More than 100,000 employers to receive $890 million (Asiaone 22 Sep)
More than 100,000 employers to receive $890 million
Tue, Sep 22, 2009
AsiaOne
More than 100,000 employers, with whom about 1.4 million local workers are employed, will receive $890 million from the third payment of Jobs Credit on September 30, 2009.
Eligible employers will receive a letter of notification from the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS) by Thursday, September 24. This letter will inform them of the amount of Jobs Credit they will receive for the third payment.
Employers do not need to sign-up, as eligible employers will automatically be granted the Jobs Credit. This includes those who did not qualify during the first two installments.
Related posts
Facing Joblessness With Confidence – Be Prepared

This article was reproduced here in Jan 09.
Many who visited this blog site I believe will have been retrenched or preparing for retrenchment. However, it is not the end of the world yet.
The unemployed need to prepare themselves well if they are retrenched. Those with severance package definitely have the upper hand to wait out the prolonged down turn. Those without will face the future with less confidence.
Nevertheless, staying prepared for retrenchment even if one is working now help.
Related posts
She quit job as secretary to be a cabby (Asiaone 18 Sep)
She quit job as secretary to be a cabby

For the sake of her three children, she switched jobs from being a secretary to a taxi driver.
Her husband complimented her career move by becoming a taxi driver himself and they even became partners at work.
Four years ago, Mdm Yu Xiu Yun, 37, resigned from her secretarial job to pursue a career in the male-dominated taxi driving industry.
At the job interview, she said she had grown tired of her former job and resigned to spend time at home taking care of her children who were still schooling.
Related posts
Job interview cues that say “hire me” (New York Times 21 Sep)
Sep 21, 2009
WORKING LIFE
Job interview cues that say ‘hire me’
No set rules but courtesy and common sense give applicants the edge
NEW YORK: It is always fun to hear hiring managers recall the most boneheaded mistakes they have seen job seekers make during an interview: showing up in flip-flops, say, or taking a cellphone call while meeting the company president.
But that kind of cluelessness is rare. More common are the subtle missteps or omissions that can cause one candidate to lose out to another. If one person is sending out the right signals and behaving in the right way through each step of the process, he or she has a much better chance of landing the job – even with an inferior resume.
Related posts
How working parents can find jobs in a Recession (Business Week 16 Sep)

How Working Parents Can Find Jobs In a Recession
Posted by: Lauren Young on September 16
Even if the recession is over, the outlook for job seekers remains bleak.
I asked Tory Johnson (pictured here), who is chief executive officer of Women For Hire and author of Fired to Hired, to offer her career advice in an unsettled economy.
Question: Unemployment figures show that more men are out of work than women. What are your thoughts on this trend and how it is impacting workers?
Related posts
Singapore-born porn actress killed in California (Sunday Times 20 Sep)
S’pore-born porn actress killed in California
31-year-old beaten and suffocated; boyfriend charged with torture, murder
By Jamie Ee Wen Wei

In one of her MySpace accounts, Miss Felicia Lee wrote in her profile: ‘Growing up, I lived in many different places. But I was born and raised in Singapore. My family and I moved around a lot!’ Her family reportedly moved to Los Angeles, California, when she was 13.
A Singapore-born porn actress has been found dead in her apartment in the small city of Monrovia in Southern California.
Related posts
What it takes for foreigners to integrate in Singapore (Sunday Times 20 Sep)
What it takes for foreigners to integrate in S’pore
By Radha Basu, Senior Correspondent
At an in-house course a couple of months ago, a colleague voiced her deep apprehension about being crowded out of her ‘own backyard’. At MRT stations and offices, parks and pubs, she bumped into people whose accents and attire advertised their foreignness. Almost overnight, ‘they’ had overrun her tiny nation, she said.
She rationalised that she knew the nation needed foreigners to sustain its economic growth. But her heart, alas, sang a different tune. She felt upset, isolated. A stranger in her own home. Her predicament was not unique.
Related posts
Email from a Singaporean PR (15 Sep)
I want to discuss the matter relating to foreign professional in Singapore.
It seemed that local university students tend to face tougher competition once they graduate especially during this present recession.
Some of the foreign students, if my memory is right, were given scholarship by the Spore govt. I was reading the Indonesian newspaper in Indonesia and there is this advertisement by one of the Spore universities encouraging Indonesian student to apply for the scholarship.
There has been a survey that most local students prefer to work in other countries rather than in Singapore.
Related posts
The jobs that ate a family (The Daily Telegraph 19 Sep)

