Young lawyers push for Malaysian Bar to have binding minimum pay for chambering students

• Published date: 28 May 2022
• Publication title: Malay Mail Online

The Malaysian Bar should put in place a binding ruling for law firms to start paying a minimum salary to pupils or chambering students to protect them from alleged exploitation, instead of introducing it as a guideline which law firms can choose to ignore, a group of young lawyers said today.

Pupils or chambering students typically undergo nine months of training under senior lawyers, before they apply to the court to officially be admitted to the legal profession as lawyers.

Young Lawyers Movement spokesman Goh Cia Yee said he had raised the same issue of minimum pay for pupils or chambering students two years ago, and that this issue was being raised again as the young lawyers had yet to receive what they asked for.

Goh noted that the Malaysian Bar had often cited Section 42(1)(a) of the Legal Profession Act to highlight its purpose of upholding the cause of justice and argued that this should extend to justice related to labour rights.

'Well, it is our position that justice is not just freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. Justice involves socio-economic justice and labour rights, there needs to be protection for those rights.

'And the Bar cannot say it is fulfilling its purpose without having done the right thing by ensuring that there is justice within the profession itself. The lens that has been used to view outside the profession must be used to view internally,' he told reporters here at Wisma MCA where the Malaysian Bar was holding an extraordinary general meeting (EGM).

Goh argued that priority should be given to living entities or individuals as compared to business entities, expressing his view that business entities would be able to take an increase in the cost of paying pupils and that there could be pupils with family circumstances who would be unable to afford receiving low pay.

While noting that the Malaysian Bar intends to implement minimum pay, Goh questioned if it would be in the form of guidelines which would be non-binding on law firms and which he suggested would be ineffective as compared to a binding ruling.

'I think we need something binding, that's one of the reasons why we are here today, because we disagree with what the Malaysian Bar has said,' he said.

The two demands by the Young Lawyers Movement today are for a direct election of Bar Council members to ensure views made by the Malaysian Bar reflect its members' views, and for the Malaysian Bar to confirm whether the minimum remuneration for pupils would be done through a...