Monitoring Employers’ Long-term Efforts at Creating Fair Workplace Environment

Mr Yip Hon Weng asked the Minister for Manpower how does the Tripartite Alliance for Fair and Progressive Employment Practices monitor employers’ long-term efforts to create a fair workplace environment as opposed to doing the bare minimum to avoid breaching the Fair Consideration Framework.

Creating fair workplaces is a long-term effort that involves educating companies to adopt fair and objective hiring processes, building a positive culture that supports fair employment practices and reducing personal bias across all levels of the organisation. This effort needs to be sustained at all levels, including business owners, human resource practitioners, supervisors and hiring managers, and results will not be apparent overnight. To help employers in such efforts, the Tripartite Alliance for Fair and Progressive Employment Practices (TAFEP) runs public awareness campaigns and promotes the adoption of Tripartite Standards, an initiative to encourage employers to adopt verifiable and actionable employment practices in areas, such as recruitment, flexible work arrangements and grievance handling.

MOM monitors the overall adoption of fair workplace practices through several indicators. For example, MOM regularly conducts the Fair Employment Practices Survey – recent results have shown that the incidence of workplace discrimination based on resident employees’ experiences fell from 24% in 2018 to 8% in 2021. We also closely watch the trend of discrimination-related complaints and proactively identify higher-risk employers through data analytics. Enforcement actions will be taken against egregious employers but, for other employers, our focus is on engaging them to improve their workplace practices. For example, employers on the Fair Consideration Framework (FCF) Watchlist have not flouted any rules but may have greater reliance on foreign manpower, compared to industry peers, or a high concentration of a single foreign nationality. Since 2016, TAFEP/MOM has completed more than 1,700 employer engagements under the FCF.