Gradma Di, left, daughter India, 11, mum Melissa Blackley, daughter Holly, 8, and dad John Anderson at home / John Fotiadis
SYDNEY mother-of-two Melissa Blackley is so obsessed with work that she doesn’t know what her children eat for lunch and hasn’t cooked dinner in two years.
She maintains her relationship with her partner of 18 years John Anderson via email. And each day the couple run a “dutch auction” to decide which parent will take daughter India, 11, to violin lessons or go to eight-year-old Holly’s extra-curricular activities.
Related posts
A Romance Writer Jabs at Singapore’s Patriarchs (New York Times 19 Sep)

Catherine Lim at her home in Singapore.
By SETH MYDANS
Published: September 18, 2009
Singapore
IT is the dress, she said, that catches the eye, the long silk sheath with the slits in the sides that offers what she calls “a startling panorama of the entire landscape of the female form.”
The dress is called a cheongsam, and the woman wearing it is Catherine Lim, 67, arguably the most vivid personality in straitlaced Singapore and, when she is not writing witty romantic novels or telling ghost stories, one of the government’s most acute critics.
Related posts
Cut dependence on foreign labour (My paper 18 Sep)
IT MUST be tough for the authorities to figure out a suitable manpower-deployment system, especially with regard to the complex issue of local businesses hiring foreign workers to increase their profits.
Singapore citizens find it difficult to comprehend that foreigners can come to our country so easily with prospects of employment ahead of them, while they remain jobless during the current economic recession.
The reason for local workers shunning many service jobs, despite vacancies, boils down to pure economics.
Most service jobs pay close to $1,000 a month and, after Central Provident Fund deductions, a take-home pay of around $800 is left.
Related posts
Tips for Parents (Touching Lives)

Tips for Parents
Did you read the report of the 9-year-old who was killed in an accident on her way to school (The Straits Times,16 Sept 2009)? What added to the sadness was the father’s statement that “There are so many things I haven’t done with her yet.”
For most of us, there will be many things we haven’t done with our children yet. We live busy lives, with work and other demands crowding out the time and attention that we want to give to our families.
Related posts
Depression cuts cancer survival (BBC 14 Sep)
Depression ‘cuts cancer survival’

Cancer patients often struggle with depression
Depression can damage a cancer patient’s chances of survival, a review of research suggests.
The University of British Columbia team said the finding emphasised the need to screen cancer patients carefully for signs of psychological distress.
The study, a review of 26 separate studies including 9,417 patients, features in the journal Cancer.
It found death rates were up to 25% higher in patients showing symptoms of depression.
In patients actually diagnosed with major or minor depression, death rates were up to 39% higher.
Related posts
Counsellors find ways out of debt for families (ST 18 Sep)
Counsellors find way out of debt for families
HDB’s specially trained staff have helped 800 families so far
By Theresa Tan

Mr Rashid – with sons Ariff (left) and Zafir and wife Norhasimah in his in-laws’ home – was advised to downgrade to a smaller unit after he was retrenched and took a job with lower pay. — ST PHOTO: LIM SIN THAI
ABOUT 800 families who owed the Housing Board money have downgraded to smaller flats in the past year, after receiving debt-management advice from specially trained HDB staff.
Related posts
Face up to real jobless figures (My paper 17 Sep)
I REFER to media reports on the rise in the number of chronically unemployed.
For some time, reports have focused on a declining unemployment rate which has stabilised at a seasonally-adjusted 3.3 per cent for two straight quarters.
Singaporeans have been told to be flexible in job hunting, and that retraining would help in solving the structural-unemployment predicament here.
The repeated emphasis has been on the labour market but many international reports have confirmed that we have one of the best workforces in the commercial world.


