Tan Kin Lian's Blog: Unemployment in Singapore

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Unemployment in Singapore

I need your help to do some research on unemployment in Singapore

a) How many citizens and permanent residents lose their job each year, due to retrenchment or business failure of their employers, i.e. not due to change of job? It varies from one year to another, but I like to have an average over a number of years.

b) What is the proportion of people who lose their job, i.e. taking this average number as a percentage of those in the workforce.

c) How long does it take to find a new job and what is the average salary for the new job compared to the job that was lost? This statistics may be difficult to get, but I hope that some approximate figures are available.

d) How long does it take a school leaver to find a full time job?

You can post your findings here or send them to kinlian@gmail.com

10 comments:

Anonymous said...: My daughter graduated from her
polytechnic somewhere in May 2009.
she got her 1st permanent job in December but chose to start in January 2010 as she was working at a job paying $5 an hour and wanted to take a short break.

Hope this info help in your survey.

I had a nephew who graduated from NUS, got married and was unemplyed for more than a year before finally
taking a teaching job with MOE out of desperation and pressure from in-laws; January 14, 2010 12:31 AM
Anonymous said...: Hi Mr Tan,

Let me try. Most of the stats can be obtained from MOM website. The publicly accessible official stats tend to lump both Citizens and PRs together (residents). So no separate figures.

A) Involuntary Job Loss.
Stats can be found here.

B) Proportion Of People Who Lose Job.
Divide the numbers in (A) by the total number employed for each year. Info can be found here.

C) How Long To Find New Job?
Rough gauge based on median length of time people stay unemployed. Mostly from 8 to 12 weeks out of job. Info found here.

Salary Of New Job Compared To Old Job?
This one harder to interpret. I can only base on the growth rate indicated for the quarterly figures. You can see average salary goes down after major setback e.g. 911 attack and in 2009. Stats found here.

D) School Leaver To Find Full-Time Job.
Dunno about this. The only thing I can think of is the Graduate Employment Surveys which are conducted 6 months after their graduation. But the info does not directly address the question -- at most you know what percentage of graduates found full-time work or part-time work 6 months after graduating. GES for the three universities found here.
Summary of GES for Polytechnics found in this PDF.

Hope all the above helps.; January 14, 2010 3:20 AM
Tan Kin Lian said...: Thanks for your help. Very useful and relevant. Very much appreciated.; January 14, 2010 5:33 AM
Anonymous said...: Do you trust the figures churned out by MOM ? Sure they don't play around with the figures to hide ugly facts ?

For comparison, just look at the Straits Times - nothing but a propaganda tool for the authorities !; January 14, 2010 12:51 PM
Anonymous said...: Another aspect you might want to look into is compensation for workers who are retrenched.

If you work for a company for 20 years and the boss decides to retrench you, it seems that there is no law that requires the company to give a minimum compensation to the affected worker.; January 14, 2010 2:07 PM
Anonymous said...: I was the one to suggest the various MOM stats.

The MOM stats should be quite representative of the OVERALL situation. Unfortunately, this will hide certain issues that are probably worse off. E.g. Citizens employment rate versus PRs; Proportion of job loss versus age bracket of workers; Time to find new job versus age bracket of workers; Proportion of job loss among citizens versus PRs; How long does citizen take to find new job versus PR?

All the above can also be further analysed against income brackets i.e. What is the proportion of top 20% income earners retrenched compared to bottom 40% income earners? Are top income earners able to find another job faster then low income earners? Is the new salary affected more for low wage workers than the top 20%? Etc etc.

If the demographics of PRs are younger than citizens, it will be no surprise that employment stats will be worse for citizens compared to PRs. Besides for non-talented PRs who are typically in average jobs, they can undercut asking salary to get another job faster, as their long-term plans do not involve retiring in S'pore.

The staff involved with all these stats collection and massaging of numbers will surely know all the hidden truths, but they are unable to reveal under pain of the Official Secrets Act.

Ex-Con; January 14, 2010 4:57 PM
Anonymous said...: Oh, and I forgot to mention... Those who lost their jobs and are now in WDA or SPUR training etc are not considered unemployed. Even though many of these so-called skills upgrading are Train-and-Place which means it is your business to find a job after finishing the training. I know a couple of friends undergoing this --- get to hear all kinds of stories, abuse of policy by training providers, pushing them to take up 3-month contract jobs and no-fix salary odd jobs just to show nice figures to WDA etc.

And as you have read in the news, those on 1-month, 3-month contract also considered employed. To me, anything less than 6-month (which is already very lousy) should not be counted as employed. Like that might as well count those school kids doing holiday and part-time jobs to boost the employment figures.

Best is those who cannot find another job after 6 months. This group move to another category of Voluntary Unemployed i.e. retired.

Ex-Con; January 14, 2010 5:17 PM
Anonymous said...: So either way, MOM wins. They use all kinds of tactics to hide the truth, to hide the fact that our ministers are doing a damn lousy job to revive the economy despite being paid millions of dollars !!

Our political system is no better than N. Korea !; January 18, 2010 1:43 PM
Anonymous said...: I'm a regional sales manager. I just got my pay cut by close to 20%and that amount becomes part of my variable bonus, i.e. can give can don't give. I'm only a middle income earner. I did no wrong and the reason given was to align the company's strategy. In fact, my sales was increasing at a high speed the last 3 months.
I was head-hunted 2 months before Lehman collapse in 2008 with an 11%increase in pay. And now that the economy is picking up and my company's business is also picking up very fast since Novemeber. Now I'm 9% worst off than before and I wonder why I was head-hunted in the first place? Mr Tan, you may want to look into how company treat workers in pay cut situations. It seem that I have no recourse.; January 18, 2010 11:05 PM
Anonymous said...: Let me share abit with you all on my end...

Im currently working in the states, the situation here is realy realy BAD. Just 2 weeks ago, my company laid off 25% of the workforce. Things are gg from bad to worse. Workloads are piling and lots of overtime to churn.

When I look at Singapore's economy, im rather surprise that things are going quite well, maybe its because of good govt, but i can assure you that another BIG wave of March 2009 is coming. So be prepared. Just a few days ago the PM already hint that 2010 is going to be another difficult year...

just my 2cents sharing...; January 29, 2010 8:07 AM