Government gearing up to fight unemployment with programs

Responding to a recent instruction by President Ma Ying-jeou to come up with a large-scale program to combat unemployment to cope with the possible advent of an extensive jobless wave by the end of the year, the government is considering expanding the ongoing “short-term employment enhancement program” and the “workplace experience program” for fresh school graduates.

The Executive Yuan (Cabinet) already launched a “short-term employment enhancement program” on Nov. 1, aimed to create 46,000 job vacancies by year end and 56,000 by the end of next June.

The “immediate employment program” also kicked off on Nov. 1, providing NT$10,000 of subsidy to enterprises for every new employee they hire.

Jennifer Ju-hsiuan, minister of the Council of Labor Affairs, said yesterday that her council will relax the qualifications on applicants for receiving subsidy under the program to encourage enterprises to hire employees already laid off by other firms.

As of yesterday, as many as 3,145 enterprises have applied for hiring 8,000 new employees in accordance with the subsidy program, and a total of 1,716 people have found jobs via the assistance of the program.

In addition, the government has been executing a long-term “workplace experience program,” encouraging enterprises to hire fresh school graduates for half a year of probation with the provision of NT$8,000 to 10,000 monthly subsidy per person during the period. There is a quota of 3,500 vacancies for the subsidy this year and over 1,000 graduates have benefited from the program so far this year.

Moreover, the “medium- and long-term employment enhancement program, 2009-2012” envisions the creation of 48,000 job openings annually, totaling 200,000 during the four-year period. Under the program, the government will invest NT$6.6 billion annually over the next four years to create an average of 48,000 jobs per year through vocational training, wage subsidy and short-term employment. The project is expected to bring down the unemployment rate by 0.3 percentage points in four years time.

To smoothly carry out the programs, the Cabinet is planning to appropriate NT$80 billion in budgets to support the program. This, coupled with the NT$420 billion in budgets for the economic stimulus program to be enforced in 2008, will add up to NT$500 billion, which will be up for screening and ratification by the Legislative Yuan early next year.

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