By Fawwaz Baktee
NTUC U Care Centre (UCC) targets to reach out to 10,000 low-wage workers in the Malay-Muslim community this year through active engagement with Enhanced Mosque Clusters (EMC) and Mendaki SENSE.
This was announced by Minister for Communications and Minister-in-Charge of Muslim affairs Dr Yaacob Ibrahim at the UCC Iftar event held on 23 June 2015 at The Grassroots’ Club.
This comes after UCC found that more can be made aware of their employment rights and opportunities to earn better income through training.
According to UCC Director Zainal Sapari, less than 10 per cent of participants at employment seminars and roadshows organised by UCC are attended by workers from the Malay-Muslim community.
“We want to be able to benefit as many local low-wage workers across all sectors and communities. UCC is looking at enhancing its efforts to do more for these workers and is keen to make breakthroughs in un-ventured avenues. Working with EMCs and Mendaki SENSE to impact more workers in the Malay-Muslim community is one of our strategies,” said Mr Zainal.
Meeting Different Needs
Working with the EMCs to engage low-income Malay-Muslim families, including zakat recipients and low-income beneficiaries of the mosques’ programmes, UCC said that it will customise programmes and workshops to meet the clusters’ different needs.
These programmes will include seminars that are packaged with information on employment rights.
There have also been discussions to hold quarterly sessions where consultants are stationed onsite at the various mosques to provide workplace advisory services based on the needs of individual clusters.
UCC also hopes to further extend its outreach to low-income families by equipping befrienders of the Mosque Befrienders Scheme and youth volunteers with knowledge of UCC’s services and basic employments rights for them to share when visiting low-income families.
Groundwork for UCC’s outreach efforts in the mosque clusters started in November last year where it reached out to 2,000 befrienders and zakat beneficiaries in the southwest and northwest EMCs.
Working With Mendaki SENSE
UCC will also tap on Mendaki SENSE’s signature events such as roadshows and trade exhibitions that focus on educating low-income workers and enable them to explore opportunities to upskill and earn a higher income.
Addressing some 300 low-wage workers and their families at the event, Dr Yaacob said: “I hope more of you here will make full use of these opportunities that UCC offers. With UCC’s help you can upgrade yourselves, be more informed of your employment rights, and at the end of the day, lead better lives with better income.”
One guest present at the Iftar event was 48-year-old part-time cleaner Zainah Rasif, who said that she didn’t know much about her employment rights before she attended a three-month training course provided by NTUC.
“At the course, I learned that workers can voice out their concerns and if we have any problems such as pay matters, we can go to UCC for help,” said Ms Zainah in Malay.
Source: NTUC This Week
