Singapore’s labor scarcity issues are easing as unemployment continues to fall close to pre-pandemic ranges, mentioned Minister of Manpower Tan See Leng.
“For local unemployment, we are actually in a fairly good state. The unemployment has dropped. I think we’re close to pre-Covid levels,” he advised CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Thursday.
“We are seeing the long-term unemployment, which is defined as anyone who’s unemployed for more than six months, has dropped to about 0.8%. Pre-pandemic levels [were] about 0.7%. So we’re actually quite close to what it was before Covid,” Tan added.
Foreign workforce
Singapore’s complete employment continued to broaden by 42,000 (excluding migrant home employees) within the first quarter of 2022, in accordance to official knowledge. About 85% of that improve got here from non-residents, as border restrictions have been progressively lifted and employers backfilled vacancies for jobs which can be extra reliant on migrant employees.
“With the significant relaxation of border restrictions, we expect the non-resident workforce to continue to recover, catching up with the strong resident employment growth over the past two years. This will provide some relief to the current labor market tightness,” the manpower ministry mentioned within the launch of the primary quarter figures.
“At the same time, the deterioration of the external economic environment, due in part to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, has weakened the demand outlook for some of our outward-oriented sectors,” it added.
Construction picks up
The minister mentioned that as border restrictions proceed to be relaxed, extra overseas employees are returning to Singapore, which might ease the labor crunch in some sectors, particularly building.
In May, the CEO of actual property firm PropertyGuru Hari Krishnan highlighted that the development sector was largely shut for round two years due to a scarcity of manpower, although the trade began to get well in 2021. Supply chain bottlenecks additionally affected constructing supplies, he mentioned.
“[With] the easing of the borders, we have seen a huge uptake in terms of the number of foreign workers returning back into Singapore. Our construction manufacturing process has somewhat recovered to more than 90% of pre-Covid levels,” mentioned Tan.
As a consequence, building exercise “has gone up significantly,” he added.
“The level of foreign workers [has] reached more than 90%. I think we are looking at probably about 95% of pre-pandemic levels. So many of the projects have all started and many contractors are also catching up for lost time.”