Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) Minister Jennifer Wang (王如玄) yesterday denied that the number of job openings is being inflated in government statistics.
At the legislature’s Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committee meeting yesterday, lawmakers grilled Wang on a number of issues ranging from job openings promised by the government to unemployment rate predictions after high school and college graduations at the end of the current academic year.
The Executive Yuan has promised to provide jobs for more than 50,000 people next month at four job fairs to be held in various parts of the country.
However critics have labeled the plan nothing but a numbers game because the majority of positions available at the job fairs were internships.
In response, Wang said that “internships count as jobs too,” adding that because the program was funded by the government, the internships were essentially the same as civil servant positions.
When lawmakers asked whether the economy would improve in the next several months, Wang cited the council’s statistics that the number of people applying for unemployment benefits was gradually falling, from 33,079 in January to 35,208 last month, and 23,972 this month.
However, she painted a gloomy picture when citing numbers from a recent Ministry of Education survey of soon-to-be college graduates.
Of the 287,000 students who will graduate this summer, more than 130,000 will enter the workforce.
Around 70,000 will pursue higher education, 63,000 will serve in the armed forces, 9,000 will enter internships and almost 6,000 will neither work nor receive training.
“Not all 300,000 graduates will enter the workforce,” Wang said.
The council said there would be 60,000 jobs openings in the graduation season.
However, counting the 130,000 graduates that will enter the workforce, the unemployment rate in July and August is expected to rise by 0.66 percent, bringing the forecasted unemployment rate to more than 6 percent.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲) told a press conference that the government had spent NT$150 billion (US$5 billion) on its employment expansion program to create 130,000 jobs.
But the project stipulated that 71 percent of the jobs would be short or medium-term jobs and only 30,000 would be long-term opportunities.
Kuan labeled the project ineffective, saying it would not help resolve the unemployment problem.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY RICH CHANG
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