The Gig Workers’ Bill: one small step for parliament, one big step for the nation

By OOI KEE BENG, for The Edge Malaysia Weekly. September 22-28, 2025

The passing of the Gig Workers’ Bill 2025 by the Malaysian parliament is significant, encouraging and inspiring. For a country whose political culture pathologically encourages racial consciousness, confrontation and intimidation, this legislation is a rare acknowledgement of society’s struggling classes — and gig workers are a besieged category.

It is a potential game changer.

Especially after the Covid-19 pandemic, gig work brought many young working-class people a sense of hope, or at least temporary relief from poverty and hopelessness. However, without proper regulations to protect gig workers, their lifestyle quickly revealed itself to be more an option for desperate persons than a career path.

Gig work, like any form of labour in any industry, becomes a systemic form of exploitation if no legislation follows to improve the working conditions of the workers involved; it does not matter if they are called vendors, contractors or labourers.

Now, such legislation is only possible if policymakers think in terms of economic imbalances and in terms of persistent income gaps. That train of thought did in fact underline Malaysian policy thinking for a while. The Second Malaysia Plan (1970-1975) did seek to enshrine the eradication of poverty as a key pillar for nation building. However, that consciousness about the curse of class immobility was soon subsumed and diluted by the fixation with ethnicity that the country’s ruling parties found to be so conducive to their serial re-election.

One could also point out other related dynamics which contributed to the predominance of ethnicity over class in the national consciousness, such as the fear of communism that crippled unionism in the country from the very start, or the rise of neoliberalism (“governance is most effective if market dynamics are promoted in all its policies”) in the 1980s — throughout the world — as a lazy man’s alternative to responsible policy thinking.

The global dismissal of political ideologies in the wake of the Cold War excused any leader from having long-term goals. “The market”, after all, is an arena of contention where the might of the strongest decides; meanwhile, the vulgar understanding of “the invisible hand” exempts governments from being responsible for negative socioeconomic conditions. The market will not only fix things; it is the only thing that can fix things.

In matters of general health, national education, or legal predictability, we are all homo economicus now, and that includes our leaders. This explains much of the malaise society suffers today: bad healthcare, deteriorating education and legal insistence. Needless to say, the environment — silent and patient — does not get a say.

Corruption in monetary and moral terms naturally followed, in the West as in the East, with Malaysia leading the charge, it would seem. This also meant that the people were now on their own. They are to survive as well as they can.

It is in such a context that we should read the significance of the Gig Workers’ Bill. It may be a small step but it reinjects the vital value of solidarity back into the equation. When was the last time Malaysians witnessed a law being passed to better the lot of the working man, without an obsession with race?

What this development will inspire in the near future remains to be seen. But conceptually, this leads me to a discussion about “the people”. There are many synonyms for “the people”, but in the Malaysian context, we could list the following:

1.     The Rakyat. This seems to be the common term used, but in connotation, it suggests the masses to be quite passive, in need of help, in need of cajoling and in need of leaders.

2.     Citizens. This connotes people with rights vis-à-vis the state. Whether they live in a democracy or not, being a citizen carries with it a basic sense of security. There are laws in place providing privileges and rights to a person holding a national passport. Differentiating the rights of one citizen from another essentially runs against this basic understanding of what a nation state is meant to be.

3.     Voters. If the people are considered as voters first and foremost, then they are treated accordingly, as persons whose importance lies in how they cast their vote and whose mind is best swayed in the run-up to an election. The weight of their individual votes is also administratively malleable. Such a conception of “the people” also means that politics becomes an unending electoral campaign, and popularity polls and good daily publicity become the leaders’ main concern.

4.     Pedestrians. I throw this in for good measure. If the people are seen as pedestrians, we then focus on the liveability in their environment. They are seen as people having a daily life which should be made as comfortable and safe as possible. It should not matter if they are voters or not. They have a right to safety and comfort on a daily basis. That appears to me to be a basic responsibility often forgotten by governments of developing countries, who are more willing to see the people either as voters who can be manipulated, as passive and patient members of the Rakyat, who are in essence undemanding, or as citizens, who are legal agents with rights and with growing empowerment.

My concluding point is this: The Gig Workers’ Bill, as a legislative improvement of working conditions for the struggling classes, potentially reorientates the national discourse towards worker rights and sees them as citizens, not as voters or as patient and long-suffering members of the Rakyat.

Kudos to Steven Sim, the minister of human resources, for pushing this significant piece of legislation through despite opposition from within the ruling coalition of parties.