MANPOWER DEMAND IN BUSINESS SECTORS

MANPOWER DEMAND IN BUSINESS SECTORS: 10.

Mr Teo Siong Seng asked the Minister for Manpower (a) whether his

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Ministry has conducted surveys and forecasts to ascertain the manpower demand in the retail, hospitality, marine, logistics, telecommunications, healthcare and construction sectors which are critical to Singapore as a business hub; (b) whether there are sufficient Singaporeans to take up skilled and unskilled jobs in these sectors based on our current and projected manpower resources; and (c) whether his Ministry will relax foreign labour policies to enable local enterprises to recruit the much needed foreign workers who are prepared to work long and irregular hours.

The Minister for Manpower (Mr Gan Kim Yong): Mr Speaker, Sir, the Ministry of Manpower closely monitors the overall economic outlook and the employment landscape through regular surveys to identify manpower trends and job opportunities in the various sectors. For example, we regularly conduct the Labour Force Survey to monitor the labour market and to review and formulate policies on the workforce and related matters. We also engage companies to gain a better understanding of their business prospects and their needs. We meet up with the various chambers of commerce in a series of dialogues throughout the year, which provide a platform for the tripartite partners to discuss manpower issues and other concerns. In fact, we conducted a briefing for the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry – in which Mr Teo is President – in June this year on the Tripartite Guidelines for Managing Excess Manpower, the Skills Programme for Upgrading and Resilience and the changes to the Employment Act. In addition, MOM works closely with the economic agencies to assess the short-term and long-term manpower demand and skills required by the various industries. MOM will then work with our tripartite partners and relevant agencies to develop the skills in demand through pre-employment training (PET) for our

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students as well as through continuing education and training (CET) for our local workers.

We have been successful in getting more locals to take up the good jobs we created. Today, more than half of our local workers are in PMET jobs, compared to just 41% 10 years ago. However, during periods of strong growth such as in 2007 and 2008 when total employment grew by more than 200,000 a year, we will not have enough local workers to take up all the jobs created. We need foreign manpower to augment our local workforce and enable our economy to grow beyond what our indigenous workforce alone can support.

Nevertheless, we need to strike a delicate balance between the needs of businesses and employment opportunities for local workers so that they can benefit from the economic growth. This is achieved through our foreign manpower policies, including the foreign worker quota and levy system.

The labour market is still soft and is likely to remain so for the rest of the year given the cautious outlook. It would be unwise to relax our foreign manpower policies at this moment. I would encourage companies with manpower needs to tap on the pool of locals, including those fresh out of schools. The Workforce Development Agency’s career centres and the National Trades Union Congress’ Employment and Employability Institute will help employers identify suitable candidates and provide the relevant training if necessary.

Mr Teo Siong Seng (Nominated Member): Sir, the concern for my community is not a matter of relaxing the foreign employment. The concern is there will be a tightening of hiring foreign workers and there are industries and

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businesses where they just cannot get local workers to work during the odd hours.

Mr Gan Kim Yong: I am not sure what the question is but let me try to respond to the concern. We have not tightened the overall quota system for our foreign worker framework. However, as I mentioned during the COS debate, we are raising the quality requirement for foreign workers who enter Singapore, particularly for the S-Pass as well as for the skilled workers because they enjoy lower levies. We want to ensure that foreign worker quality will continue to improve. This is because over the long term, we must ensure the overall quality of our workforce in Singapore will be raised gradually. For the local workforce, we will provide them with CET training. The Government has invested heavily in training and upgrading for our workers here. But for foreign workers, we want to also improve their quality and one way of doing so is to continue to tighten the requirement in terms of quality – their qualifications, their working experience as well as the types of jobs they are working in. So, over the last few years, we have gradually tightened that requirement. And we will continue to do so to ensure the quality of our workforce will improve over time. Of course, I understand that there will be industries that will be affected. Some of them will find it more difficult to find high quality foreign workers to replace the foreign workers they already have. I think the key, as I have mentioned in my reply, is to work with our agencies, WDA, NTUC and so on. We will find ways to help industries identify suitable workers. If there is training gap or if there is a skills gap, we will provide the necessary training to prepare them better for the job. But, I do also agree that even with all these training and upgrading for our local workers, there will still continue to be a need for foreign workers to supplement our local workforce. As the economy picks up momentum, we will need to

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ensure that the labour market remains flexible and responsive to the needs of the economy.

Mr Yeo Guat Kwang (Aljunied): I think we all agree that we need foreign manpower to supplement our local workforce but does the Minister agree that we should get employers to ensure that fairer terms and performance-based reward and remuneration systems be implemented in these sectors that are much more dependent on foreign workers? And also, at the same time, employers should step up efforts to re-design work processes to improve productivity and so pay the workers well in these sectors.

And would the Ministry also consider ensuring that employers are more transparent in the recruitment process when they have to recruit local and foreign workers? I think it is important to ensure that the foreign workers that we bring in have the job and language competencies.

Mr Gan Kim Yong: Sir, in general, we agree with the Member's comments. I think it is important for our tripartite partners to work together. NTUC, MOM, WDA will provide the necessary training for local workers. At the same time, we want to work with the employers to ensure that when employers recruit foreign workers, they must ensure that these foreign workers have the necessary skills to perform the work that they are required to do.

It is also important for us to continue to work on productivity improvement so that we will be able to achieve sustainable growth in the long term. For this reason, we have set up a multi-Ministry workgroup focusing on ways to improve productivity, sector by sector. This workgroup is being chaired by my Minister of State, Mr Lee Yi Shyan and they are looking into what measures we can

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introduce to help companies and industries upgrade their productivity so that we can achieve long-term sustainable growth that will benefit Singaporeans.