Mr President, we congratulate the ILO Director-General for his excellent report on “Tackling the Global Jobs Crisis”, which details what the world needs to do collectively to get out of the global recession and ensure that the future global economy moves towards a fairer globalisation that is economically, socially and environmentally sustainable. We fully support ILO’s call for a Global Jobs Pact to be implemented in every country, focusing on employment and social protection. The ILO encourages the sharing of experiences, good practices and knowledge on measures and actions taken by government and social partners in responding to the crisis. I would like to take this opportunity to share some of the measures and actions that the Singapore tripartite partners have taken in response to this crisis.
The Singapore labour movement has set itself three targets during this difficult period. They are firstly to avoid record retrenchment; secondly to avoid record unemployment and thirdly to strive for more up when up. Let me elaborate.
Our highest retrenchment numbers was during the 1997/98 Asian Financial Crisis when some 29,000 workers lost their jobs. To avoid setting a new record for retrenchment, the tripartite partners in Singapore have issued a set of “Tripartite Guidelines on Managing Excess Manpower” in November 2008, advocating retrenchment only as the last resort. The clarion call is to “Cut Costs to Save Jobs” rather than to “Cut Jobs to Save Costs”. Unions will therefore work with employers to reduce non-wage components as much as possible. The Singapore government has created and fully funded a new training programme known as the “Skills Programme for Upgrading and Resilience (SPUR)” to encourage companies to send workers for training to equip them with new skills and enhance their employability. It has also implemented a new initiative known as the “Job Credits Scheme” with cash grants that effectively lowers the wage costs of an employer without lowering the take home pay of the worker.
Should direct wage cuts be inevitable for a company that is in dire straits, the tripartite partners have hammered out an understanding that management should lead by example by taking earlier and/or deeper wage cut than rank and file workers.
Despite doing all that I’ve just mentioned, there will be companies that will still have to let go workers as a last resort. The SNTUC has set up an “NTUC Employment and Employability Institute” to minimise structural unemployment. This Institute helps workers to re-skill, up-skill and find jobs as quickly as possible. So long as workers are willing to be trained, there will be no lack of help for them. This Institute has also actively canvassed the whole economy for job vacancies and provides a job matching service for those who are unemployed through job fairs that are run every week.
The third target of the SNTUC is to be more up when up. By this, I mean that we can expect that eventually the economy will recover. The pace at which we recover will depend on how well we have equipped our workers with new skills that will be inevitably be required as companies themselves upgrade to face a new business environment and new competition. We should not have to wait for the economy to recover and start training people for new jobs. On the contrary, training should take place in a downturn in preparation for recovery. When production capacity drops workers are naturally more available to attend training. This is precisely what programmes like “SPUR” does. It not only helps workers re-skill quickly so that they can find another job should they be retrenched, the programme also systematically up-skills other workers to prepare them to enter different industries or to take on more valued added jobs in the same industry. There is no better time than now to invest in workers’ capabilities for the future by facilitating industry-wide upgrading initiatives to improve service quality, productivity and pay.
For low income workers who may be very badly affected by wages cuts or jobs losses, more help will be made available to them. The government has enhanced its “Work Support Programme” whereby a worker will now receive assistance for up to 12 months from six months to help workers upgrade their skills and find a new job. The SNTUC, together with its affiliated unions and associations, social enterprises, working partners, individual private companies and organisations, have raised S$23 million to provide needy members and their families with financial assistance and to help increase their purchasing power. SNTUC currently has 12 social enterprises that provide many essential services to union members. They have all committed to continue to play an important role during this downturn by moderating the cost of living and stretching workers’ hard earned money. Not only have the 12 social enterprises committed to zero retrenchments during the downturn, some are in fact expanding their operations and hiring more workers, including fresh graduates, retrenched professionals and back-to-work women. We hope that more companies will emulate the actions of our social enterprises.
All these efforts would not have been possible without the strong support of our tripartite partners. The practice of tripartism in Singapore has seen us through many crisis and we believe that it will see us through this one as well. The crisis is far from over, and there will be much more than we can do to help our workers see through this downturn and emerge stronger. I look forward to learning from the experiences of others at this ILC. With this note, I wish all a fruitful conference.
Thank you.
