Singapore's Labour Demand Could Ease Further This Year, After Signs of Cooling in Q2: MOM

The Business Times2023-09-14

Singapore’s labour demand is set to ease further in the rest of 2023, after employment growth and job vacancies moderated in the second quarter, based on the Ministry of Manpower’s (MOM) Labour Market...

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The increase was attributed to a rise of non-resident employment by 25,500. Nearly half of that was from construction, due to the demand to fulfill the backlog of housing projects caused by the pandemic.Some other sectors, such as wholesale trade or retail, have yet to return to pre-pandemic levels, said an MOM spokesperson.As for the contraction in resident employment, MOM said: “Robust increases in sectors such as community, social and personal services and financial and insurance services were offset by contractions in food and beverage services and retail trade due to outflow from the cessation of seasonal hiring.”Ang Boon Heng, director of MOM’s manpower research and statistics department, said that there is often a lot of hiring for temporary positions in the second half of the year, to support the Formula 1 Grand Prix, year-end festivities and sometimes even Chinese New Year.This tends to “taper down” in the first half of the following year.MOM added that such activities are expected to boost resident employment growth in Q3 and Q4. But the increases will likely be lower than the corresponding year-ago period, in line with cooling labour demand as well as a slower resident labour force growth.While he cautioned against complacency, Minister for Manpower Tan See Leng said: “You may sort of see this kind of lumpy seasonality, so I wouldn’t act on one quarter’s sort of drop.”DBS economist Chua Han Teng agreed that the contraction is “not concerning”, given its cause and the expected rebound in H2.For employment overall, given the challenging external environment, the outlook remains weak for outward-oriented sectors such as manufacturing as well as finance and insurance, MOM said.Ongoing tourism recovery is expected to support air transport and accommodation, as well as consumer-facing sectors such as retail trade and food and beverage services.Job vacancies also declined in Q2, sliding for the fifth straight quarter to 87,900 in June, from March 2022’s peak of 126,000.Ang said that while some may see it as a sign that “times are bad”, it could also be construed as demand coming down to “a more reasonable level”. It marks an easing in labour market tightness compared to when vacancies peaked and businesses faced manpower shortages.Vacancies also remain elevated from the pre-Covid average of 50,000 to 60,000, and should continue to moderate, he added.MOM said: “Growth sectors, including professional services, information and communications and financial services, made up more than one-fifth of the overall available job vacancies in June 2023.”With the fall, the ratio of job vacancies to unemployed persons dipped significantly for the second consecutive quarter to 1.94 – slipping below 2 for the first time since June 2021, where it was 1.6, said an MOM spokesperson.Hiring demand could also continue to soften, MOM noted – in June 2023, 58.2 per cent of companies polled plan to hire in the next three months, down from 64.8 per cent in March.Retrenchments fell in Q2 to 3,200 from 3,820 in Q1 after rising for three quarters, mainly due to reorganisation or restructuring (69.9 per cent) – which Ang noted has been common post-pandemic.The retrenchments were largely driven by the information and communications sector. At 69.2 per cent, the likelihood of residents retrenched from the sector finding new jobs remained high compared to other industries.Dr Tan added that reorganisation and restructuring often strengthens companies: “So that churn may not necessarily be bad, and net-net there’s still a shortage in that field.”MOM said that unemployment is expected to inch up modestly over the coming months amid weaker economic growth. In July, unemployment rates registered a slight uptick, at 2 per cent overall, 2.8 per cent for residents and 2.9 per cent for citizens. All three groups marked a 0.1 percentage point increase from May and June.But Chua said: “While Singapore’s economic growth is below-trend in 2023, the economy remains in expansion, and therefore, we think that any uptick in the unemployment rate is likely to be modest and contained.”Resident long-term unemployment rate remained low in June 2023 at 0.5 per cent and remained within the 0.5 per cent to 0.7 per cent range since August last year. It is expected to stay in this range.The long-term rate was slightly higher for mature workers. It increased to 0.8 per cent from 0.7 per cent in the preceding quarter for those aged 50 to 59, and remained stable at 0.7 per cent for those 60 and above.While it will continue to monitor these figures, they were traditionally much higher at 1 per cent and 0.8 per cent respectively pre-Covid, the MOM spokesperson said.Dr Tan on Thursday spoke to media during a visit to Dyna-Mac Engineering Services, which fabricates modules for the offshore oil and gas industry. He highlighted business transformation support programmes, including Workforce Singapore’s Career Conversion Programme for the marine and offshore energy sector, which Dyna-Mac has taken up.Launched in April 2023, the programme provides funding support to defray costs of reskilling employees and redesigning roles, to prepare them for the green transition as well as digitalisation and automation. Over 25 companies are onboard the programme, which is expected to benefit up to 400 employees.","kind":null,"is_publish_news":true,"is_publish_highlight":true,"is_publish_live":null,"is_publish_wemedia":null,"editions":null,"column":"","sentiment":"","news_tag":"","news_rank":0,"symbols":[],"gpt_button":1},"commentList":[],"isCommentEnd":true,"newsSizeData":{"likeSize":2,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"favoriteSize":0,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false},"APP":{"userAgent":"Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)","isDev":false,"isTTM":true,"deviceId":"web-server-community-laohu8-v3","version":"4.23.1","shortVersion":"4.23.1","platform":"web","vendor":"web","appName":"ttm","isIOS":false,"isAndroid":false,"isTiger":false,"isTHS":false,"isWeiXin":false,"isWeiXinMini":false,"isWeiBo":false,"isQQ":false,"isBaiduSwan":false,"isBaiduBox":false,"isDingTalk":false,"isToutiao":false,"isOnePlus":false,"isHuaWei":false,"isXiaomi":false,"isXiaomiWebView":false,"isOppo":false,"isVivo":false,"isSamsung":false,"isMobile":false},"href":"/m/news/1136009710"}