Women lift employment rates to 17-year high

EMPLOYMENT rates, boosted by more women in the workforce, are at a 17-year high, a report by the Manpower Ministry released yesterday showed.

Some 835,000 women are now in the market, compared to 818,100 a year ago, mainly due to the efforts by the Government and the unions to get more women back to work.

More women are also employed: Seven in 10 women aged between 25 and 54 are working, up from just over six in 10 a year ago.

The employment rate for those aged 55 to 64 crept up by 1 percentage point to 57.2 per cent. This, again, was due mainly to more older women finding jobs.

These gains pushed the employment rate for locals - Singaporeans and permanent residents - up by half a percentage point to 77 per cent. This is the highest since 1991, when data was first compiled.

In fact, the rosy picture of how the workforce was faring in the middle of this year is unlikely to continue next year, said human resource consultants, who expect the employment rate to drop.

This is because of the retrenchments taking place now and the cautious hiring outlook by companies, said Mr Paul Heng, managing director of NeXT Career Consulting, which specialises in outplacement services.

'From 20 to 30 retrenchments a week, companies across all sectors are now retrenching 80 to 120 a week,' he said.

Already, latest figures show that the resident unemployment rate is at 3.3 per cent, up from 3.1 per cent in the previous quarter.

Singapore's local labour force is now 1,928,300 strong. Of those employed, more than half are in professional, managerial, executive and technical jobs.

In contrast, less than one in five people, or around 17 per cent, work in low-wage full-time jobs.

The workforce is now also more educated compared to a decade ago. Almost two in five, or 38 per cent, have tertiary education - up from 25 per cent in 1998.

The report also said that the median monthly income for full-time workers rose by 11 per cent to $2,590 from a year ago.

But after taking into account inflation, which rose by 6.4 per cent in October, the rise in real incomes was just 4.6 per cent.

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