SOME numbers hit you immediately in the annual Labour Market Report. Like the number 100 – which is the extra number of employed Singaporeans last year. Like the number 31,600 – which is the extra number of foreigners employed last year. Mind-boggling! To think that we were supposed to be tightening the tap on foreign workers!
The new Manpower Minister knows how likely it is for people to jump to the wrong conclusions: Jobs are all going to foreigners! So, he took members of some social media news sites, including TMG, through the report earlier today.
Was he convincing? Yes and no.
Crunching numbers
The 100 figure looks drastically small, and would imply that there were hordes of unemployed citizens out there. But the unemployment rate for citizens is 3 per cent, which in some countries, would be defined as full employment. What gives? Simply, Singapore is running out of local labour. Or those who want to be employed are already employed. And the jobs created are being filled by, yes, foreigners. But if the number of foreign maids and construction workers is taken out, that 31,600 figure comes down to 15,800.
It is likely that some people think the foreign worker number is still too high. It comes from the confusion over what tightening the foreign worker tap means. Tightening the tap means slowing the inflow, not throwing out the water. That’s why there are still so many foreign workers around; there is one foreign worker to every two Singapore workers. The tap has definitely been tightened over the years, from 7.6 per cent in 2011 to 2.3 per cent last year – (the figures include maids and construction workers) – or the country would be swamped by foreigners and citizens would become a minority.
So that part of the story looks okay but it cannot be that there are just 100 extra employed Singaporeans? It’s really too small compared to last year’s 96,000 increase. In 2013, the local labour market grew by 82,900 over the year before.
Mr Lim Swee Say and his Ministry of Manpower (MOM) officers cite a combination of factors, such as how there were more part-timers, say, in the retail market then. They left, for varying reasons, but they don’t seem to be looking for full-time jobs so they were out of the market last year.
Also there were measures to bring in more women, older people into the labour force. In other words, the local labour supply has been sucked up over the years with few people left to spare. That’s why local employment growth rate is near zero, and not likely to climb much higher this year either. Maybe 1 per cent.
Convincing? (Do not shoot the messenger.)
What about incomes?
So if everybody who needs work is working, what are they earning? The real median gross monthly income is $3,798 which is about 7 per cent higher than last year’s figure. But incomes rise and fall, so if you look at it over a five-year span, the annualised increase is about 3 per cent, not much different from the increase between 2006 and 2010 for this middle group. The lowest 20 per cent of workers earn $1,965, which is also a 2.9 per cent annualised increase from 2010 to 2015. But the change from the previous five years from 2006 and 2010 is more obvious. Then, the rate was 2.1 per cent.
Retrenchments
Now, here’s the not-so-good news – 14,400 people, including half who were in the services industry, were made redundant last year, a figure that’s been climbing since 2010. There’s no breakdown between locals and foreigners. Mr Lim isn’t too fussed over this given that they manage to get jobs fairly quickly.
Evidence: long-term unemployment rate is 0.6 per cent. But given that they are the PMET sort who would be more highly paid than the rank-and-file workers who got laid off in the big retrenchments of 1997, he’s aware that employers might not be willing to meet their pay expectations. In October, the Career Support Programme was launched for the G to subsidise part of the cost of hiring a retrenched, older worker. You can read about it here.
The bottom-line
So what do we make of last year’s report and what is the prognosis for the future? It seems the tight local labour supply isn’t going to go away. It means that businesses will still keep yelling for more foreign workers because they can’t find locals to do the job. It means that employers might have to pay more to hire Singaporeans because they have little or no choice. This might be good for citizens in the short term, but we might well be over-pricing ourselves if productivity doesn’t move up as well.
That’s actually the bigger issue.
http://themiddleground.sg/2016/01/28/33479/
