Conditions of Precarity and Strategies of Resilience: The Malaysian Hawker Community and COVID-19 Pandemic

This chapter is a desk review of the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted hawking practices in peninsular Malaysia. Hawking is an important lifeline for the precarious and forms complex arrangements of food markets in the peninsula, occupying public spaces including streets, markets, and designated hawker centers. The chapter first explains informality, precarity, and strategies of resilience as related to hawking in the Global South. Then, reviewing academic research, policy papers, and news coverage, it discusses the struggles Malaysian hawkers experienced during the pandemic while examining the strategies of resilience that they have adopted to cope and survive. The pandemic, and the measures to contain it, has challenged and complicated hawkers’ livelihoods, as hawkers have faced numerous difficulties with restrictions of space and movement, rising prices of commodities, changes in customer food patterns, and tensions with law enforcement and public health officials. As hawkers adapted by changing business strategies and embracing new methods of digitalization, many unemployed have also turned to hawking to support themselves and families, evincing the importance of hawking as a precarious form of labor. The shortcomings of government assistance and social protection have also left hawkers financially vulnerable, a problem that hawker organizations attempt to ameliorate. At the end, the chapter will explore policy recommendations to assist hawkers to overcome the pandemic, in line with the implementation of various SDGs in the country that concern microbusinesses.