Dear President, Sec-Gen, Central Committee Members, Colleagues and Guests,
Introduction and Thanks
First of all I would like to thank you for attending this very happy event for the MWC Team and helping us celebrate a milestone in our existence. We moved into our original Headquarters just down the road in 2009.
We’ve come a long way since then, reaching out to more than 400,000 migrant workers in the last 4 years on our messages of Fair Employment Practices and Proper Dispute Resolution Channels, as well as Social Integration and Harmonious Co-existence at the Work Place and the Live Place. What I’m even more proud off is that in the same amount of time, we have rendered direct one-to-one assistance to almost 9,000 migrant workers. This assistance spans the entire gamut of migrant worker needs. In short, if they have questions or fears, we have answered and assured them; if they are hungry, we have fed them; if they are homeless, we have housed them; and most importantly of all, we have made representations to the authorities on their grievances all the time seeking no less than the best and most favourable outcome possible for the worker. Through our outreach and our assistance efforts, MWC’s goal was and will continue to be to “work ourselves out of a job”. Success to us would be when we are no longer needed – where the migrant workforce is well-integrated and there is no more employment malpractices towards migrant workers. It is when employers and workers are enlightened, appreciate and value one another.
In the last 2 years especially, the MWC has grown from strength-to-strength. While others may view our experiences as having to deal with crises, the team has taken the challenges in their stride, rising successfully to each new challenge and never forgetting the golden rule of safeguarding the interests of the workers. We have not only seen an increase in cases that we handle but also an increase in recognition from employers, NGO partners, and also government agencies. The work we now do has required us to ramp up our resources, such as in recruiting more staff. We have also grown out of our beloved old premises in Rangoon Road and we now need a larger, better equipped and more future-ready home.
MWC Serangoon is twice the size of our previous office and will be able to support all that we hope to achieve moving forward, without having to move out of the Little India area. We are grateful to our Sisters and Brothers at the Singapore Teachers’ Union, especially GS and Vice-President Brother Edwin Lye for reaching the decision to lease the premises out to us.
Key Guiding Principles
For 2014, we will continue to proactively pursue our outreach and assistance activities as we always have. For today, I want to spend a little time on how we view the migrant worker employment environment and the improvements we will be strongly advocating for in the coming year. MWC continues to be guided by our key principles, which are to Maximise the Economic Contribution of Migrant Workers; Minimise the Social Cost that comes with having a large migrant workforce; and to Champion Fair Treatment for All.
Every Migrant Worker a Better Worker
We all recognise the need to complement our workforce with migrant workers. Rather than recruiting by headcount, we feel employers should recruit migrant workers for the skills and value that they can bring to the job. Therefore, MWC will continue to advocate aggressively for the formalisation of a skills requirement as a pre-requisite to work permit renewal. While we understand the government’s preference for upgrading and up-skilling to be employer-initiated and driven, our insight tells us that businesses will always concentrate first on maximising business to stay afloat. Majority of employers view up-skilling not as an investment in the future but as a cost in the short-term. In line with this thinking, our migrant worker landscape prioritises getting the quickest and most benefit possible from migrant workers in the shape and form that they come to us. From the employers’ viewpoint, it may well be a situation where “if there is no exam, no one will study”. Therefore, we hope to persuade the authorities to regulate for a cleaner and clearer renewal requirement for workers to continue to stay and work in Singapore. The benefits of this requirement are manifold. A continued reliance on low or unskilled migrant labour will hamper our drive towards productivity and our hope to create better jobs for all. Leveling up the entire workforce must certainly include the almost 1 million work permit holders in Singapore who make up a substantial amount of our workforce.
We want to advocate for quality over quantity when recruiting migrant workers so that every worker can be a better worker; employers value every migrant worker they bring in; and for other more obvious reasons. Higher skilled workers are easier to integrate, more socially adaptable and readier to complement our drive towards productivity. Most importantly, their skills command a premium which makes them valuable to the employer. This means that they have more choice and are less likely to come in burdened by debt.
Stemming Abuse by Overseas Intermediaries
When assisting migrant workers, we often see this debt burden. This is a symptom of the abuses which stem from errant intermediaries. While it is possible to clean up the act of local agents, many of the abuses we see are committed in the countries of origin where there are different levels of regulation and equally disparate levels of enforcement. As a result, in some places, errant agents operate with relative freedom. They charge huge fees to source work in Singapore for any able-bodied person as long as they can pay the price. The introduction of a skills requirement for renewal will jeopardise the livelihoods of these errant recruitment agents and depress the amount of fees they can charge.
MWC will also advocate strongly for a standard Singaporean employment contract for all migrant workers as an added protection. This is already done for Foreign Domestic Workers (FDW) and generally discourages the operation and malpractices of errant overseas FDW agents. In order to discourage the same behavior, we believe this feature should be extended to other migrant workers. We will continue to press for it to be incorporated into the regulations.
A Better Dispute Resolution System for Those Who Fall Through the Cracks
Despite all that MWC can proactively do to anticipate or prevent abuses, there will still be some that will fall through the cracks and suffer grievances at the hands of errant agents or employers. MWC will continue to speak up for these aggrieved workers by advocating for improvements to the government’s dispute resolution processes. This will range from continuing our calls for stricter enforcement to deter those who would risk gaming the system, to pressing for swifter settlements to salary or injury claims. For those cases where a prompt resolution is not possible, we will renew our offer to work with the authorities to place affected workers in temporary employment so they can earn for a living for themselves. In our experience, being able to work for his own upkeep even while awaiting the resolution to a claim goes a long way to preserve a migrant worker’s self-esteem as well as his psychological and emotional well-being.
In short, we will call for greater cooperation from the government authorities and a greater role for us to play in representing aggrieved migrant workers. We want to take this relationship to the next level. We hope to move beyond simply bringing abuses to the attention of the authorities and then being the partner for food and lodging while the case is dealt with by government officers, even if in the beginning, this might mean merely being able to stand by the worker and offering moral support.
On the issue of increasing our manpower in a flexible and scalable manner, we have received many offers from concerned members of public to volunteer with the MWC to carry out our work over the last 4 years. I'm happy to inform everyone that starting in February this year, interested individuals will be able to call into our helpline to volunteer their time and service. We will work out a suitable schedule for them to help out. We can first involve them in our events and outreach so that they understand the environment and the audience. When they have gained more experience, we hope to be able to deploy them alongside our specialists in direct assistance work.
New Logo, New Image
Lastly, we have left no stone unturned in the last 4 years to convince workers that we empathise with them, and are serious about doing everything we can to assist those who experience abuses. We have been successful to a large extent and in these more pragmatic, practical times, our logo has served us well. As we go on to take on the challenges of a changing migrant worker environment however, it is a good time for us to revisit our image as the pragmatic, practical advocate, and assume a more empathetic, reassuring and approachable outlook. Therefore, we have decided to coincide today’s Centre Opening with the launch of the new MWC logo carried publicly for the first time, on the front facade of MWC Serangoon. The new logo sports a cleaner, more professional look but at the same time, incorporates an invisible heart, which lies at the centre of what we do. It marks the coming of age for the MWC, and while maintaining a softer touch in how we treat distressed migrant workers, continues to display strength and fortitude in standing by them until we solve their problems.
Once again, if I do not get the chance to thank you personally, I’d like to say we sincerely appreciate your taking time off your personal schedules to join us this morning. Your support means a lot to the MWC team.
Thank you.
