Muhammad Shafiq Harun; Nur Layali Mohd Ali Khan; Siti Aisyah Afifah Azman
Box Article: The Review Of Hours Worked In Malaysia
Introduction
- The year 2020 has brought tremendous changes in the way we live and work. The exponential increase in the COVID-19 cases around the globe have caused countries to put countermeasures in place to protect the population from further risk of infection. As the daily cases surged, most countries have resolved to the Great Lockdown with major restrictions of economic and social activities (International Monetary Fund [IMF], 2020). These containment actions, although aimed to protect lives, have resulted in the depth and magnitudes of collapse in activities like never before (IMF, 2020). Therefore, COVID-19 is first and foremost a health crisis, but as a consequence, is also an economic crisis.
- As this unprecedented event continued to unfold, causing slower economic growth in certain regions and downturns in the others, labour as one the factors of production cannot avoid being impacted significantly by the crisis. At the global front, labour market situation has changed dramatically in the first three months since the outbreak of the pandemic. According to the International Labour Organization [ILO] (2020), the global workforce of 3.3 billion were affected by the full or partial lockdown actions either in the form of job losses or reduced hours worked.