We congratulate the Director-General of the ILO on his excellent Report, Tackling the global jobs crisis: Recovery through decent work policies, 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 globalization that is economically, socially and environmentally sustainable.
We fully support the 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 governments and social partners in responding to the crisis. I would like to take this opportunity to share briefly the Singapore labour movement and its social partners? response to this crisis.
To ride out this severe economic downturn, the Singapore labour movement has resolved to be the “Most Pro-worker Nation”, “Most Pro-business Economy”, “Most Caring Labour Movement” and “Most United in Tripartism”.
The Singapore National Trades Union Congress (SNTUC) desires to be the “Most Pro-worker Nation” by championing fair treatment in the work-place and improving the skills and employability of all workers. We believe that the best welfare we can give a worker is a decent job. Thus, together with our social partners, we have set up the Employment and Employability Institute to minimize unemployment. This Institute helps workers to learn new skills, upgrade their existing skills and find jobs as quickly as possible. It actively canvasses the whole economy for job vacancies and provides a job matching service for the unemployed through weekly job fairs.
When the world economy eventually recovers, the pace at which the Singapore economy will recover will depend on how well we have equipped our workers with new skills that will inevitably be required as companies upgrade to face a new business environment and competition. We strive to make use of this downturn to invest in workers' capabilities for the future by facilitating industry-wide upgrading initiatives to improve service quality, productivity and pay for our workers.
Decent jobs are created when businesses grow and respect workers? rights at work. Thus, the SNTUC aims to be the “Most Pro-business Economy” so that businesses will remain viable, emerge stronger from the downturn and continue to provide decent jobs for our workers. Our highest retrenchment numbers were during the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis when some 29,000 jobs were lost. To avoid setting a new retrenchment record, the social partners issued a set of tripartite guidelines on managing excess manpower, 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. We will work with employers to reduce non-wage components as much as possible. One way is for companies to tap into the government-funded training programme entitled the “Skills programme for upgrading and resilience”, to send workers for training, to equip them with new skills and enhance their employability. The Government has also implemented a new initiative, the “Job credits scheme”, to subsidise employers' wage bills to en-courage retention of workers and implemented many other measures to help businesses to cut costs and preserve jobs. For companies that are in financial dire straits and need cost-cutting measures that will affect workers' wages, the union expects management to lead by example by taking earlier and/or deeper wage cuts than rank and file.
We want to be the “Most caring labour movement” and to do more to help union members even more during this downturn. The SNTUC, together with its affiliated unions and associations, social enterprises, individual corporate partners and organizations, have raised 23 million Singapore dollars to provide members in need and their families with financial assistance and help increase their purchasing power. The SNTUC's 12 social enterprises provide many essential goods and services to union members and workers. They have committed to continuing to play an important role during this downturn by moderating the cost of living and stretching workers' hard-earned money. They have also committed to zero retrenchments and 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.
The SNTUC resolves to be the “Most united in tripartism”. The effective practice of tripartism in Singapore has seen us through many crises in the past. With the continued strong support of our social partners, we are confident that we will ride out this crisis 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 International Labour Conference. On this note, I wish you all a fruitful Conference.
