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Union’s Partnership with Hotels
The Food, Drinks & Allied Workers Union (FDAWU), together with NTUC’s e2i (Employment and Employability Institute) and NTUC LearningHub, signed Memoranda of Understanding with 18 hotels to form Company Training Committees (CTC) under the FDAWU-Hotel Future Of Work (FOW) Partnership Network today. These CTCs will comprise union and management representatives who will work together to redesign jobs and work processes and enhance the training and upskilling of workers of these hotels. These hotels have a combined staff strength of over 6000 workers.
This Partnership Network will plug each hotel CTC into a sector-level network, whereby each hotel is able to participate in sectoral research, redesign projects and gain access to dedicated research and resources. The latter includes those of the Hospitality ABC Network ecosystem that was created by the NTUC Hospitality and Consumer Business cluster, FDAWU and 20 other sector stakeholders in January 2018.
Partnership with the Institute for Adult Learning
The first project that the Partnership Network will embark on is to form a joint hotels' workgroup to redesign security and engineering jobs in the hotel sector. This is timely, in view of the lean manpower in the industry and the push for hotels to adopt smart hotel technology. The project will be guided by and supported by the Institute for Adult Learning (IAL).
Skiils Recognition Pathway Project
Using data points gathered from the project, the Partnership Network will concurrently launch a separate project to chart a skills recognition pathway for hospitality professionals in engineering, facilities and security teams, which is currently not covered in the Skills Framework for Hotel and Accommodation Services. The Partnership Network’s work will ensure that future and current workplace trends are captured and translated into clear and updated pathways that allow management to identify knowledge and skills gaps. The management can then work closely with training providers to develop targeted programmes that address these specific knowledge and skills needs of the workers.
Other upcoming projects
Beyond these projects, the Partnership Network will closely work with NTUC LearningHub to roll out a SkillsFuture Singapore-supported bespoke Workforce Redesign Programme that will equip participating hotel CTCs with the capabilities to do strategic workforce planning; and job analysis, design and redesign. This will allow hotels to develop a strategic and sustainable workforce capability-building roadmap that supports their pursuit of business goals.
Together with the IAL and NTUC LearningHub, the Partnership Network will also strengthen workplace learning so that time-stretched hotel workers can keep pace with new demands and ways of work. This will be enabled via a development programme to build line managers and supervisors’ competencies as well as the concurrent training and resourcing of the line managers and supervisors to facilitate learning at the workplace.
Efforts such as the above redesign project and other initiatives outlined, reinforces the push by FDAWU’s fellow Labour Movement partners and sector stakeholders such as e2i, Singapore Hotel Association, Singapore Tourism Board and Workforce Singapore, to strengthen human capital progressive practices, such as applying redesign approaches to jobs and reviewing career pathways, so that jobs in the hotel sector are updated and attractive to the Singaporean workforce. As the partnerships transform jobs in the sector, e2i will also support the hotels to carry out career coaching and job placement programmes to attract and reskill potential new entrants to join the hotelsector.
The training efforts outlined will build on the existing Hospitality ABC Network’s efforts to jumpstart upskilling via bite-sized learning programmes as well. FDAWU has signed CTCs with two other hotels previously – Ascott and Royal Plaza on Scotts. They will be part of this Partnership Network, making the total number of hotels on board, 20.
Mr Tan Hock Soon, General Secretary of the FDAWU said, “The Future of Work Partnership Network enables FDAWU and our 20 hotel CTC partners to benefit from potential of scale, shared resources and research. A sharing platform, the Partnership Network opens up new possibilities for hotels’ CTCs and workers. Initiatives such as the redesigning of jobs to use enabling technology, can potentially be multiplied across Partnership Network hotels quickly, affordably and more sustainably, as know-how and resources such as workplace learning tools, updated compensation practices and so on can be made accessible to more. With synergised efforts, we can look to re-energise hotels’ employer value proposition and use gains from the Partnership Network’s CTC initiatives to improve wage, welfare and work prospect outcomes for every hotel worker.”
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