Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers yesterday accused the government of ramping up public hiring and heavily subsidizing temporary work positions to boost employment figures.
Figures released on Thursday show that the nation’s unemployment rate for last month was 5.16 percent — a slight rise of 0.02 percent from May, its lowest point since January last year.
The small increase was primarily because of recent graduates entering the workforce, a report released by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said.
It reported that hiring was up due to a rebound in Taiwan’s economic environment, which along with the government’s employment initiatives, increased the number employed to 10,483,000 people, up 0.23 percent since May.
The DPP caucus yesterday accused the government of “beautifying” its figures through massive public spending.
It said based on its calculations, most newly created jobs were either in the public sector through government hiring, internships or through subsidies for temporary positions.
Without these initiatives, which could have cost the government up to NT$39 billion (US$1,216 billion), Taiwan’s “real” unemployment rate would have reached well over 7 percent, DPP lawmakers said.
Statistics provided by the DPP caucus also show that between 2008 and last month, employment numbers in the private sector only increased 1.3 percent from 6,940,000 to 7,030,000.
Meanwhile, jobs in the public sector swelled a staggering 10.3 percent from 958,000 to 1,057,000.
“The announcement that employment is going up is a sham. It was calculated by manipulating the numbers through public spending,” DPP Legislator Huang Wei-cher (黃偉哲) said.
The figures come at a sensitive time for the government, which has been coming under increasing pressure to reduce Taiwan’s unemployment rate, currently the highest amongst the other Asian tigers of Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea.
In late May, the Ministry of the Interior announced that newly graduating male university students would be able to immediately serve their military service without waiting the customary three to four months.
This initiative, along with other internship initiatives offered by the Council of Labor Affairs, will likely help Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) stay in his job after he announced that he would step down if the unemployment rate did not fall below 5 percent by the end of this year, Huang said.
The rate has been declining steadily since a record high of 6.13 percent in August last year.
While government officials have blamed the global economic recession as the main cause of the soaring unemployment figures — which were only 4.14 percent in 2008 — DPP Legislator Tsai Huang-lang (蔡煌瑯) said he believed another main reason was because of Taiwan’s economic reliance on China.
He pointed out that of the record-high NT$34.2 billion of export orders received in June, up to 50 percent of the orders would eventually be filled in China, boosting it’s employment rate instead of Taiwan’s.
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