Over 180,000 job seekers get placements last year: Riot
PUTRAJAYA: A total of 183,433 job seekers managed to get job placement in various economic sectors last year, said Human Resources Minister Datuk Seri Richard Riot.
Out of the total, he said 57,320 or 31% of the job seekers were graduates and 126,113 or 69% comprised of non graduates.
He said 57,366 job seekers were matched with jobs that were offered by employers within less than a month through various career programmes organised by JobsMalaysia.
"The domestic labour market also saw the hiring of foreign workers making up 13% out of the total workforce in the country, namely 1,732,944 foreign labourers and 183,000 expatriates.
"The priority to fill employment opportunities is always given to Malaysians first, several ongoing interventions have already been implemented by the government," he said in a statement today.
Riot said interventions implemented by the government, specifically to regulate the intake of foreign workers, for example, are related to the implementation of strict foreign workers' employment policies as well as to enforce existing law provisions that prohibited employers to terminate the services of local workers with the aim of hiring foreign workers.
"The law also does not permit any employer intending to reduce the workforce to terminate the services of local workers unless the foreign workers in the same job category are terminated first," he said.
He said according to the Department of Labour Report for January until December 2017, some 35,097 workers were retrenched, a decline of 6.2% from 37,699 workers in 2016.
Out of that total, the service of 31,159 workers or 89% were terminated via the normal layoffs while 3,938 workers or 11% were through the voluntary separation scheme (VSS).
The statistics also showed that the highest number of retrenchment occurred in the manufacturing sector involving 25,370 persons (72%) while the highest occupational category with the highest number of retrenched workers were operators and plant installers at 11,113 (32%), he said.
Riot said based on the Labour Force Survey Report released by the Statistics Department for 2017, over 90% of new job opportunities were created in the wholesale and retail trade sectors. — Bernama