Resident employment has grown while unemployment continued to ease in the first half of 2021.
While sectors such as finance, insurance, and professional services as well as information and communications saw growth and sustained demand for manpower, domestically oriented, tourism- and aviation-related sectors have yet to recover from the impact of the pandemic.
These were the findings in the Labour Market Report Second Quarter 2021 released by the Ministry for Manpower (MOM) on 15 September 2021.
Manpower Permanent Secretary Aubeck Kam said that this report affirms MOM’s earlier report in July, where the labour market recovery has broadly remained on track.
He said: “While we have since observed a slight increase in unemployment rates in July 2021, this reflected a temporary easing in manpower demand in sectors most affected by the Phase 2 Heightened Alert measures, such as F&B and Retail Trade.
“Overall, we still made considerable improvement since September 2020, when the unemployment rates peaked.”
Total employment fell by 4,000 in the first half of the year. MOM said that this was largely due to a big dip in non-resident employment (-32,000) because of the on-going border restrictions.
Non-resident employment declined across all sectors and pass types, including work permit holders, due to tightened travel restrictions.
With that said, resident employment grew by 28,500 during that same period.
In general, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate continued to fall. Overall unemployment rate dipped to 2.7 per cent, with resident unemployment falling to 3.5 per cent (previously 3.7 per cent) and citizen unemployment dropping 0.1 percentage point, down to 3.7 per cent.
The first half of the year also saw 4,620 retrenchments, or 2.3 retrenchments among every 1,000 employees. According to MOM, these were comparable to the half-yearly levels seen in 2018 and 2019.
More employees in the F&B sectors were placed on short workweek or temporary layoff in the second quarter of 2021. This number rose from 4,020 in the first quarter to 5,580 in the second quarter.
Mr Kam said that the findings are optimistic.
“We are working hard to ease border restrictions and open up domestically as our vaccination rate continues to rise. This should raise employment levels and progressively reduce unemployment rates,” he said.
“However, we should continue to expect the labour market recovery to be uneven across sectors as uncertainties in the external economic environment remain.”
