By Lydia Lim, Senior Political Correspondent

THE push to retrain workers is a hard slog for all concerned.

It's grunt work that contains far less drama, and thus draws less attention than tales of Indian rojak food poisoning or the leadership tussle at leading women's group Aware.

But worker retraining and skills upgrading are on the Prime Minister's mind and for good reason.

Last week, PM Lee Hsien Loong was asked about recent optimistic forecasts that the worst might be over for the US economy, with the appearance of 'green shoots' thought to herald a new spring.

PM Lee replied that he hoped those predictions were right, but he was preparing the Singapore economy on the basis that recovery would still take some time.

'I'm not planning that the problem will soon be over and therefore we can just wait for it to pass.

'The problem will be with us for some time, we must work at it, we must make sure that we prepare our people so that they can be as employable as possible and can endure through this downturn,' he said.

If the recession ended sooner rather than later in a green shoot sprout, he added, it would be a bonus.

That seems a prudent stand to take since rumours of a recovery may be grossly exaggerated.

US economist Paul Krugman has called for caution and observed that during the Great Depression of the 1930s, there was 'a pause in the plunge about a year and a half in - roughly where we are now'.

History, he wrote, showed that in the face of a severe economic slump, premature optimism is one of the great policy dangers. It can cause governments to cut back on programmes that are still necessary to support employment and demand.

Persistence to stay the course on tough but necessary action is what is needed, he stressed.

The International Monetary Fund's (IMF) outlook for global growth is similarly cautious.

This week, it slashed - for the third time - its estimate for this year to a shrinkage of 1.3 per cent, down from growth of 0.5 per cent in January and a contraction of between 0.5 per cent and 1.0 per cent in March.

The IMF also cut its forecast for 2010 by more than a full percentage point, predicting sluggish growth of 1.9 per cent globally.

Mr Olivier Blanchard, the IMF's chief economist, warned that weak growth would stoke unemployment.

'As long as growth is below normal, unemployment will continue to increase. We thus expect unemployment to crest only towards the end of 2010, and to decrease after that,' he said.

Like the IMF, the Singapore Government has had to cut its growth forecast three times this year. The current projection is for a shrinkage of between 6 and 9 per cent this year.

Some of us may find it hard to square those grim numbers with what we see around us.

People are still dining out and shopping in large numbers. A friend expressed surprise that there was even a queue outside a branded goods store at Paragon recently.

When I asked a colleague in his 20s how his friends are coping, he replied: 'I think they are waiting for things to get worse, so they can enter the property market and buy at a good price.'

It seems that a good number of Singaporeans remain comfortably insulated from the fallout of the current recession, deep though it is.

They have the many good years of strong economic growth - when their wages rose steadily and their assets and savings swelled - to thank for their current happy state.

While their wages and bonuses have taken a hit this year, they can still well afford to consume, although perhaps not as conspicuously as before.

A second factor is that although trade and manufacturing output have fallen off a cliff, the full impact on employment may not have been felt - yet.

That could be due to the Government's Budget measures to save jobs.

The $4.5 billion Jobs Credit scheme provides government subsidies for wages for a one year period. It is designed to make the greatest difference to workers on wages of $2,500 or less a month.

Under the $650 million Skills Programme for Upgrading and Resilience (Spur), companies that enrol Singaporean and permanent resident workers in any of the 800 Spur courses will receive subsidies for course fees and absentee payroll.

In the four months since its launch last December, around 700 companies have signed up 43,000 workers for Spur courses.

But unless global demand comes roaring back, companies may find it tough to stave off job cuts indefinitely.

As it is, the unemployment rate has been creeping up and reached 2.5 per cent in December last year. That translates into 69,900 jobless citizens and permanent residents.

Manpower Minister Gan Kim Yong warned recently that the unemployment rate for the first quarter of this year will likely be higher than for the last three months of 2008. Redundancy figures for the first quarter are expected later this week.

For all these reasons, the hard but unglamorous work of retraining displaced workers and helping them stay employable, must continue.

At stake are the lives of workers like Mr Kannan G. Manoharan and their families.

After the 32-year-old lost his job as a cleaning supervisor last June, he attended various literacy, numeracy and customer relations courses.

With help from his Community Development Council career counsellor, he is now set to embark on a eight-month diploma course in tourism at the University of Nevada - a very exciting prospect for a man who dropped out of school before completing Secondary 1.

Here, too, is a green shoot worth celebrating.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.