According to the statistics by Ministry of Manpower (MOM) conducted on 13th of June, 2,320 workers were fired in the first six months of the year. The number of unemployment (4000) has decreased from the same quarter of the last year. The initial estimation made by MOM was of 2,100 and it is higher than this.
The situation was not the same in previous years. Earlier in March 2013, the retrenchment figure was 2,120. From 2015-2017, it has been 5,000. This year in March, the rate of long-term unemployment was 0.7 percent. It has come down from last year (0.8%). This figure includes the share of those residents who are not employed for minimum 25 weeks.
Overall, the rate of unemployment has seen a significant improvement by 2 percent. The unemployment rate was 2.2 percent last year.
In the first quarter, the re-entry rate has also decreased by 3% as compared to the last quarter. During the last quarter it was 64; however, now in this quarter, it has now gone down to 61%. PMETs group and people who are 50 years or older witnessed re-entry.
In March, the combined rate of Singaporeans and Singaporeans with permanent residents was 2.8 percent. It came all the way down from 3.5 percent and 3.2 percent respectively a year. In March 2016, it was for the first time when the number of new job openings was more than the number of unemployed people. It implies that there are job opportunities available for everyone in Singapore.
According to the survey, the number of vacancies raised up to 53,900. It was measured among all the public sector and private sector companies, which had at least 25 staff members in their offices. The vacancies that were available in March this year were mostly from PMETs, mostly from the domains like information and communications, technicians, community, social and personal services. Professional services were also among them. The reason why an-PMETs increased was that of community, social, personal services, transportation, and storage.
According to a survey conducted by MOM, the main sectors that became the reason of employment were a community, social and personal services, finance and insurance, transportation and storage as well as information and communication. It grew up by 400 in the first 6 months of this year and compared to the first quarter of last year.
It was because of this change, the decline in employment in manufacturing and construction ended as they saw their employment shrinking by 3,800 and 5,600 in the first half of 2018. According to MOM, the overall demand for labor is still on a rise and is expected to grow in this year but it will not be same in all the sectors of the country. The construction companies and shipyard sectors will still face the issue of unemployment and less labor while service sectors like healthcare, wholesale trade and logistics will have many job opportunities.
Find out more from the newspaper article link below
https://www.straitstimes.com/politics/retrenchments-at-five-year-low-job-vacancies-on-the-rise
