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Tag: employment

  • Online hiring in Malaysia fell 8% in Q3

    Online hiring in Malaysia fell 8% in Q3

    Online hiring activity in Malaysia fell by 8% in the third quarter, falling behind the performance from one year ago by 14%, according to the third quarterly Monster Employment Index (MEI) report. It said online recruitment in the country could not sustain the strong performance of the previous quarter, continuing a negative trajectory.

    The report highlighted that Malaysia has still not recovered its economic position, despite a stronger performance in the previous quarter.

    This Southeast Asia Q3 Online Recruitment Trends Report by Monster.com examines the hiring trends and performance of online recruitment, and offers a comprehensive overview of major industries across Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines.

    It said top three job roles among occupations hiring freelancers online in Malaysia are sales & business development (16%), marketing & communications (8%), software, hardware, telcom (5%).

    Among occupations, hospitality and travel recorded the strongest quarterly growth with 2%, while engineering and real estate soared 13% in a quarterly comparison.

    The IT, telecom/internet service provider (ISP) and business process outsourcing (BPO)/IT enabled services (ITES) sector exhibited the strongest performance among industries throughout July, August and September in a year-on-year comparison, while the logistics and BFSI industries registered the weakest performance for the same period.

    While general online hiring has been slowing in Malaysia in the third quarter, the IT, telecom/ISP and BPO/ITES sector recorded a 5% growth in the three-month period.

    With Penang becoming an increasingly attractive hub for tech companies in Malaysia, the IT, telecom/ISP and BPO/ITES sector resumes the path that was set in the second quarter. In a year-on-year comparison, the sector even registered double-digit growth with 11%, 11% and 12% respectively – indicating a resilient industry despite political concerns.

    This edition of the quarterly MEI took a closer look at the freelance economy and its online hiring demand across industries in Southeast Asia. With job scopes continuing to shift due to technological innovations, it is up to human resources leaders to define the way freelancers, part-timers and full- time staff collaborate and share their workload.

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  • Swiggy to engage 2,000 women for food delivery

    Leading food ordering and delivery start-up Swiggy on Tuesday said it would engage about 2,000 women as delivery personnel by March 2019. “About 2,000 women will join our delivery team by March next year. Over the last few months, we have been working on training women for opportunities in this growing food delivery sector,” the city-based online food delivery platform said in a statement here.

    By deploying more women as delivery personnel across the country, the company said it aimed to create an inclusive workforce.

    The company engages around a lakh personnel daily to deliver food across 45 Indian cities it operates in.

    Currently, about 60 women are tied up with Swiggy across 10 cities, including Ahmedabad, Kochi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Nagpur and Pune, to deliver food.

    World over, the employment of women as delivery personnel has been meagre.

    “We are creating a women-friendly work environment with a dedicated helpline for any concern, as well as appointing more women in managerial roles,” the company said.

    Swiggy is identifying ‘safe zones’ for women delivery personnel to operate in and will allow them to complete their deliveries by 6 p.m., it added.

    “Since inception, we have seen the potential in investing in logistical prowess, which has helped us in having end-to-end control over the food delivery experience,” Sachin Kotangale, Vice President (Operations), Swiggy said in the statement.

    Set up in 2014, the food delivery platform claims to receive about 20 million orders a month across 45,000 restaurants in 45 cities, including New Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Kolkata, Gurugram and Pune.

    It raised US$ 210 million (around Rs 1,500 crore) from multiple investment firms, and has so far raised over US$ 460 million (around Rs 3,350 crore).

    The company, which has over 4,000 employees, reported an operating revenue of Rs 442-crore for the fiscal 2017-18.

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  • Vietnam’s Ha Long casino continues to lose staff on poor business performance

    Vietnam’s Ha Long casino continues to lose staff on poor business performance

    Ha Long’s only casino continues to lose employees due to a number of reasons, including its persistent losses. Hoang Gia Joint Stock Corporation (RIC) in Ha Long, Vietnam’s resort city, which runs the Casino Gaming Club, said the number of employees has fallen by 275 now compared to the beginning of the year.

    It has less than 1,200 employees remaining. Last year 514 had quit.

    The main reasons, the company admitted, are the casino’s poor business and competitors’ talent attraction policies.

    Revenues increased by 23 percent in the first nine months of this year to VND187 billion ($8 million), but it lost VND14 billion ($597,555).

    Another problem for the casino is the sluggish progress of transport infrastructure works in the region, such as Van Don airport and the Ha Noi – Ha Long Highway, which prevents more foreign tourists, mainly from China, Japan and South Korea, from coming here.

