31 January 2007
Press Statement
Question: What is your take on the 4th quarter 2006 employment figures?
SG Lim Swee Say: The employment results released today is most encouraging. We are happy and heartened to hear of these good results.
A few years ago when the Singapore economy was going up and down, the first concern of the Labour Movement was whether the Singapore economy would return to healthy growth. This has happened with our Gross Domestic Product growing by 7.7% last year.
The Labour Movement’s second concern is that as we grow our economy, will we experience what some other countries have experienced, what they call “jobless growth”, meaning that the economy may be growing, but not the number of jobs. Again, this has not happened in Singapore. Over the last three years, we have added more than 360,000 jobs to our job markets. So, it has been a healthy economic growth and more importantly, it has not been a jobless growth.
Our third concern is whether Singaporeans benefit directly from this growth in the job market? And again, the answer is yes. Of the 360,000 jobs added in the past three years, about 200,000 jobs or more than half the jobs we created actually went to Singaporeans. The labour market is getting tighter. Because of the good performance of companies and our flexible wage system, workers are getting better increases and better bonuses.
So, on the whole, we are certainly moving on the right track. The way the tripartite partners work together to grow our economy, create jobs and help Singaporeans take on more of these jobs, is working well. I hope that 2007 will be another good year like the one we had in 2006, and hopefully beyond that.
Question: Consistently, structural unemployment has always been a problem, and it still is today, but has that come down?
SG Lim Swee Say: If you were to look at the number of unemployed, it has come down from about 90,000 three years ago, to about 67,000 today. Of the 67,000, I believe the long term unemployable, meaning these are the workers who face greater difficulties in getting jobs, accounts for about 15%-20%.
Even though the situation is under control today, we must continue with our efforts to minimise the mismatch between jobs and workers. The two basic mismatches are either the workers do not like the jobs or the jobs do not ‘like’ the workers. What can we do? If the jobs do not find the workers ‘attractive’, then the solution is to upgrade the workers so that they would be more ‘attractive’ to the jobs. And if the jobs are not ‘attractive’ to the workers, then we have to upgrade the jobs.
This is the reason why over the last few years, we have the Job Re-creation Programme and Skills Redevelopment Programme. The whole idea is to keep upgrading the workers on one hand and keep upgrading the jobs on the other hand so as to minimise the mismatch between the two.
We are making steady progress but we still have a long way to go. As we continue to create more jobs in the economy, we should encourage, support and facilitate more and more Singaporeans to adapt and re-learn new skills to take up meaningful employment in our growing job market.
The challenge of growing structural unemployment will never go away, but what we can do is to make sure that we keep it at the minimum possible level.
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Goy Kae Lip
Consultant
Corporate Communications Department
National Trades Union Congress
DID 6213 8184
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Email goykl@ntuc.org.sg
