Local workers do deserve higher wages, and a wage floor that rises is, in principle, a wage floor that lifts the lowest-paid.
While better wages are necessary, raising them without first creating the economic conditions to sustain them is not reform.
The Institute for Strategic Analysis and Policy Research (Insap) supports the goal but our concern lies with what the policy will actually deliver to the workers it claims to protect, and nowhere more sharply than in Sabah.
Income disparity between Sabah and the rest of Malaysia is not a new problem. It is a long-standing structural feature of the federation.
It is visible in every measure that matters: household income, poverty incidence, the share of high-value industry, and the depth and breadth of the wage distribution.
Sabahans have lived with that...