A new trend seems to have develop among the many emails we received from job seekers - they are aged below the traditional 40 years old with some even coming in their twenties. Our government has successfully kept this vulnerable young group off the unemployment statistics for many years as the public sector seems to always only hire the young and dangerous graduates fresh out of our universities. They are usually offered 2-year contract and shipped off to some public service sectors so that they are gainfully hired and hope that during this period they have garner enough experience to look around in the private sector once their contract is up. Jobless fresh graduates are a troublesome group as they are ambitious, impatient and rash. Many uprisings in the past are created by students who flirted with unemployment and lost opportunities till they all band together and create a revolution. The infamous Tianmen Square and Arab Spring uprisings were mostly the works of university students out to change the world. Its also economically unwise to have a big group of young graduates staying jobless for a prolonged period as the economy loses out from their productivity and contribution. But in our country when new economic foreigners come in the tens of thousands every year in a massive immigration drive, we may now see many of our young graduates going into prolonged unemployment causing all kinds of social problems. The government wont be able to absorb all the fresh graduates every year and this group totalled close to 20, 000 excluding those who graduate from overseas universities. If you are 40s and jobless, the government wont bat an eye as at that age there is enough wisdom and rationale in you to back off from any subversive activities. You also should have chalked up enough resources and experience to fend for yourselves. Those in their twenties tend to feel very lost snd disillusioned when they are out of work for less than three months. God knows what will happen to them if they remain jobless for more than a year. Will they spark off an unprecedented uprising here? We have posted stories of the new Generation Y jobless graduates on our site recently and among them is a 29-year-old finance graduate from highly-regarded SMU. He resigned from a position two years ago and has being out of job for two years. Many comments reflected shock and amazement that a SMU finance graduate can stay jobless for so long. They are considered the elite and banks chase after them even before they have graduate. So what happened here? We also just learned yesterday of a 35-year-old business admin graduate mum of two young kids who lost her job last year due to retrenchment and the family has been surviving on the salary of her security-guard husband. She only has $10 left in her bank account before her husbands salary credit this coming Friday. She survived on short term work contract of a few months each and yearn for a permanent job. She also mentioned attending interviews conducted by FTs and wondered if there is bias when the interviewer is not a local Singaporean. Nrvertheless, there was an overwhelming outpouring of support and assistance when her story broke out yesterday and I was busy throughout the day answering email after email - all wanting to provide some form of relief for the young mum. Some offered money whereas others provide leads to employment. Yet the pertinent question to ask is how could a young graduate of 35 years of age totter on short-termed work contract in low-unemployment Singapore whereas our foreigner friends work away in permanent comfort? Something must be wrong here and we may have now witness the rise of a dangerous new jobless group - from the Generation Y twenties.
Posted on: Wed, 04 Dec 2013 02:14:57 +0000