By Fawwaz Baktee
In line with the Labour Movement’s mission to care for its members, NTUC has helped uplift the lives of thousands of low-income union members through the NTUC-U Care Fund since its inception in 2009.
With the setting up of the NTUC U Care Centre (UCC) in 2013, the Labour Movement has also been helping low-wage workers in Singapore with workplace advisory to ensure that these workers are aware of their employment rights and the available avenues to help them upgrade their skills.
NTUC This Week asked NTUC Assistant Secretary-General (ASG) Zainal Sapari, who is also Director of the NTUC Care and Share Department and NTUC U Care Centre, to share his thoughts on the Labour Movement’s U Care efforts.
On the Appreciating U Initiative
“We feel that it is only when the public recognises the valuable contribution of our low-wage workers by ensuring Singapore is clean, green and safe, any effort to help push for them to get better wages would be easier.
When we started the Appreciating U campaign, our key approach was to create public awareness and to encourage a ground-up initiative. Rome wasn’t built in a single day and we need to sustain these efforts.
NTUC will continue to push for the public to show greater appreciation to our unsung heroes. The outcome that I would really like to see is everyone making an effort to get to know these workers at their workplace and when they have special company occasions, to involve them. We don’t need big events. It’s the individual gestures that we do every day, such as greeting and saying hello to them that would make them feel appreciated.
On U Care Assistance Programmes
“The assistance programmes are targeted at low-income union members and their families. The assistance that we render is based on the amount of funds that we raise every year.
We foresee that as NTUC recruits more union members, the demand for U Care assistance might increase. On the other hand, if the economy is doing well, we will have more workers earning better salaries, which in this case there is a possibility of there being fewer applications for assistance. Regardless, the assistance programmes are there to tell union members that we are a part of a family and we look out for each other.
We know that the main beneficiaries of U Care Fund are our union members and their families. Currently, NTUC is working with Singapore Labour Foundation and the government to see whether we can start assistance schemes that would benefit not only our union members but all low-wage workers in general in times of need.
Efforts of U Care Centre
“Moving forward, our engagement with low-wage workers need to be more targeted. We know that if we can increase the awareness of employment rights and statutory benefits, it would make them less vulnerable and less likely to be taken advantage of by unscrupulous employers.
What we did was that we decentralised our outreach and this has helped improved the attendance of our seminars as they are now more accessible.
However, we notice that we are still not reaching out to some groups of low-wage workers. So this year, we worked with the Enhanced Mosque Clusters to create better awareness among the Malay-Muslim low-wage workers on the availability of U Care assistance.
We have also used an indirect approach where we have gone down to tertiary institutions because we feel that tertiary students can be our ambassadors where they will be our eyes and ears on the ground to see whether there are workers that may need our assistance."
Source: NTUC This Week
