Associate Professor Jamus Lim, a Member of Parliament (MP) for the Workers’ Party representing Sengkang GRC, has brought renewed focus to the economic struggles facing middle-aged professionals in Singapore.
In a Facebook post published early on Monday (23 Jun), Assoc Prof Lim described the outcomes of his latest outreach efforts in the Gardens cluster of Sengkang.
Now serving his second parliamentary term after being re-elected in the 2025 General Election, Assoc Prof Lim stated that his team had modified their approach to house visits. Instead of rotating between scattered blocks, they are now visiting consecutive blocks within a single precinct to better understand local concerns.
During these engagements, Assoc Prof Lim updated residents on forthcoming repair and restoration works scheduled to begin in late 2024. These works form part of routine efforts to rejuvenate public housing estates.
Beyond municipal matters, Assoc Prof Lim recounted a conversation that highlighted the employment challenges faced by Singapore’s middle-aged PMETs (Professionals, Managers, Executives, and Technicians). He spoke with a couple who had both recently been retrenched.
Assoc Prof Lim described their situation as a “triple whammy” of disadvantages: exclusion from jobseeker support schemes due to income ceilings, rising job market competition, and age-related obstacles to re-employment.
His observations are supported by data from the Ministry of Manpower’s Labour Market Advance Release – First Quarter 2025, published on 28 April. The report noted that employment growth in Singapore has slowed amid global economic uncertainty. Total employment grew by 2,300 in Q1 2025, down significantly from 7,700 in the previous quarter.
More notably, resident employment contracted in outward-oriented sectors such as Professional Services, Manufacturing, and Information & Communications. These sectors traditionally employ large numbers of PMETs.
At the same time, the resident unemployment rate edged up from 2.8% in December 2024 to 2.9% in Q1 2025. While the incidence of retrenchments declined slightly to 1.3 per 1,000 employees, business reorganisation and restructuring remained the primary reasons.
Under current regulations, jobseeker support is only available to individuals earning below S$5,000 per month. As Assoc Prof Lim explained, this threshold excludes many middle-income workers, forcing them to rely on personal savings or a spouse’s income when retrenched.
This became more difficult for the couple he met when both partners lost their jobs in close succession, leaving them financially strained.
The couple also voiced concerns about competition from foreign workers willing to accept lower wages due to favourable exchange rates and cost-of-living differences in their home countries. Assoc Prof Lim noted this intensified the challenge of job-seeking, particularly for those in their 50s.
Although age discrimination in hiring is legally prohibited in Singapore, Assoc Prof Lim said employers often cite secondary reasons for not selecting older candidates, making such bias difficult to prove or address.
“There isn’t any perfect solution for helping our PMETs in a rapidly changing economic landscape,” Assoc Prof Lim acknowledged in his post.
He advocated for broader access to redundancy insurance across all income levels and for mandating retrenchment benefits for employees with long service records. Additionally, he proposed a structured “redundancy-retraining-reemployment” pathway to help workers transition into new roles—a policy the Workers’ Party has championed for over a decade and included in its party manifesto.
Assoc Prof Lim’s comments reflect ongoing national discussions about employment resilience, especially for mature workers. While government programmes such as SkillsFuture and Adapt and Grow offer retraining pathways, his remarks suggest that gaps remain for certain segments of the workforce.
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