Banging on tables to demand what they wanted. Walking out of meetings when there was no consensus between union and management.
That was the industrial environment a 24-year-old Soh Swan Fong found himself in when he became a branch official for Hitachi Zosen Robin Dockyard under the now-defunct Pioneer Industries Employees Union (PIEU) in 1974.
Of course, collaborative tripartism was in its infancy then but gaining traction, and old union habits die hard. Swan Fong was a unionist cut from cloth weaved during trying times.
As a young union leader, Swan Fong had to fight on two fronts – one was on the management front, the other, the worker front.
“In the 1970s, especially in the shipyard, a lot of the union members were gangsters. Real gangsters. To get what they wanted, they would try to bully union leaders into doing things. They would threaten us if we didn’t do what they wanted. To be a union leader then, you had to be equally tough,” recalled Swan Fong.
The dockyard where Soh Swan Fong used to work in his youth.
Leading with a no-nonsense approach, Swan Fong became the chairman of his branch just one year after becoming a branch official.
“The first year when we set up the branch was a difficult one. We had to set up the branch welfare, we had to raise funds by begging for money, getting sponsors. All at the same time while dealing with issues with management, dealing with gangsterism and all,” he recalled.
Soh Swan Fong addresses 700 of his union members as Branch Chairman of Hitachi Zosen Robin Dockyard, 1975.
Swan Fong eventually became the first general secretary (GS) of the Chemical Industries Employees' Union (CIEU) in 1981, which was one of the nine industrial unions created after the restructuring of PIEU and the Singapore Industrial Labour Organisation.
In his time as GS, he had with him 3,500 union members in 57 branches.
“When they told me to helm the union, I was also quite reluctant. Mr Lim Boon Heng and someone else whom I can’t remember talked to me. I told them, ‘I can set up this union, but I don’t want to be GS.’ They asked me if I could serve for one term, but I ended up serving for one and a half terms,” he said.
He continued to be part of CIEU by serving as an industrial relations officer for several branches after stepping down as GS.
Soh Swan Fong stands in the rain, holding up the Singapore flag, as the Late-Lee Kuan Yew's funeral cortege drives past the NTUC Centre. Photo: NTUC This Week, 2015.
In his four decades with the Labour Movement, Swan Fong has served under seven different secretaries-general.
“I grew up in NTUC. I’ve seen changes to how we do things, changes to our relationship with management. I’ve seen retrenchments, how people had to transform to reskill themselves. I’ve seen the good work unions can do in making Singapore a great nation,” he said.
Later in his years with the Labour Movement, he became a principal specialist in NTUC’s facilities support department. Now 69, Swan Fong has retired from the Labour Movement, but he said his heart will always be with the unions.
“I want to see my fellow brothers and sisters in the Labour Movement progress. I want them to progress in their knowledge and skills, their desire to help workers, the desire to do good. There will be challenges, and there must be hard work. And we all can make NTUC and Singapore go to greater heights,” he said.
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