Keeping Singapore's Workforce Competitive In Light of Remote Workers From the Region Willing to Work For Less Pay

Mr Yip Hon Weng asked the Minister for Manpower (a) how can Singapore's workforce remain competitive when remote workers from the region are willing to work for usually far lower remuneration; and (b) how will our labour laws be updated to address the impact on our locally-based workforce and tax base.

Mr Speaker, COVID-19 has necessitated a change in the way we work, in particular with remote working becoming commonplace for many of our workplaces. Some companies, such as Facebook, have announced that all employees can work from home. UBS has started experimenting with issuing its home-based traders with virtual reality headsets to recreate the experience of working in a packed trading floor. Increasingly, traditional jobs which require physical presence may also be done remotely. For example, port cranes could only be operated from their cabins in the past but now they can be automated and controlled from a remote centre.

The impact of remote working technology is, however, not fully clear. Even when staff are able to work from home, employers may still prefer to bring teams of workers together physically, on a regular basis, for learning and collaboration. Face-to-face interactions with clients and partners will still be needed. As with digital technologies, which have mostly been adopted to augment rather than replace the work performed by people, it is likely that remote working technology supplement rather than fully replace physical interactions at the workplace.

Nonetheless, remote working may indeed prompt companies to redistribute their activities to take advantage of manpower availability in lower cost countries. This is similar to how activities such as garment manufacturing and call centre operations have shifted out of Singapore over the years. In their place, we have now grown new manufacturing clusters such as biomedical sciences and expanded the services sector.

At the same time, activities that remain in Singapore moved higher up the value chain. With limited land and manpower, we no longer compete on cost alone but on productivity, connectivity and ability to support business innovation. However, with each potential new disruption, we cannot take our relevance as a given. The effort to transform our economy must continue, to retain a competitive edge.

First, we must strengthen our business environment and ensure that Singapore remains the preferred location for trade and investment, particularly in emerging growth areas, such as additive manufacturing and fintech. The anchoring of global companies, which meet our desired profile and the aspirations of Singaporeans, will help to preserve and spur the creation of good jobs.

Second, we must sustain efforts to help Singaporeans build skills relevant to the global talent marketplace. This is why we started the SkillsFuture movement and complemented it with a range of career conversion programmes. They have helped Singaporeans take up new jobs in growth areas.

As for whether labour laws need to be updated, this is an on-going process that takes into account feedback from our tripartite partners. We are also actively monitoring shifts in workplace practices due to remote working and sharing views with our international counterparts, to assess the need for policy intervention.

Mr Speaker, Sir, I thank the Senior Minister of State for his response. I wish to ask: how will MOM work with the Labour Movement to deal with the impact of remote workers from overseas competing with our local workers?

Indeed, Mr Speaker, the Member has pointed out that markets are certainly dynamic and businesses will often make decisions based on what makes business sense. So, it is important for our economy to continue to be relevant, to continue to be conducive, stable and to ensure that our companies remain, jobs continue to grow and we create new jobs and new opportunities for Singaporeans.

But what it also means is that we need to help our workers stay relevant, skilled, to remain competitive so that these jobs are not substituted or moved overseas so easily. Therefore, I think that the whole eco-system needs to be worked on and this is where the Labour Movement plays an important role, working with the Government, especially on our SGUnited Jobs and Skills programmes.

One of aspect of the programmes is to upskill workers, work on job matching, trying to garner and harness some of trends out there and see where the emerging growth areas are. But more importantly, apart from just providing opportunities and job matching, it is also helping workers get the right skillsets, working with companies to redesign jobs, to help us move up the value chain. Beyond that, I think it is still important for the Government to keep an eye on growing the economy. Because ultimately, the stronger our eco-system is, the more rooted companies will be here; and for the more rooted, the jobs will be here despite remote working being a trend.