Mr Othman Haron Eusofe asked how the Government is helping the older workers who have been laid off.

The Workforce Development Agency (WDA) administers training programmes, grants and other assistance measures, especially for older workers. But the older workers themselves have to be prepared to undergo training to upgrade and equip themselves with new skills, and take on jobs which can be quite different from their previous jobs.

We have the People for Jobs Traineeship Programme (PJTP) which continues to be popular for placing older workers. Every month, it places about 500 to 800 older workers and there is a subvention, part of their pay, up to half, up to quite a high limit, for up to six months. Since the scheme started in June 2001, it has placed more than 16,000 workers. Under the PJTP, the Government pays up to 50% of the wages of an older worker who takes a job in a different field for six months. Last year, 44% of the older workers stayed on with their employers, even after the salary support from Government ended. And now the proportion has gone up to 57%. So I think that we are making some headway.

Other unemployed low-income Singaporeans can also make use of the Work Assistance Programme to help them get back to work as quickly as possible. For FY 2003, the scheme helped about 2,500 unemployed Singaporeans.

A global economy means more intense competition for investments and for jobs. Even as the output of our manufacturing sector grows, I do not expect the number of manufacturing jobs to go up. Increasingly, the growth will be through higher output per worker, not through more workers. Over the years, manufacturing has held its share of GDP to one-quarter, but the share of employment has been going down for over a decade. But this is happening in almost every economy in the developed world, and the only countries where there are big increases in manufacturing employment are in China and Russia. So, I think if we can keep our manufacturing jobs here by upgrading the industry, by bringing in new investments and replacing the jobs which leave, we are doing well.

Dr Maliki had asked where our new jobs are going to come from. So I have a Chart (Chart 2) to show Members. This is a Chart of the jobs which have been created, net jobs, over the last 10 years. And you can see that we created more than half a million jobs over the last 10 years, but manufacturing generated hardly any net jobs, in fact, from beginning to end, almost flat. Construction a few, particularly during the boom. Services generated 480,000 new jobs, and I think services is where the new jobs are going to come from and that will remain the main engine of job creation in future.