Structural Unemployment in Singapore
However, once you reach 45 and above, finding a job is a challenge. Older Singaporeans have struggled with this problem for many years. Recently the MoM came out with a set of guidelines on the re-employment of older workers[Link]. These set of guidelines will lead to legislative changes in 2012. So 3 years from now we will discover these guidelines to be inadequate and ineffective. Why?
Our structural unemployment problem is caused by our liberal foreign worker policy which brought hundreds of thouands of young workers from India, China, Phillipines etc. Our workforce demographics has been distorted by this high influx. With a large pool of young workers available why would employers try to retain or hire older Singaporean workers? Remember in the past we never had the structural unemployment problem because during the boomtime, employers will have a hard time find workers and they are 'forced' to hire older workers and give them a chance.
(Too busy to write a Chinese version today, maybe later.)
Sooner or later we're going to face this, I am just somehow closer to it than most of my readers.
So, is locking up the country to block younger foreign workers a solution to deal with this? I don't think so. Younger workers could replace domestic workers to cause "structural unemployment", but they could also displace certain kinds of domestic workers and enable the latter to engage more productive professions (from the domestic perspective, of course).
No, it doesn't mean I am supportive to the "liberal foreign worker policy", and I understand that the displacement effect is just theoretical; more often the domestic workers being displaced didn't opt for jobs with better GDP, they were forced to either go abroad, stay at home or school, or simply become unemployed.
In Taiwan, an island country lacking natural resources and markets of economic scale, we're facing the similar situation to Singapore, and we're also facing an aging population structure. Eventually the problem will emerge, and then it (and we, and yourself) would be your problem too, young fellows.
