Regional layoffs expected to rise due to crisis

Regional layoffs expected to rise due to crisis

SINGAPORE (Agencies): As many as 15,000 people in Singapore
may lose their jobs this year as a result of Southeast Asia's
economic crisis, a report said yesterday.

Layoffs are relatively rare in the prosperous city-state of
three million people, which has long enjoyed strong economic
growth and full employment.

The estimate, by market pundits, exceeds a prediction of about
12,000 just a week ago. A recent spate of retrenchments has
prompted employers and headhunters to suspect the recent
financial turmoil may take a higher toll, the Straits Times
newspaper said.

"I haven't seen this in Asia in the last five years -- it
reminds me of New York in the 1970's," the paper quoted Michael
Sullivan of Boyden Financial, a branch of Boyden Executive
Search, as saying.

U.S. electronics giant Seagate Technology International said
yesterday it would retrench 1,800 employees or up to 12 percent
of its workforce in Singapore as part of a global plan to cut
costs.

Some 1,400 of the Seagate employees to be laid off were
production staff while the remainder were in other job
categories, said a spokeswoman for Seagate, the second largest
private sector employer in Singapore after Singapore Airlines
Ltd.

Disk-drive giant Seagate is a victim of the worst slowdown in
the industry in years, as keen competition and capacity
overplanning resulted in excess inventories and plunging prices
of disk drives, analysts said.

The California-based company had warned last week that it had
made a "substantial" operating loss for the December quarter. It
had said in October that it was reviewing all its worldwide
operations.

Philippines

Separately, Philippine Senator Ernesto Herrera said yesterday
that more than 7,600 workers were retrenched in Manila in the
first two weeks of the year as firms slowed down production to
cope with the financial crisis.

Herrera, citing a report from the Labor Department, said about
6,200 jobs were cut while another 1,400 people were temporarily
laid off.

Another 2,000 have been asked to reduce their working hours,
said Herrera, a prominent labor leader.

"The retrenchments are widespread and involve establishments
of all types and sizes -- from small, medium to large firms," he
said in a statement.

There are about six million Filipinos working in Manila where
most of the industrial and financial companies operate.

Local companies are being hobbled by rising interest rates and
slowing consumer demand following the sharp depreciation of the
peso which has fallen more than 40 percent against the dollar
since its effective devaluation last July.

Thailand

Thailand, meanwhile, said yesterday that it had deported more
than 11,000 illegal Myanmar workers since the government decided
late last year to replace unskilled foreign laborers with Thais.

Labor Minister Trairong Suwankhiri vowed in December to send
home more than one million Myanmar workers operating illegally in
Thailand because of the country's economic crisis.

"Hundreds of Myanmar workers have returned home every day,
either by deportation or voluntary return after the minister's
announcement," said an immigration official based in western
Maesot town along the Thai-Myanmar border.

In the past two months, 11,607 illegal Myanmar workers had
been rounded up and deported. Another 300, fearing action against
them, are returning daily of their own accord, he said.