Socso chief executive Mohammed Azman Aziz said the manufacturing and construction industries recorded the highest number of job losses this year.

This is based on Employment Insurance Scheme records, which show that as of Dec 14, Socso received over 33,000 claim applications by 22,268 workers who had lost their jobs.

“Automation is the trend now, we cannot deny that,” Azman told FMT.

“Even if you look at the banking industry and the manufacturing industry, people are moving towards automation.”

In the banking industry, people are considering implementing financial technology or FinTech, he said.

More banks are also encouraging customers and clients to do their transactions online instead of using cheques or queuing at counters.

According to Azman, 27,418 of the 33,726 insurance claim applications received by Socso were approved. This includes applications for first, second and third payments.

He attributed the mismatch in number of applications approved for payment and the number of workers out of jobs to the 2018 interim assistance policy, which allows workers who lost their jobs this year to claim insurance under Socso a total of three times.

“Each worker can claim insurance three times, for three months consecutively, if they don’t have a job,” he said.

“Some of them go back to work within the first month, others will go back within the third month.”

The Interim Payment Assistance scheme under Socso’s Employment Insurance System allows a monthly cash allowance of RM600 for a maximum of three months.

Human Resources Minister M Kulasegaran recently said more than 21,000 people had lost their jobs this year, half of whom were in Selangor and Kuala Lumpur.

Selangor topped the list with 5,902 losing their jobs, followed by Kuala Lumpur (4,767), Johor (2,536) and Penang (1,328).

Azman said most of the job losses were recorded in urban areas such as the Klang Valley as these locations happened to have the highest number of employees in the affected industries.

“If you ask me, the first thing we should do, which we are very fortunate to have done already before the Industrial Revolution 4.0 and before people started implementing automation and e-commerce, is to establish an employment insurance system.”

This allowed Socso to provide financial assistance to affected workers, he said.

There are two components under the system: employment insurance and employment services support.

Azman said the latter was the more important component as it aimed to get workers who had lost their jobs back into the workforce as soon as possible.

Under the employment services support component, he said, an officer or job counsellor would match the workers’ qualifications to available vacancies, and support them in the employment process.

“We also organise job fairs and go to the industries to ask them if they have any vacancies, and we call them to our centre to interview workers who have lost their jobs.”

If workers were unable to fill the identified vacancies, he said, Socso would provide training to equip them with new soft skills.