SELANGOR - Physics graduate Ahmad Imran Amsyar gets ready at 5am daily to go to work. But instead of going to an office, he heads to the same traffic light in Seksyen 13 Shah Alam, Selangor, where he peddles food to motorists there.
Mr Imran, 25, said he parks his mother’s car by the roadside as early as 7am to set up and walk straight to the middle of the road when the light is red, hawking pre-packed nasi lemak and pickled fruits.
“I graduated in 2020 during the pandemic. I was desperate to earn some money after graduation because our family wasn’t doing well as my mother was laid off. So I came up with this idea of peddling food at traffic lights,” he told The Straits Times.
“But two years on, I’m still stuck doing the same thing because I couldn’t secure a job in the field that I studied in,” he said.
“At the same time, I only have two options – to come up with whatever on my own, so I can earn some money to survive, or continue looking without knowing if I’d l ever land a job in my field. This is me just trying to do whatever it takes to survive.”
Mr Imran is one of many Malaysians who have turned to selling food and drinks or proffering myriad services to make a living.
The unemployment rate dipped from 3.7 per cent in August to 3.6 per cent in September, maintaining at that level in October, according to government data.
The unemployment rate in October 2021 was 4.3 per cent, the lowest reading at the time since February 2020.
The number of unemployed dropped 14.2 per cent in October from a year earlier to 605,000, while employment increased 3.4 per cent to 16.08 million.
But the downward trend in unemployment could be due to more desperate people settling for any available job in order to make ends meet.
Malaysian Trades Union Congress deputy president Mohd Effendy Abdul Ghani noted: “There are so many factors why we’re seeing the unemployment rate going down, but more people working in the streets.
“Some are not considered unemployed, because technically they’re not jobless. But they’re doing all sorts of random work to generate some income just to get by. Some stray from their respective fields because the pay is too low,” he told ST.
A recent study found that Malaysians are at their worst financial position in 2022 during the past five years, with dwindling savings making it harder for them to deal with a looming recession.
A recent survey by Malaysian financial services website RinggitPlus revealed that 70 per cent of Malaysians saved less than RM500 (S$153) per month in 2022, or did not save at all.
Mass communications graduate Nurul Hidayah Yassin, 24, said: “It’s just impossible to save now. Sometimes, I manage to save RM200 and then there’s an emergency, I’m back to square one.
“Which is why I recently started offering a new service. Since more concerts are taking place in the country, I decided to offer my ‘ticketing service’ as I’m pretty good at securing tickets online.”
“Depending on the popularity of the act, I charge between RM20 and RM30 per ticket for my service. I managed to make slightly above RM1,000 from my ticketing services when Korean multi-genre group Dream Perfect Regime and Chinese singer Jackson Wang came to Malaysia. It’s not much, but at least something for me,” she added.
