KUALA LUMPUR, August 25 — Tengku Permaisuri Norashikin Kajang Hospital is recruiting personnel from the Malaysia Short-Term Employment Programme (MySTEP) at an RM1,700 monthly wage without offering overtime pay.
According to a job advertisement posted by the Selangor state health department, a MySTEP personnel’s responsibilities at the government hospital include helping and implementing administration and management work at units where they are to be stationed.
The MySTEP personnel job is a contract position, open to Malaysians aged between 19 and 40 years with a minimum SPM qualification. “Benefits” include rest leave and medical leave, as well as Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF) and Social Security Organisation (Socso) contributions.
“Willingness to work overtime and shift duties without overtime pay” is listed among the job requirements.
Interested applicants must submit their applications by 5pm today.
The MySTEP job advertisement sparked a furore on social media, with one posting on X that plenty of young people are being “abused” by this programme.
Contract doctors’ group Hartal Doktor Kontrak commented on Facebook: “Labour law doesn’t apply to KKM.”
The Ministry of Health (MOH) frequently faces scrutiny of labour issues, with the most recent involving a public health clinic in Selangor that allegedly allowed pregnant women health care workers to only leave work early from 36 weeks’ pregnancy, instead of 22 weeks as permitted by a Public Service Department (JPA) circular.
A Budget 2025 webpage on the Ministry of Finance’s (MOF) website describes MySTEP as an initiative by Socso under the Ministry of Human Resources (Kesuma) through the MYFutureJobs portal, expanded to people with disabilities (OKU) and senior citizens with job opportunities in the public sector and government-linked companies.
The webpage states that MySTEP personnel are not eligible for overtime allowance. The duration of service of MySTEP personnel must be at least one month.
JPA guidelines for the 2024 MySTEP programme, released on December 6, 2023, explicitly state that MySTEP personnel are not civil servants and, therefore, are not subject to civil service regulations.
Malaysia’s minimum wage for private sector workers under the Employment Act 1955 is RM1,700 a month, the same offered for the MySTEP personnel job at Tengku Permaisuri Norashikin Kajang Hospital.
According to the Employment Act, all salaried employees who earn less than RM4,000 monthly are entitled to overtime pay.
After the country’s minimum wage rate was raised from RM1,500 to RM1,700 monthly under Budget 2025, Human Resources Minister Steven Sim said last October that labour law violations, including those related to the minimum wage, should be reported to the ministry.
CodeBlue has requested comments from Kesuma on why MySTEP personnel from the Socso programme are not entitled to labour law protections like overtime pay, if they are presumably considered to be private sector workers.
