speech, I would like to propose that the Federal Government considers ways to socialize the implementation of this extended maternity leave to cushion its impact on employers. One way is to expand Socso coverage to cover maternity leave.
I am in full agreement that women should be given this 90-days maternity leave. In fact, fathers should also be given paternity leave as well, and this would bode well for family development.
But we should also realize that unlike 50 years ago when most employment was done via government and large corporations, these days small and micro businesses, self employment and the gig economy make up a sizeable portion of our workforce.
For the small and micro businesses, they may only be hiring less than 30 workers (by Malaysian definition of small and micro enterprises) and many of these companies may be just hiring 2 or 3 employees. Many of these smaller employers will have a harder task to financially pay for maternity leave, especially an extended one. This is not to say that maternity leave should not be granted, but instead a better system is needed to pay for it.
This will also overcome the possibility of social biased against women that may (but should not) arise when small and micro business make hiring decisions.
When employers were mostly large corporations, easily having a few hundred or a few thousand employees, employers would be able to handle this matter in house. The same way the government as the largest employer in the country copes with maternity leave.
However, with the changing face of employment in the 21st century, we must solve the challenge with a different system that achieve our social objective whilst being financial fair on society. Maternity leave is a social goal and benefit of the society and country (not the specific business), and thus socializing its cost should be the way forward.