Mr Wilson Tan, Group Chief Executive Officer of Singapore Post Limited, Bro John De Payva, President NTUC,
Bro Lim Swee Say, Secretary General, NTUC,
Bro Roger Tan, President UTES,
Bro Logarajah, General Secretary UTES,
UTES Exco members,
NTUC CC members,
Union Leaders,
Management representatives and friends,
Good morning,
First let me wish everyone a Happy National Day. This is the 43rd year of our independence and we have much to celebrate. We live in a peaceful country and although our economic growth is expected to be slower, job creation continues to be healthy. Many Singaporeans are understandably concerned over the high inflation, but we are also thankful that there are many programmes to help Singaporeans cope, including those provided by the labour movement and the recently announced 50% more growth dividends and higher utilities rebate by the PM. For the first time in 48 years, we have won a silver medal for table tennis and everyone is rejoicing including people like me who has no idea at all what ping pong is all about. This is the Singapore spirit that we want to nurture, where we celebrate our achievements together, support each other and spur each other on to do even better.
Last year, the NTUC embarked on various key initiatives with the primary objective of creating an inclusive membership. A core element of these initiatives is to reach out to all segments of our population. We identified Back to Work Women as a core group that we need to reach out to for obvious reasons. The employment rate of women is low compared to that of our males and certainly much lower when compared to the employment rate of women in the developed countries. We realized then that we needed a much bigger push if we wanted to improve the employment rate of women. Last year, the Tripartite Committee on Enhancing Employment Choices for Women was set up to push this agenda. We took one step further in NTUC when we decided to embark on the Back to Work Programme. This programme focuses specifically on attracting housewives back to work. For 2008, we set ourselves a target of assisting 2000 women and I am happy to say that to date, we have been able to place 1250 women in various jobs.
Many of these women were housewives and were returning to the workforce after many years of caring for the family. Those we spoke to were very happy with the concerted help that they were getting to get back to work. They are not just statistics or numbers in our database or on the payroll of a company. Many of these women are now looking for work because they need the extra money to supplement their family income as the children are growing up and expenses have gone up. Some need to save as they do not have enough for their retirement while others wanted to do something more productive with their lives after they have discharged their responsibilities. It seems clear to us that while the economic arguments are useful, what is an even more compelling reason for us to help these women under our Back to Work Programme is because they have genuine needs and we want to help them fulfill those needs. Many had to make adjustments in their expectations and be prepared to go for training or skills upgrading and most were up to the challenge.
Our work under the Back to Work Programme would not have been possible without the support of our partners WDA and e2i. Through WDA we received funding under the FlexiWorks Fund which allows employers to tap up to $100,000 each to initiate part-time or other flexible work options so as to improve their chances of placing the women. To date, about 50 companies have tapped into this fund and have committed to place 2,500 women in jobs.
In this regard, I am indeed very pleased to have SingPost as one of our partners. In 1996, SingPost started their Neighbourhood Postman scheme or should I say Postwomen as the scheme is predominantly female since 83% of the 440 postmen are women. They also have various other part-time and flexi work schemes for women. What is attractive to me about SingPost is this. While most companies try to fit the women into their jobs, SingPost did the opposite. They modified and restructured their work to fit the women. Hence, if the women cannot come to the SingPost premises to work, SingPost brought the work to them. This is indeed a practical and novel idea born out of necessity. SingPost needed workers to deliver their mail and what better way than to leverage on the housewives who are living in the neighbourhood itself. We will later have a chance to interact with some of these Back to Work Women first hand. But SingPost’s example shows that if companies are prepared to think out of the box it is possible for them to create numerous opportunities for our Back to Work Women to achieve win-win outcomes.
SingPost’s efforts are also fully aligned with the second objective of our Back to Work Programme which is to encourage more companies to adopt flexible work practices and work life harmony initiatives. This is also something which the Prime Minister touched upon in his National Day Rally speech. He had called upon companies to do more to promote work life balance. Many women that I spoke to applauded the Marriage and Procreation Package as far sighted and generous. But a number also voiced the concern that having children is a life long commitment and therefore while financial incentives are useful these alone are not sufficient. Some ask what will happen after the maternity leave and child care leave are exhausted. Others are worried over the impact of these leave on their employment opportunities and career prospects. They feel that for a more sustainable and long term solution, greater support from employers in the form of flexible work options and work life harmony initiatives are necessary. Indeed, this is one key success factor of the Swedish and Danish models where there are a high percentage of women at work but they also enjoy a far higher birth rate than us. We hope that more companies will cultivate a conducive and supportive work environment and nurture harmonious work life balance among their staff. We are still gathering more feedback on the M & P package from our affiliates through various dialogue sessions and may be able to share the responses at an appropriate time.
We have worked closely with SingPost and UTES to specially arrange this Learning Journey so that they can share with us their experience in getting women back to work as well as in helping them to balance work and family. We hope that you will find this Learning Journey useful and will inspire you to initiate some efforts with your own companies. I wish to thank both the management and UTES for your support.
On this note, let me once again wish everyone a very Happy National Day.
