Dec 15, 2008
Q3 jobless rate at 2.2%
By Jeremy Au Yong
Singapore's economy fell into its first recession in six years as the global financial crisis reduced demand for Singapore's exports and factory output. -- BT FILE PHOTO
MORE than 35 people lost their jobs every day from July to September this year, a large jump from 21 a day in the three months before that.
The latest figures from the ministry show that 3,178 people here either got laid off or had their contracts ended prematurely in that period.
This is a 70 per cent spike compared to the 1,884 in the second quarter and marks the highest number of job losses since the last quarter of 2006.
Still, experts say the numbers represent just the tip of the retrenchment iceberg. Much worse news will likely come next year, and when fourth quarter results of this year are tallied.
The July to September figures, they say, do not fully capture the full impact of the fallout that started after investment bank Lehmann Brothers failed on Sept 15.
Already, every economic indicator listed in the ministry's report bore bad news.
As of September, the resident unemployment rate - which does not factor in foreigners - stood at 3.3 per cent. This is a slight increase over the 3.1 per cent in June.
Productivity also shrank, total employment growth slowed, the number of job vacancies dipped and recruitment rates fell.
One bright spark was the finding that service sectors firms as a whole are still likely to hire in the fourth quarter to deal with year-end festive season activities.
The results for Q4 should be worse. Previously, the retrenchment mainly came from the banks and financial institutions. For the last month, it was the manufacturing companies such as Philips and Sony that were hogging the headlines for most of the retrenchment exercises and I expect there will be more companies retrenching people.
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