Published April 30, 2009

Gloomy Q1 saw 12,600 job losses

Manufacturing took the worst hit as redundancies broke all previous records

By LEE U-WEN

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(SINGAPORE) An unwanted record in Singapore has been set, as new government figures have revealed that a staggering 12,600 workers here lost their jobs in just the first quarter of this year alone.

This easily beat the previous quarterly mark of 9,410 in the final three months of 2008, as a further sign of the growing economic crisis. Prior to that, the peak was 8,890 redundancies in the last quarter of 2001, after the dotcom bubble was punctured and the United States faced the Sept 11 terrorist attacks.

In its much-anticipated employment situation report for the first quarter of 2009, the Ministry of Manpower's (MOM) preliminary estimates found that the total of 12,600 redundancies comprised 10,800 workers who were retrenched and a further 1,800 who had their contracts terminated prematurely.

Most of the affected workers came from the manufacturing sector, which was responsible for 9,000 cases, mainly from the electronics industry. Some 2,900 workers were laid off from the services sector and 700 from the construction industry, said the report issued by MOM's manpower research and statistics department.

On Tuesday, labour chief Lim Swee Say said in a grim May Day message that the retrenchments in the first quarter would not be the only wave that Singapore would experience, but rather just the first one.

According to preliminary estimates, the total of 12,600 redundancies comprised 10,800 workers who were retrenched and a further 1,800 who had their contracts terminated prematurely.

'It is not a question of whether we will see a second wave of retrenchment, but a question of when it will reach the peak, how high the peak will be, how long it will last, and how many more workers will lose their jobs in this next wave,' he said.

Total employment in Singapore, meanwhile, fell marginally by 1,000 workers in the first quarter, coming off the year 2008 which saw four consecutive quarterly increases.

As at March this year, there were 2,951,400 people with jobs in Singapore. The MOM report said that 'falling external demand' had severely affected the manufacturing sector as employment fell by 19,900, much deeper than the 7,000 losses in the previous quarter.

'Supported by a strong pipeline of building projects, construction employment grew by 8,500 in the first quarter of 2009, but lower than the gains in the earlier quarters.

'Services added 10,300 workers, substantially lower than before,' said the report.

The overall unemployment rate rose from 2.5 per cent in December 2008 to 3.2 per cent in March 2009. Among the resident labour force, the unemployment rate increased from 3.6 per cent in December to a five-year high of 4.8 per cent last month.

On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, the overall unemployment rate rose from 2.4 per cent in December to 2.9 per cent in March this year, even though students who looked for work during the year-end school vacation had returned to school, said the report.

Among the resident labour force, the non-adjusted unemployment rate was 4.4 per cent in March this year, which was also higher than the 3.5 per cent the previous quarter.

An estimated 87,800 residents were jobless in March 2009. The seasonally adjusted figure was 95,600, a sharp rise from 71,800 last December.

All the preliminary data estimates can be found at www.mom.gov.sg/mrsd/publication.