On Thursday, the Cabinet said it was considering a plan to spend about NT$1.6 billion (US$53 million) to create nearly 20,000 short-term jobs starting this month through the first half of next year. While the plan’s objective is to help the unemployed get back to work, it also highlights the dim prospects for employment in the face of an economic downturn.
Under the job-creation plan, the Cabinet proposes providing about 10,250 unemployed people with temporary jobs and job training programs for a period of up to six months. The government also plans to offer 8,000 victims of Typhoon Morakot short-term work for up to two months.
Launching short-term job programs has become the administration’s standard response to a bad economy: The government created 99,000 short-term jobs last year after providing 102,000 short-term jobs at government organizations and agencies in 2009.
The government should be praised for placing job creation at the top of its economic agenda, especially after the number of workers forced to go on leave without pay surged in recent weeks. The latest data from the Council of Labor Affairs show that the number of workers taking involuntary furloughs has almost doubled over the past two weeks to 5,513 last week — and the real number of workers on unpaid leave may be much higher than official statistics indicate.
However, the government’s job-creation scheme will have a limited impact on the labor market considering the number of openings and the plan’s short-term duration. While the latest figures from the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) show that the unemployment rate dropped to 4.28 percent in September from 4.45 percent in August, the rate is still higher than the levels seen before the 2008-2009 global financial crisis.
What’s more, the official unemployment rate does not include the long-term unemployed — people who have been unemployed for more than a year and who have given up looking for jobs — the ranks of which swelled to 150,000 in September, up 4,000 from the previous month, according to DGBAS figures. If this figure were included, the broad unemployment rate would have been 5.55 percent in September.
Regardless of whether the proposed job-creation scheme is a move to buy votes ahead of January’s presidential and legislative elections, as some have alleged, the stalling economic recovery is likely to push more people into long-term unemployment, reflecting structural problems in the nation’s job market, in which an increasing number of young, highly educated workers in high-tech industries are losing their jobs.
Another concern relating to the health of domestic employment is the continuing decline in wages in the industrial and services sectors, which is a consequence of the rapid rise in atypical employment, such as contract, temporary and dispatch workers, in recent years. While the expansion of atypical employment has helped companies adjust their workforce to cope with economic changes, its rapid increase has aggravated the vicious cycle of poverty among Taiwanese workers.
Minister of Economic Affairs Shih Yen-shiang (施顏祥) said on Thursday that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) accounted for about 98 percent of companies in the country and employed about 78 percent of the nation’s workforce. In other words, SMEs are the key to increasing national employment, while the government’s job-creation scheme is not.
The question is: Has the government done enough to help SMEs survive and avert bankruptcy in a bleak economic environment? Has it worked to facilitate funding and access to capital for SMEs, or has it only focused on rescuing big companies in the DRAM and LCD sectors? The government has to do more than just offer short-term job opportunities.
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