Wanted: Women, older workers

THE labour movement will focus on roping in more women and older workers to increase the size of the workforce next year, said labour chief Lim Swee Say.

The movement also aims to increase productivity by helping companies to improve their processes, he added.

These actions will help the workforce take advantage of an upturn next year, he said.

He was outlining next year's plans and summing up the labour movement's efforts in the past year yesterday.

The movement has been successful at staving off record retrenchment and unemployment this year, he said.

Mr Lim, who is the secretary general of the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC), added that after a year of defensive play on the job front, the new year will mark the beginning of an offensive campaign.

This means that the tripartite partners - comprising the Government, employers and unions - will strive to build a 'cheaper, better and faster' economy, by helping companies improve their productivity rates, capabilities and flexibility.

NTUC wants to nurse employment levels here back to a full-employment rate - where fewer than 3 per cent of working adults are jobless.

It also wants to go beyond that by encouraging a large pool of people, who are not in the job market currently, to re-enter or join the workforce.

The way to do so would be by re-training them, rather than by creating new jobs, said Mr Lim.

'We hope that re-employment in Singapore can be further increased, structural employment can be further reduced and, more importantly, under-employment among the middle-aged PMETs (professional, managers, executives and technicians) can be further avoided, through retraining and reskilling,' he said.

The number of these potential job entrants stands at an estimated 162,400, Mr Lim said.

About a third of them are first-timers to the job market; the remaining 116,000 have some job experience. Among them are 19,800 degree-holding women.

'Many of them are very employable, so the challenge lies in how we reach out to them and match them (to jobs),' Mr Lim said.

The Employment & Employability Institute (e2i), NTUC's one-stop job-matching and training centre, will step up efforts to train and match jobs to this group, he added.

The unemployment rate for the third quarter of this year is 5 per cent. About 20,000 people were retrenched this year, of whom about 95 per cent were from the manufacturing sector.

But despite a steeper drop in gross domestic product this year, significantly fewer workers were retrenched compared to the previous two downturns in 1998 and 2001, NTUC and e2i pointed out yesterday.

Up to last month, e2i has helped find jobs for 16,000 jobseekers. This comes up to three in five of its trainees, the same rate as last year.

Another 8,000 have been trained or are undergoing training, but are still jobless; the remaining 3,000 sought help from other agencies later.

e2i also helped 180 companies upgrade the skills of 33,000 workers through the Skills Programme for Upgrading and Resilience.

NTUC has done well against the international benchmark, largely because of its strengthened tripartism ties during the crisis, said its deputy secretary- general, Madam Halimah Yacob, citing an International Labour Organisation report.

- mypaper