Measures to Ensure Employers are More Proactive about Workplace Safety

Mr Desmond Choo asked the Minister for Manpower (a) to date, how many companies have breached safe distancing measures in workplaces in 2021; (b) what are the punitive actions taken; and (c) how can the Government better support SMEs in putting in place safe distancing measures especially where resources may be more limited.

Our main strategy to prevent accidents is to align business interests closely with workplace safety and health (WSH). This was part of our WSH 2028 recommendations. We want employers to realise that it is in their commercial interest to be safer, so that they will be more proactive and take greater ownership of WSH.

We have been progressively implementing the WSH 2028 recommendations on this front, including making business owners and managements more accountable and prosecuted them for negligence, and sharing work injury compensation claims data with insurers so that premiums reflect safety performance. More recently, with the launch of the CheckSafe e-service on 21 January 2021, developers, main contractors and other service buyers for construction contractors can now use CheckSafe to compare the WSH performances of contractors, which includes injury and enforcement data.

We plan to expand CheckSafe to cover more sectors in the near future. This gives a commercial advantage to safer firms in securing contracts.

While we encourage management and business owners to take ownership and be proactive about WSH, deterrence is still necessary to emphasise the serious consequences of workplace accidents. The penalty framework was recently revised to impose higher fines and longer imprisonment terms. The highest fine imposed on a single employer by the Courts increased from $250,000 in 2016 to $400,000 in 2019. Where there was negligence in supervising safety, the Courts have started imposing imprisonment sentences from 2018.

Apart from issuing stop-work orders, fines and notices of non-compliance, MOM places companies with poor workplace safety and health records on the Business Under Surveillance (BUS) Programme. This involves close monitoring with more frequent inspections, until MOM is convinced that their WSH management system has improved.

Construction companies will also be debarred from employing or renewing work passes under MOM’s demerit point framework, if they have multiple WSH infringements. The combination of penalties has helped reduce our fatal injury rate steadily from 2.3 per 100,000 workers in 2013 to 1.0 in 2019, even if we disregard the lower fatality rate in 2020 due to work stoppages.

WSH also means guarding against health risks. During the COVID-19 pandemic, MOM has been strictly enforcing against non-compliance with Safe Management Measures (SMM) at the workplace. As of 15 March 2021, MOM has conducted close to 17,000 inspections and offered 178 composition notices totalling $178,000 for non-compliance with SMM requirements.

The common non-compliances were failure to enable employees to work from home, failure to demarcate safe physical distance of at least 1 metre at the pantry, canteen, office desk, meeting rooms, and failure to prepare an evacuation plan for unwell or suspected cases.

The SMMs are designed to be practical and easy-to-implement, so that all firms including SMEs are able to act on them. To better support SMEs in adapting to the new SMMs effective from 5 April, our SMM advisory includes a step-by-step checklist on how to comply. It also includes guides on business continuity planning, digital solutions and grants that companies can tap on.

In our inspections, most SMEs have been compliant with the previous SMMs. The latest SMM revisions are a relaxation of previous measures and employers, including SMEs, should find them easier to comply.