By Quah Boon Huat

This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on January 5, 2026 – January 11, 2026

Affan Kurniawan, a 21-year-old ride-hailing driver and his family’s breadwinner, should have been invisible to power.

On Aug 28 last year, an armoured police vehicle crushed him as it chased protesters. The video of his death seared Indonesia.

Affan was not a protester. He was working — delivering food, saving for a home, keeping his family afloat. His killing ripped through Indonesia, turning resentment into rage. Lawmakers had already voted to give themselves housing allowances nearly 10 times the minimum wage. His death made that privilege combustible.

The episode exposed more than elite privilege. It revealed an economy that drives burdens downward: The vulnerable carry risks, the powerful take gains and the line between survival and dignity vanishes.

Indonesia is not an outlier. It is part of a regional pattern — one embodied in the rise of the gig economy.

For many in Southeast Asia, gig work is a safety net. Grab, Foodpanda and others provide income to those locked out of the formal labour market — school-leavers, single mothers and informal workers excluded from pensions and payroll.

Gig work serves this role because entry is frictionless. A smartphone, a motorbike, the will to hustle. It is often the only option in low-income communities. In downturns, it steadied the fall. When Covid-19 shuttered businesses, gig work kept millions from destitution.

The result has been massive expansion. By 2024, over three million Malaysians — nearly one in five workers — were in gig-type roles. What began as a stopgap is now structural. That scale demands regulation. The problem is not that it exists, but that it escapes the law.

This legal gap left workers exposed. No health coverage. No paid leave. No retirement security. Illness or injury was theirs alone to bear. Pay was dictated by hidden algorithms and shifting bonuses that forced overwork. The information gap was total, and the risk landed on the worker.

The gap was structural. Called “partners”, gig workers were stripped of employee rights and denied collective bargaining. Legal status existed — but only to impose obligations, never entitlements.

Parliament passed the Gig Workers Bill 2025 to confront these gaps. It introduces fair contracts, guarantees timely pay, ensures redress and extends social security to platform-based workers. This is important, but if policy stops there, it risks mistaking gig work for the centre of the economy — and ignores the deeper failures behind it.

Those failures are the bigger picture. Weak job creation, stagnant wages and skills mismatches push millions into precarious work — a symptom of economic malaise. The bill addresses symptoms, not the structural failure beneath them.

It is blind to what a rapidly expanding gig economy represents: a development trap. Unlike manufacturing, gig work generates no spillovers, no export competitiveness, no economies of scale.

And developing economies that shift too far into gig work forfeit the productivity gains that drive lasting prosperity. Without the foundation manufacturing provides, growth becomes fragile — consumption-led but hollowed out. The result is premature short-circuiting of industrialisation.

These macroeconomic losses are mirrored in the human cost. Traditional jobs build careers through skill and progression. Gig work, on the other hand, breaks that ladder, trapping workers in low-productivity roles with no way up.

Automation compounds the damage. Mid-skill roles are vanishing. ArtificiaI intelligence and chatbots displace clerical and administrative work — once pillars of middle-class stability. When routine jobs vanish, rewards pool at the top — among the well-educated and well-capitalised. As a result, inequality widens within and across nations.

These consequences accelerate divergence. Gaps in wealth, power and opportunity fracture societies and set nations on split trajectories. This is no accident. It flows from an economy where capital grows stronger with scale, labour weakens with fragmentation and public policy lags behind technology.

These concerns are not theoretical for Malaysia. The consequences are visible. Malaysia’s B40 and M40 are being trapped in what the World Economic Forum calls the “loop of job degradation”. Their jobs pay poorly, progress nowhere and remain precarious.

The T20, unlike the B40 and M40, are insulated. They are better educated, better connected and positioned to benefit from digitisation. They own the capital — both human and financial — that the future economy rewards. They keep compounding gains while others are left exposed.

In Malaysia, mobility is stratified. Nearly two-thirds of those born in the richest 20% stay there. More than half of those born in the poorest 20% remain trapped. The result is politically combustible: immobility fused with inequality.

For two decades, progress on curbing inequality has stalled. And even as Malaysia claims high-income ambition, its Gini of around 40.7 stands well above that of high-income economies. Crossing that threshold with inequality this entrenched is a path to fragility, not prosperity.

That fragility is systemic. Without shared prosperity, cohesion, legitimacy and mobility cannot endure. Any country that relegates its low- and middle-income groups to gig work cannot sustain its democratic compact. Preventing the gig economy from becoming the default is now an existential imperative.

Read more @theedgemalaysia