    The company targets revenue and profit after tax this year of $15.9 million and $1.5 million. Casino operations are expected to account for around 63 percent of the revenue with the rest generated by hotels and villas the company owns.

    The owner of the company is Khai Tiep International Investment Limited, registered in the Cayman Islands.

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  • Lotte pledges 50 trillion won investment

    Lotte pledges 50 trillion won investment

    Lotte Group announced Tuesday a major investment plan to spend 50 trillion won ($43.9 billion) and hire 70,000 workers over the next five years. “The plan comes in order to normalize management activities, obtain a competitive edge for future growth and contribute to vitalizing the local economy,” Lotte said in a statement.

    The announcement comes on the heels of similar plans announced by other conglomerates like LG, Shinsegae and Samsung. Lotte couldn’t join that wave because Chairman Shin Dong-bin was sentenced to 30 months in prison last February for bribing former President Park Geun-hye. On Oct. 5, the Seoul High Court replaced the prison sentence with four years of probation, and Shin returned to work three days later.

    Lotte announced an investment plan of 40 trillion won in 2016. But most of the investments couldn’t be executed after the group was badly affected by the deployment of a U.S. antimissile system in Korea in 2017 on a golf course formerly owned by the group and a Chinese boycott against Lotte that followed. Shin’s imprisonment earlier this year also got in the way.

    Execution of the 50-trillion-won plan will start next year. A 12 trillion won budget is planned for 2019, a record for the conglomerate.

    The two sectors that will receive the greatest attention are chemicals and retail. Some 40 percent of the investments will be in chemicals and 25 percent in retail. Lotte grew to its current size thanks to food and retail, but in recent years, the company has been active in developing the chemical business.

    For chemicals, investments will focus on expanding local and overseas manufacturing facilities. The group currently has factories in three locations in Korea, which Lotte said will be expanded.

    Investments in overseas facilities will also be made to expand the company’s businesses abroad. Lotte Chemical has a $4-billion project in Indonesia that was put on hold when Shin was jailed. A source at Lotte said, with Shin back in the saddle, resuming the project won’t take long.

    The main goal for investments in retail is improving the infrastructure for e-commerce. Lotte said in a statement it plans to establish logistics and computing infrastructure to offer a more convenient experience for shoppers online and off.

    Tech development and enhancing the level of digitalization is a long-term goal across the conglomerate’s affiliates. For example, Lotte wants to apply tech to its food business: Artificial intelligence technology is underway to be used for trend analysis and to suggest new products.

    Indonesia and Vietnam will be two foreign markets Lotte’s affiliates will focus on. The company once had a huge footprint in China, but Beijing unofficially retaliated against Lotte after the deployment of the antimissile system in Korea. The company added in the statement that it would continue discovering new markets.

    The goal for new jobs in 2019 is 13,000, which is 10 percent higher than what Lotte plans to hire this year. Many hires will be in the e-commerce sector.

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  • Korea’s Income gap widened again in 2nd quarter

    Korea’s Income gap widened again in 2nd quarter

    The income gap in Korea widened again in the second quarter, a serious blow to the so-called income-led growth policy of the Moon Jae-in government, which vowed to narrow the inequality in earnings between the rich and poor.

    According to data released by Statistics Korea on Thursday, earnings for households in the first quintile of income brackets, the bottom 20 percent of the population, retreated 7.6 percent in the second quarter compared to a year earlier.

    Households in the second and third quintile also saw their incomes fall by 2.1 and 0.1 percent – whereas the rich folk kept getting richer.

    The average income for people in the fourth quintile went up by 4.9 percent and for the fifth quintile by 10.3 percent.

    A similar trend was spotted from January to March this year, when people in the first and second quintile experienced 8.0 and 4.0 percent drops in their incomes while people in the fourth and fifth quintiles saw gains of 3.9 and 9.3 percent compared to the previous year.

    The total distribution ratio for disposable income – a barometer of earnings equality – was 5.23, which means the earnings of those in the fifth quintile were 5.23 times higher than those in the first quintile.

    That figure indicates that the Korean economy is facing the worst level of income inequality since 2008 when the ratio for the period of April to June came to 5.24.

    Officials from the Finance Ministry blamed the aging of Korea’s society and other long-term problems such as ongoing slumps in certain sectors like shipbuilding.

    “The Korean economy is suffering from a lack of domestic demand [for goods and services], a result of massive restructuring we have seen in the manufacturing sector since 2015,” said Park Sang-young, a director at Statistics Korea. “It seems like this situation is taking a toll on those in the first quintile of the income group.” Statistics Korea is run by the Finance Ministry.

    The statistics agency explained that the number of employed in households in the first quintile has shrunk from 0.83 per household last year to 0.68 per household this year, an 18 percent fall.

