Model ID: 317c5a11-75d5-46cf-b2c3-8c62c8118682
Sitecore Context Id: 317c5a11-75d5-46cf-b2c3-8c62c8118682;
Tripartism and Helping Women Back to Work
Mr Speaker Sir, President Halimah Yacob’s opening speech charts the direction for the government, the people and the nation as a whole for an inclusive and caring society. We have a government that upholds the rule of law, a well-educated and skilled workforce that upholds meritocracy, a cohesive society cemented by multi-racial, multi-lingual and multi-religious belief and values. Over the last 50 over years, we have developed as a nation comparable to any First World Nation, but we should not sit on our laurels.
Tripartism and bipartism
Tripartism has been our national treasure that helps us through the economic cycles; uphold industry peace and harmony for employers and justice and fairness for workers.
Tripartism is one of Singapore’s most sustainable advantages. Unions in other countries tell us that in their circumstances, it is not so easy to replicate or emulate Singapore’s successful formula. In 1996, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, our founding father had said “Singapore has enjoyed harmonious Industrial Relations for almost 3 decades because of the successful tripartite co-operation among employers, Unions and Government. This has been a major achievement in our industrial relations – a complete turnaround from the bitter confrontational practices of trade unions in the 1950 and 1960s.”
We have to ensure that the younger generation and workforce understand the importance of tripartism, as well as bipartism relations at the company level too. I am very concern over the fact that many of our working population do not understand or perhaps appreciate the history behind our successful economic development and growth.
Over the last 5 years, I have been teaching tripartism and industrial relations to aspiring younger working cohorts doing their degree programme in human resource. I am indeed surprised and amazed that through the years, I have only come across a handful of working cohorts who understood the working mechanism under tripartism and the National Wages Council’s (NWC) recommendations. We are not talking about ordinary workers with minimal education, but graduates and those doing post graduate studies. If we place much importance to industry peace and justice, it is about time that the whole of the government, employers and working people understand and cherish this national treasure.
There have been several calls to have this as a main core curriculum in school, but beyond this, we need to do more at every level to ensure that this is entrenched into every generation of Singaporeans. Human Resource Professionals are the key to ensuring the sustainability of bipartite relationships at workplaces. Government officials and employer representatives are the keys to the sustainability of tripartism.
Strong tripartism and bipartism should also help Singaporeans move towards social equality. With good bipartism at the workplace and tripartism at national level, we are in a better position to execute and implement the Industry Transformation Maps (ITM) for the success of our current and future economy.
There must be tripartite and bipartite effort in each of the 23 sectors of the ITM. Skills future initiatives and lifelong learning can only sustain if employers partake in the responsibility of training their workers, employees embrace change as a constant, willing to learn, unlearn and relearn without having to chase after academic qualifications alone, government should also provide a conducive environment for all forms of learning to take place, be it online learning, bite-sized training, on the job training or structured training.
There must be regular engagement at bipartite levels and with workers to know what are the jobs at risk and what are the jobs of the future. We are seeing incoherent speed of transformation happening in each of the industries. This is of concern. What have we implemented so far? How does it translate to workers on the ground, and if it translates to meaningful outcomes of better skill, better jobs and better career with better wages. More needs to be done. As such, I urge the government to take a sector based approach in all current and future programmes. These include monitoring progress in areas such as productivity, skills development, adoption of tripartite standards, labour participation rates of women, older workers as well as percentage of vulnerable workers and adoption rate of NWC recommendations in each of these sectors. I understand that MOM has some of the indicators but to be holistic, we should not only track, but form tripartite task force in each of the sectors to drill down and improve the outcome in each of these aspects with clear deliverables.
Helping women back to work
Though we pride ourselves to be an envy of the world, but we are not quite there yet when it comes to women in the work force. In this chamber, many of my fellow MPs have spoken on the challenges that women are faced with during the first half of the parliament for this term. I wish to further reiterate what I had mentioned during the last budget speech on working women issues.
I am indeed heartened by the Minister for Manpower Ms Josephine Teo for initiating several initiatives. Ms Teo has been a strong advocate on flexible workplace arrangement; I applaud the success so far even though the adoption of Tripartite Standards on Flexible Work Arrangement has been gradual.
I urge the Ministry of Manpower to closely monitor the labour participation of women in the respective industries. The assumption is there are many women in the service sector than any other sectors. But we need to post-mortem those issues and strategise tripartite initiatives at sectorial level to further improve the overall labour participation rate across Singapore. In fact, in recent years, the Ministry of Health (MOH) has done pretty well in attracting non-practicing nurses and “stay-at-home” women back to nursing. MOH’s continuous engagement with inactive nurses does make a difference in persuading them to community nursing. Likewise, each sector despite its incoherent industry nature could also strive to develop strategies and programmes to help “stay-at-home” women back to work. There should be better opportunities for good job and fair wages offered by companies to encourage women to re-join the workforce.
I must thank Minister Josephine Teo and her Ministry for organising the Adapt and Grow appreciation lunch last Saturday. It was attended by employers, career coaches as well as clients or recipients of jobs and their families, each to share their journey. Several recipients of jobs shared their emotional stories of being unemployed and the joy of being gainfully employed. It is indeed heart-warming to hear some of these stories. In fact, these are inspirational anecdotal stories that we need to compile and share with more workers or potentials workers, so that they do not lose sight of resilience and the hope for a bright light at the end of the tunnel when one loses a job.
I was glad to see several women that came to share the stories, one of who was inclined to work because of employer’s support for flexible work arrangement. Share and tell more such stories. Perhaps go a step further to provide relevant grants or funding support only to employers that are supportive and have put in place policies or adopted tripartite standards on flexible work arrangement to be considered first in the name of positive discrimination.
Lastly, I again reiterate the call for working women to have a lactation room. A colleague of mine cynically commented that Singapore is very advanced in many ways and with law on Bicycle Parking and provision of parking space, but yet to have a provision for dedicated enclosure for lactating mothers at workplace or in shared office buildings. It can start with new buildings, but we have yet to see any progress in this area.
To be truly inclusive at all levels of the employment and economic front, we need both tripartism and bipartism that thrive at all levels. We need the political will to move things for the long term and greater good of all working people including women. I am confident this will happen expeditiously in the good hands of our Woman Minister for Manpower Ms Josephine Teo.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Mr Lim Swee Say, former Minister for Manpower for truly walking the talk of tripartism, bringing about incredible positive change for the working people and for job seekers. Through implementing various measures and innovative initiatives, it had resulted in a win-win outcome for many working people and employers.
With this, I support the motion.
Thank you.
