SINGAPORE: Workers’ Party MP Jamus Lim (Sengkang GRC) said in a Monday morning (Nov 13) Facebook post that in the course of house visits in Compassvale and Anchorvale in the past few weeks, a conversation with a resident who had been working in the PMET (Professionals, Managers, Executives and Technicians) sector stood out to him.
The resident lost his job due to corporate downsizing and shared with the MP about the difficulties he experienced in getting another job after his office was shut down. Assoc Prof Lim wrote, “In my view (and one I’ve shared in Parliament), we can do more to have a pathway from redundancy-unemployment support-retraining-reemployment.”
The Sengkang MP underlined that the WP has called for redundancy insurance for some years now, adding that he’s “glad the government has finally indicated that some such scheme will probably be rolled out soon.”
On Sept 26, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Lawrence Wong said that laid-off workers would receive unemployment benefits under an expanded SkillsFuture system. These benefits, while not necessarily an insurance scheme, would help tide the workers over while they are unemployed.
Assoc Prof Lim added that he has proposed the SkillsFuture program be refined further to equip workers with practical and experiential skills necessary for jobs today. However, he wrote that what’s “sorely needed… is an assurance that the skills that one retrains in ultimately translates into a job,” with SkillsFuture going further “to provide a soft guarantee of a job.”
This can be done through the government building a database of types of workers needed and then matching trainees to these courses, “with an assurance that, post-reskilling, they would be absorbed into one of these new jobs for at least 6 months. To sweeten the deal on the employer side, the government can cover part of the retrained worker’s wages during this period.”
Assoc Prof Lim added that several Scandinavian countries are already managing unemployment this way. “As a wealthy country that routinely stresses the importance of human capital development, my hope is that we will steadily evolve our unemployment safety net toward those befitting a 21st-century economy and society,” he wrote.
At the Budget debate in 2020, Ms Sylvia Lim, Aljunied GRC MP and WP chair talked about the need for redundancy insurance, saying, “Today’s economic climate illustrates how such insurance could provide a stabiliser to workers, to soften the cliff-edge that they face with job disruption. If the anxiety of citizens is not taken seriously enough, the door to populism and nativism will widen.”
Earlier this year, in his Labour Day message, WP chief and Leader of the Opposition Pritam Singh again urged the government to implement a redundancy insurance scheme to provide greater assurance and protection for workers.
Read related: Workers’ Party again calls for redundancy insurance scheme in May Day message /TISG