    For households in the fifth quintile, on the other hand, the number of workers rose from 1.99 per household last year to 2.09 this year, a five percent increase.

    But the data released on Thursday coupled with a jobs report from last week – which showed only 5,000 jobs being added to the economy in July – has deeply troubled some analysts.

    Some economists are blaming the Moon administration’s relentless push to raise the minimum wage for the worsening situation.

    For the Moon government, the minimum wage hike is a key pillar of its “income-led growth” policy.

    Its logic is that by pushing up the minimum wage, workers in the first and second quintiles would see their income go up, which was supposed to make workers wealthier, willing to spend more and meant to translate into greater hiring by businesses.

    But the effect has been much less hiring of workers than in the past, particularly in minimum wage jobs, and a measurable widening of the income gap.

    “The drastic hike in the minimum wage has little impact on those in the upper group of the income bracket,” said Yun Chang-hyun, a professor of business at the University of Seoul. “But for those in a more vulnerable position, it robs them of their jobs.”

    Despite such concerns by some analysts, the Korean government is adamant about its policies.

    Kim Dong-yeon, Korea’s finance minister and deputy prime minister for the economy, said on Thursday during a budget meeting at the National Assembly that the government will propose a budget plan next year that contains “the biggest budget allocated for jobs in history.”

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  • Samsung’s flexible working hours get more malleable

    Samsung’s flexible working hours get more malleable

    Samsung Electronics announced plans to revamp its flexible working hours on Tuesday in preparation for the 52-hour work week that will be legally enforced from July.

    The Korean electronics giant plans to allow employees to decide their own working hours on a daily basis, as long as they work for at least four hours a day. Employees need to work an average of 40 hours a week on a monthly basis. The new system will come into effect from July.

    Under the new arrangement, an employee can work 50 hours in a busy week and then 20 hours in a quieter week during the same month. As long as the hours worked in the rest of the month add up to average 40 hours a week, the employee is free to balance their work as they please.

    This offers more flexibility for workers than the company’s current system, which allows employees to begin work anytime between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. as long as they work at least four hours a day and 40 hours a week. Samsung started the current flextime program in 2012.

    The Moon Jae-in administration revised the labor law to reduce weekly working hours from 68 to 52, or 40 hours a week with up to 12 hours of paid overtime. Companies with 300 or more employees are subject to the new regulations from July.

    Samsung will also adopt a discretionary system for workers that struggle with tight schedules due to the nature of their work, such as developing new products and technology.

    Under the discretionary system, employees working on high-intensity projects will determine with their managers roughly how many hours a week the work should take. While the project is ongoing, workers will then have complete autonomy, with no checks or limits on how often or how much they’re working provided the task gets done, and will be paid for the number of hours agreed at the start of the project.

    “If an employer and employee agree on a 50-hour workweek for a certain period of time, the company gives a wage based on the contract regardless of whether the employee worked that much or not,” said a spokesperson from the electronics giant. “This kind of system is only applicable for certain tasks that require worker autonomy, like developing new products.”

    The new flextime arrangements will apply to researchers and office workers at Samsung Electronics.

    For manufacturing workers, Samsung plans to adopt a different flextime option that allows for periods when demand is especially high for specific products.

    Factory workers will be able to coordinate their working hours so they meet an average 40-hour workweek over a three-month basis. This way a team of assembly line workers can work longer hours for the first 10 weeks, for instance, and then reduce their workload in the remaining two weeks.

    Samsung affiliates are likely to announce similar schemes in coming weeks.

  • Korea’s minimum wage divides Moon’s top economists

    Korea’s minimum wage divides Moon’s top economists

    Two of the Moon Jae-in administration’s top economic officials are at odds over the minimum wage increase’s impact on hiring, raising concerns among experts about the government’s future policy direction.

    “I think the minimum wage increase must have had an impact on hiring and salary,” said Kim Dong-yeon, the country’s minister of strategy and finance, in a committee meeting at the National Assembly on Wednesday. This was an about-face from his stance a month ago, when he said it was difficult to attribute stagnant new hiring to the minimum wage hike.

    “[The past few months] has not been enough time for research institutes to find any meaningful evidence on the impact of the minimum wage increase, but based on my experience and intuition, [I think] it has had an impact,” Kim said.

    Kim earlier argued that it was the ongoing restructuring of Korea’s automotive and shipbuilding sectors that slowed down employment growth.

    Kim’s remark on Wednesday came after a report released on the same day that showed a decrease in the number of new jobs created.

