With 1 January 2012 just round the corner, most unions, companies and workers are geared up for the soon-to-be rolled out Re-employment Act. In that light, United Workers of Electronic and Electrical Industries (UWEEI) held a dialogue on re-employment issues with its branch officials and the management of National University Hospital (NUH).
This dialogue session was held after the ‘re-employment champions’ - branch officials elected by UWEEI to advocate and promote re-employment in their branches actively - attended a learning tour on age-friendly practices in the hospital on 29 September 2011.
The branch officials raised a spread of issues that related to the Act and these were discussed with the panellists at the dialogue which consisted of NTUC Deputy Secretary-General and UWEEI Executive Secretary Heng Chee How, NTUC Vice-President and UWEEI General Secretary Cyrille Tan, Healthcare Services Employees’ Union (HSEU) President K Thanaletchimi and NUH’s Director of Human Resources Clara Wee.
Issues such as the re-employment policies for Professional, Managers, Executives and Technical people (PMETs) and the nuances of the one-off Employment Assistance Payment (EAP) were discussed at large.
Ms Wee also shared that NUH will explore all ways to keep efficient, mature workers in
employment as long as they can. She said: “As far as we are concerned, with minor illness we have no right to ask the worker to exit employment…If we can switch the worker to a less-labour intensive job scope, then we will. When any of our workers are certified to be terminally-ill, we will give them time to rest during the pro-longed illness and we will welcome them back to the workforce after they recover.”
NUH is one of 23 model companies on the highest level of the Labour Movement’s four tiered re-employment framework as it is proactively seeking out new initiatives to ensure that its re-employment efforts are sustainable and scalable. Unions like UWEEI are reaching out to more companies to elevate them to this level to benefit both the employees and employers.
The Keys To Getting It Right These were some key messages that were delivered by DSG Heng to the branch officials in the process of the fruitful exchange. A Law For All “The re-employment legislation does not distinguish whether you are a PMET or a rank-and-fi le worker. It applies across the board to all persons who are employed. There is a provision of exemption of certain category of workers, subject to application to the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) and that will be evaluated case by case and very stringently. For 99.9 per cent of workers, the law applies across the board.” EAP Should Only Be A Last Resort “What we want to emphasis is that the Employment Assistance Payment is not for companies to wash their hands off workers. It is a last resort that should come by when nothing else works…When we put a dollar-sign somewhere, our human instinct will zoom in. The employer will say - why so much? The worker will say - why so little? I would like to remind everybody that that is not the main purpose of re-employment. The main purpose of doing re-employment is not to get a payment so that you don’t get re-employed. The concept is to explore ways of job design and formulating HR practices to make re-employment work.” Starting Early “A company should ask - when a person joins the company at 30 to 35 years of age and if he stays till 65, how do I develop his potential to make best use of his capability and plan his career ahead to help with re-employment? Some companies decide to take the high jump and start looking at re-employment only when an employer is reaching his sixties… The purpose of the Act is to make re-employment work out well for both the company and the employee, and re-employment and the whole planning session should be looked at a longer term.” Getting As Many On Board “Some of the criteria of the law is that the employee must have satisfactory performance and health. The idea behind the law is not to say that the 62 year-old person must be perfectly illness-free in order to be re-employed but basically have satisfactory health…There is no one standard level of fitness. We want as many to be re-employed as possible with satisfactory work…It is also a personal responsibility to take care of ourselves. The more usable we are, the more valuable we will be.” |
