|
By Kenny Chee
THE National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) has helped to stave off record retrenchment and unemployment, meeting two of the three targets it had set for itself, said its secretary-general, Mr Lim Swee Say.
But more can still be done to upgrade the skills of workers to prepare them for stiffer global competition, he said.
At the NTUC Ordinary Delegates' Conference on Tuesday, he said that the union had been worried that Singapore could face high unemployment and retrenchment during the recession.
So the Government, Singapore National Employers Federation and NTUC launched a $20.5 billion resilience package early this year, to help save jobs.
The package, which included the Jobs Credit scheme that subsidises wage bills, led to a big drop in retrenchments in unionised companies in the second quarter, compared to the first.
With fewer than 100 jobs cut every week from early July to end August, NTUC believes it will meet its first target of preventing retrenchments from breaching the record 29,000 jobs lost in 1998's Asian financial crisis.
Mr Lim said it is likely that NTUC would meet its second target of preventing high unemployment, because of retraining programmes and a scheme to subsidise workers' training cost.
The second quarter's unemployment rate was 3.3 per cent, lower than the record 4.8 per cent after the 2003 Sars crisis.
But NTUC was less certain of meeting its third target of upgrading the country's workforce to take advantage of an upturn.
Mr Lim was worried about waning interest among companies for training their staff as the economy recovered.
He urged workers to be more productive and flexible, or risk losing jobs to other countries. Singapore Management University senior economics lecturer Peter Kriz said that firms need to learn how to survive in a more competitive world.
'This alone should force them to hire and maintain highly skilled staff. Firms cannot expect to recapture the full returns of training in an extremely mobile world,' he said.
For more my paper stories click here.
| 