    According to data from Statistics Korea, the number of people who got new jobs in the wholesale, retail, accommodations and food category of the service sector, which is highly sensitive to changes in the minimum wage, fell by 88,000 compared to a year before, which is a drop of about 1.5 percent. New hires in the category have been on the decline since December last year, a month before the minimum wage increase went into effect. Total number of jobs lost in the category since then is about 447,000.

    “Kim is an applied economics expert and is well aware of the relations between the rise in minimum wage and the fall in employment, which is why he finally acknowledged its impact,” said Pyo Hak-gil, an economics professor at Seoul National University.

    But the Blue House’s top economic official doesn’t agree with the finance minister.

    “There was no fall in employment due to the minimum wage increase,” said economist Jang Ha-sung, President Moon’s chief of staff for policy, in a high-level meeting in Seoul on Tuesday. “There has been some controversy about the fall in employment, but based on the analysis by several research institutes using the statistics from March, there was no notable fall in hiring, excluding some food and beverage businesses.”

    Jang added that policy support for companies that could suffer from the new minimum wage was received well, and requests for government funding far exceeded initial projections.

    The differences in opinion between Kim and Jang, the country’s top two economic policymakers, have market watchers worried about the government’s future economic policy direction.

    “The perspectives and diagnosis of current economic conditions diverge within the government, which raises questions about its ability to come up with proper solutions,” said Yun Chang-hyun, a professor of economics at the University of Seoul.

    “The unemployment issue is not entirely the fault of the current administration, but it is true that some of its policies intended to expand jobs had the opposite effect,” said Nam Sung-il, professor of economics at Sogang University. “The government has to approach this issue with a more forward-looking perspective.”

  • 50,000 malaysians expected to be laid off in 2018, says report

    50,000 malaysians expected to be laid off in 2018, says report

    MORE than 50,000 employees are expected to be laid off this year as reported.

    The English daily quoted Malaysian Employers Federation executive director Shamsuddin Bardan as saying manufacturing would be the main sector affected, followed by the services (insurance, banking and retail) and construction sectors.

    He said among the challenges facing the job market were the levy imposed on employers for the hiring of foreign workers and the Employee Insurance Scheme.

    “The increase in maternity leave days, from 60 days to 90 days, as well as the possibility of paternity leave, will also be factors.”

    The report said automation would continue to be another factor for job losses as more companies turned to robotics and information technology.

    “Multinational corporations involved in labour-intensive industries are also leaving due to higher wage costs in Malaysia,” said Shamsuddin.

    “They are moving to more attractive and lower-labour-cost nations, where there are no high social costs.”

    He said Cambodia and Laos were among the countries where wages were below US$100 (RM402.59) per month, whereas in Malaysia, they were about US$250.

    Malaysian Trades Union Congress president Abdul Halim Mansor was quoted as saying that based on information from the Labour Department, between 30,000 and 50,000 people could be retrenched this year, involving those from the finance, construction and manufacturing sectors.

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  • Manager in China motivates staff by making them tear up their money

    Manager in China motivates staff by making them tear up their money

    A manager at a retail store in eastern China motivates her underperforming sales staff by forcing them to tear up their own 100-yuan bills.

    A video showing five young salespeople tearing up the notes at the command of their boss at a Gome electrical appliance store in Jinan, Shandong province drew condemnation over the weekend.

    The incident took place on the evening of March 22. The five employees were forced to tear up the cash because they did not meet their daily sales quotas of 100 deals.

    The local police department gave the manager a warning and fined her 1,000 yuan (US$688). The manager said that she had meant to teach her employees not to waste company resources.

    In the video, the manager shouts at the employees and insists that they tear up the cash if they want to keep their jobs, although it also shows staff members warning her that destroying money is illegal.

    The police department said that any deliberate destruction of yuan would result in a police warning and a fine of up to 10,000 yuan.

    The video caused widespread outrage among mainland social media users.

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  • Vietnam plans to send more skilled workers abroad to curb unemployment

    Vietnam plans to send more skilled workers abroad to curb unemployment

    Vietnam’s labor ministry is outlining a new plan to send more skilled workers abroad in the next few years as the number of unemployed Vietnamese has surpassed the million mark.

    According to Deputy Minister Doan Mau Nghiep, the plan will focus on sending engineers to South Korea and health workers to Japan and Germany and also exploring new markets like Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Israel.

    “The ministry wants to find solutions for well-trained workers, who have graduated from universities or colleges but can’t find jobs,” he said. “But we have to assess whether the quality of our labor force meet the requirements of recipient countries.”

    According to official data, Vietnam had around 1.1 million unemployed workers, 2.3 percent of the workforce. Around one third were college graduates.

    Experts have said that the quality of Vietnamese labor force is generally low compared to Asian peers such as South Korea, India and Malaysia.

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