Unemployment hardly affected by subsidy plan

Despite relaxed qualifications for hiring workers, a government plan to subsidize small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to recruit the unemployed has proved unsuccessful thus far, as only one-tenth of the recruitment target was met as of yesterday.

Hoping to reduce the nation's unemployment rate by 0.3 of a percentage point, the government kicked off a recruitment program in mid-July, offering payments of NT$10,000 per month to SMEs that hire unemployed workers, for a total of 12 months of benefits for each worker hired.

The nation's jobless rate is currently around 5 percent.

The program was designed to create work for 25,000 jobless people, and was originally applicable for workers aged 30 to 65 who have registered with the Council of Labor Affairs.

As of last week, there were only 800 workers who were employed under the program, and there are more than 30,000 vacancies waiting to be filled.

To lure more unemployed to apply for jobs through this program, "we lowered the age of eligible jobless workers to 18 and began to simplify the application procedure on Aug. 25," said Chen Mao-shun (陳茂順), associate manager the Ministry of Economic Affairs' Small and Medium Enterprise Administration.

But one labor expert criticized the program.

"The government obviously used the wrong strategy to alleviate unemployment," said Wu Chung-chi (吳忠吉), a labor-economics professor at National Taiwan University. "The nation's jobless problem is not that the labor cost is relatively high ... it is that there is a very weak corporate demand for manpower."

"I think the reason that so few people can meet job requirements is that most registered job-seekers are only suitable for manual labor,while most employment vacancies now require workers who are bilingual or have computer skills," said Day Sheng-tung (戴勝通), chairman of the National Association of Small & Medium Enterprises (中小企業協會) at an association assembly last week.