Group items tagged

The walkout has highlighted a difficult balancing act as Singapore’s falling birth rate forces it to rely on foreign labour to keep its decades-long economic miracle, envied round the world, on track. The influx of migrant workers from China and Bangladesh has caused friction as “heartlander” Singaporeans have complained about crowded public transport and competition for housing.

According to the latest edition of JobTrends—a quarterly series monitoring labor markets in a sample of emerging economies—employment growth maintained its gradual ascent in the first quarter of 2012. In the countries surveyed, continued economic growth helped employment reach a growth rate of 2.9 percent in that period.

Keeping with the overall trend, labor markets in Europe and Central Asia continued then their steady recovery, with striking declines in unemployment in Lithuania, Moldova, Romania, and the Russian Federation. Similarly, selected labor markets in Latin America also improved, amid a slowdown in economic growth. In the four East Asian countries included in the report, employment and wage growth improved, with China’s employment growth jumping to 9.9 percent.

At the same time, however, the median unemployment rate increased slightly in the sample from 5.8 to 6.2 percent, signaling that some economies may have then started to have difficulties maintaining a high pace of job creation, as they were continuing to feel the effects of the financial crisis in advanced economies.

Direct elections at enterprise trade unions will become increasingly commonplace in Shenzhen, the deputy head of the city’s trade union federation, Wang Tongxin, predicted following the highly publicised election of a new trade union chairman at the Omron electronics factory in Shenzhen this weekend.

Although relatively few enterprise trade unions have direct elections at the moment, Wang said, the union federation would heavily promote direct elections so that in the future such events “will not be news, nor pioneering, but rather just normal work practice.” The union is already targeting some 163 enterprises in the city, each employing upwards of 1,000 workers, for direct elections over the coming year, he told the Southern Metropolis Daily.

The election came about as a direct result of a strike by several hundred workers at the plant two months earlier on 29 March demanding better pay and benefits as well as a more representative and effective trade union at the plant.